I recently went on a business trip to Moscow which included a stop in at special collections for my own personal benefit. I love that library and it was good to be back "home." I went there to relocate a book I found a year ago with a list of who is buried where in the Yearian Cemetery near Leadore, Idaho. I eventually found the book and read the introduction which I thought very fitting for this blog.
The book is called, This Quiet Ground and was written by a Lemhi County Historian named Julia I. Randolph. Published in 1989 by Maverick Publications.
Here is the part that I thought was fitting given the nature of the beast and the name of this blog. I'll leave you to be the judge of the current situation.
"One does not become a 'ghost hunter' overnight. It requires a great deal of squinting at old newspapers and peeking into other people's diaries and haunting old cemeteries. In Lemhi County it required good hiking boots and a husband with a fine sense of humor and nose for old bones.
Also, one does not become a 'ghost hunter' by design. The phenomenon comes about purely by accident and the first stages are barely noticeable--minor annoyance at scraggly-looking cemeteries, irritation when public records fail to reveal what became of one's great-great-great-uncle. Second stages are more recognizable. They are exhibited by a tendency to vacation at boot hill, to do one's browsing in the microfilm section of the library, and to grill one's neighbors about seemingly innocent nature walks. In the last stages, caution is thrown to the wind. There is a compulsion to seek out and question the oldest living people in the community. Casual Memorial Day visits turn into week-long forced marches between the mounds of other people's ancestors, recording and mapping names that become more familiar than one's immediate family members. Hundred year old vernacular comes easily to the tounge, paved highways recede into time-stained wagon ruts, and, yes--one's skin does seem to take on a translucent quality.
Of course, not just anyone can become a 'ghost hunter.' This particular occupation, or preoccupation, depending on one's personal views, gives new meaning to the virtue of patience, requiring checking out all types of leads and stories, and then cross-checking, and re-checking, and looking again with someone else's eyes for a fresh slant. Luckily for me, I have a whole raft of friends and family who were happy to give up their weekends beating over sagebrush mountain slopes and sorting through stacks of scribbled notes. I figure by this time next year they'll even be talking to me again. But personalities aside, most of the difficulties involving research derive from written inaccuracies that result in misinformation or contradictory information...And while this kind of misinformation is merely annoying to a researcher, to a reporter or author who is required to present only the facts, it can be something of a nightmare.
A 'ghost hunter' needs wagon loads of misguided compassion. How else can one mourn the death of a stranger's child who died at birth over a hundred years ago while one's spouse of 40 years burns himself trying to cook dinner for himself and son. How else can one spend family savings and vacation time poking around for old grave sites in the middle of nowhere while the rest of the family huddles dolefully in the truck munching on dry biscuits? There is no explanation for this strange behavior, and all I can offer in my defense is that, after actually seeing the headstones of the Grubb children at May, and reading in the paper of their untimely deaths, they were no longer strangers to me, but beautiful babies that I only missed knowing by a mere happenstance of time. I felt the fierce pride of Dan Hurley on Beaver Creek, an old blind rancher with no relatives, who bartered away his life's work to neighbors in return for a dignified death and burial on a windswept sagebrush ridge."
.jpg)
