Ghosts of the Southern Mountains and Appalachia

The Haunted Copper Mine

The Haunted Copper Mine Ducktown, Tennessee Jack McCaulla had worked in the mines all his life and, as his friends used to say, "There ain't much Jack's afeard of." Like every man who worked in the mines, Jack lived with danger, but he knew how to handle it better than most. Or so everyone thought. The Ducktown copper mines were on the Georgia-Tennessee border and they were the only places a man could make money as good as a dollar a day in the 1890s. Jack was working a tunnel about four hundred feet down one clay when a bunch of men became scared to death. One of the engines failed that ran both the air pump, which pushed fresh air through 104 106 Ghosts of the Southern Mountains and Appalachia the mine, and the wooden elevator that brought men up from the shafts. The miners ran toward the shaft and began scurrying up the steel wire ladder that hung on the solid rock wall, climbing from level to level. They were all crowded around the base of the ladder and some were pushing and shoving. Just as McCaulla's turn came to go up it, a panic-stricken old man thrust in ahead of him and McCaulla stood aside, letting him go up first. Jack was the last man to go up the ladder. Later his fellow miners talked about it, and when one of the mine officials asked him if it were true, he just said, "Well, we couldn't all climb that ladder at once. Someone always has to be last." A few months laterJack McCaulla was working about four hundred feet down in the mine when he went to the end of one of the tunnels that had been blasted the day before in a pocket of rich copperbearing ore. By the light of the lamp on his cap he began to pick up large chunks of the ore and load his mine car with the blasted-down rock. He had been loading the car for almost an hour when he heard a peculiar hissing sound as if air were escaping from the pipe. The pipes brought the life-saving fresh air under heavy pressure along the tunnels. The sound grew louder and he began to think it might come from water running down the side of the tunnel. He stopped shoveling the ore and began to listen. As he did so he was aware of a change in the sound. No longer was it a hissing nor the noise of running water, but it was becoming more and more eerie. The Haunted Copper Mine 107 It was a chorus sobbing and moaning in unison, and he recognized human voices. Somehow, he knew it was the voices of all the miners who had died in this mine and their cries were so loud they seemed to surround and overwhelm him. His hands became clammy, his face beaded with perspiration , and he didn't wait finish loading his mine car but pushed the car to the shaft as quickly as possible . The wailing seemed to follow him all the way to the skip. He rode the skip up, dumped his ore, and went to the surface boss and told him he had heard the cries of all the men who had ever been killed in this mine. The face of the man who had long been unafraid was the color of ashes. The boss looked at him and paid him off, nor did McCaulla ever go back to work in the Isabella copper mine at Ducktown again. ...