A Ghost in the Mountains

There is a ghost in these mountains, and she hasn’t rested in peace
since she left this world behind a hundred and twenty-one years ago.
And, if the few sketchy details which we know of her life contain any
truth, then neither did she walk peacefully through much of her brief
time here in this realm. Her name was Ruby, and she left life behind
in the year 1894 at the tender age of twenty-two years. That much is
fact – it’s the details of her brief life which remain a mystery.

Ruby’s early life is unknown; were she came from and who she left
behind when she moved to the Sierra Nevada are hidden in the past just
as securely as her bones now rest in a shallow grave on a shaded
hillside. When she arrived at the logging town of Millwood in the high
Sierras just west of what is now Kings Canyon National Park she was
barely out of her teens; a young lady most likely seeking a style of
life much different from whatever she’d left behind; a life which by
all accounts she briefly found before tragically losing. A popular
belief was that Ruby’s real name was in fact Lou Young, and that she
was a wild woman who left her husband and two children behind in
Southern California to become a prostitute, and that she came to the
Millwood logging camp to make a living tending to the needs of the
lumberjacks and mill workers through the long hours of the mountain
nights. It’s said that she plied her trade in a small cabin on the
outskirts of town where she lived with a dozen or so other ladies of
the same profession. Growing disillusioned and depressed, she soon
took her own life with poison and was interred just outside of town,
where she rests to this day. These, according to what scant local
history remained after the town of Millwood burned to the ground
shortly thereafter, are the facts.

Or are they?

I grew up in this section of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, splitting
my youth between here and San Francisco before making the mountains my
permanent home. One of my neighbors here back in the 1950’s was an
elderly woman who, along with her brother and two sisters, owned an
old log home in Wilsonia near Grant Grove. In my youth this elderly
lady took it upon herself to share much of the local history with me,
and we would often climb into her old Dodge and drive out to the scene
of some place lost in the shadows of history while she would relate
stories which few others remembered. She was in her seventies then,
and was a youth back when the town of Millwood was still part of the
landscape and its citizens worked these mountains. One of the stories
which she shared with me was that of Ruby Ellington, and as we stood
by her grave one evening I heard a story quite different from the
official one which dismissed the poor woman as just another lady of
the evening.

It seems that Ruby was in reality the wife of a teamster who drove
a wagon for the lumber company. Ruby’s husband had a regular route – a
two day trip down to Sanger for equipment and supplies, one day in
town while his wagon was loaded, and three days back up the mountain
to Millwood, where he would rest on the seventh day and then start all
over again. For a young, energetic, and perhaps restless twenty-two
year old young bride this must have been a very sedate life, spending
six out of seven days waiting for the company of a husband who then
turned around and left. Ruby would have been bored and restless.

And lonely.

As Fate would have it, one week Ruby’s husband had a light load in
his wagon and made it back to Millwood in just two days instead of the
usual three, and left his wagon at the mill to walk up the hill to
their cabin to surprise his wife. Opening the door to their home he
was the one who was surprised, as he found himself gazing upon the
classic scene of a husband who arrives home early to find his wife in
bed with another man. All of the actors in the tableau froze for a
long moment before the amorous couple jumped out of bed while the
husband drew his pistol and, in what he felt was righteous anger,
opened fire. The lover jumped out of a window without bothering to
claim his pants and all shots fired in his direction missed their
mark. But one of them found Ruby, and she fell dead on the floor next
to the bed while her unknown lover escaped. In this story Ruby was not
a lady of ill repute but instead just an ignored and lonely wife who
fell victim to bad luck and worse timing.

And then my neighbor added an interesting postscript to the story.
It seemed that, every year since Ruby’s death, a bouquet of fresh
flowers appeared on her grave. They appeared on August first, the
anniversary of her violent end. The wooden pickets which outlined her
grave were straightened, and sometimes a fresh coat of paint was
applied.  Was it Ruby’s teamster husband coming back, perhaps feeling
remorse for his somewhat hasty reaction? Or was it the unknown lover,
who perhaps had deeper feelings for Ruby than merely physical desire
and felt remorse for his abandonment of her? We will never know. In
the early 1970’s a newspaper down in the San Joaquin Valley got wind
of the story about the bouquet of flowers which mysteriously appeared
on the lost grave on the same date every year and published a story
about it. After that, the flowers never appeared again. Perhaps the
husband, or the lover, did not want to risk being found out. Or
perhaps he, too, passed on from old age. For a few years after the
flowers stopped appearing I got into the habit of riding my motorcycle
down that old dirt road in the forest and spending part of the night
of August first on that hillside near Ruby’s grave, but no mysterious
man ever appeared to decorate the grave or repair its century-old
fence. On one of those nights, though, as I sat with my back against a
tree and listened to the sounds of the night, and as the moonlight
suddenly appeared after being hidden behind a row of scuttling clouds;
that one night I did briefly see a figure standing alongside the grave
just a few yards from me. She turned and looked right at me, and I saw
that it was a young woman. Then the clouds blocked the light again,
just for a few seconds, and when it returned she was gone.

I prefer the version of the story told to me by my neighbor so many
years ago; told to me by a woman who knew these mountains and who
herself was a youth while Millwood was still here. But, whichever
story may hold true, I know that the spirit of a troubled young woman
still sometimes walks the hills around Millwood; that there is a ghost
here in these mountains.