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Lumberwoods
U N N A T U R A L   H I S T O R Y   M U S E U M

“  T H E   P L A I D   F A I R Y   B O O K  
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understanding, he takes his candle from the rock and tramps through the tunnel toward the sound of the drilling. He stops to listen. It seems above and he climbs up into a “raise,” where ore has been taken down from above the tunnel.
    The drilling ceases. The miner stops in surprise. He is alone, 600 feet below ground, except for this unknown companion. There is a moment of silence, intensified, it seems, by the drip, drip, drip of the water and the utter darkness.
    Not far ahead the miner suddenly hears a new sound. Some one is walking rapidly through the tunnel with a regular tread, splashing in the mud and water. The miner, his candle at his side, quickly follows. He almost runs in his haste to find his companion. But the tramp and splash of the unknown feet are always just ahead of him. He stops and shouts:
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    “Hey! Who are you, there?”
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    No answer comes, and he calls again and again. Still he hears in the darkness the tread and splash of the phantom feet. All at once a strong man is filled with fear. He begins to tremble and grow cold and then, in a panic of dread, he turns and flees, stumbling and plunging through the tunnel to the shaft.
    And the mine has mysterious voices, too. A veteran miner tells of a strange warning which came to him once X
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and a narrow escape from death. He was working in a mine in Montana in charge of the pumps, which were kept constantly going to keep the mine from filling with water. When each crew or “shift” of men finished work he would regularly make an inspection of the five pumps which were in operation.
    The ore was lifted from this mine on an inclined shaft. The cars, which run on wheels up such a shaft, are called “skips,” and it was the breaking of a “skip” which came near being fatal that night. The pump inspector had visited four of the pumps and was about to start down the shaft to the fifth, which was 600 feet below ground, when, as he tells me, he felt a peculiar feeling of fear and a voice directly over his shoulder said to him:
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    “Don’t you go down that shaft to-night!”
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    The miner stopped. He seemed almost to feel the breath of the voice against his cheek. Then he told himself he was foolish to heed any imaginings, and he went down to the pump. When he reached the 500-foot level he began at once his inspection of the machinery. Back in the tunnel, which extended away in the darkness, the water stood nearly filling the passage, over a man’s head in depth.
    A hundred feet above an ore car filled with tons of rock wits emptied into a “skip,” which was started up the inclined shaft toward the surface. A moment later the man working at the pump heard a crashing, a terrific rattling X
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