Ghosts of Goldfield and Tonopah

by Janice Oberding

  After that first meeting, the count made it a point to invite Jack and Edith to his elegant dinner parties. Innocent and impressionable, Edith fell for the smooth-talking Podhorski. Soon they were involved in a clandestine romance. It didn’t take much persuading for him to convince her to run away with him. The lovers boarded a boat for Canada, leaving her husband, Jack Hines, behind in Alaska. Hines’s heartbreak turned to fury. He would have his revenge, just as Harry Thaw had his.

  The country was fascinated with the murder that had recently taken place in June 1906 on the rooftop garden of Madison Square Garden in New York. Irate millionaire husband Harry K. Thaw had shot and killed the famous architect Stanford White in full view of hundreds of playgoers. The reason for the murder was simple: Stanford White had debauched Thaw’s beautiful wife, Evelyn Nesbitt, years earlier. Hines saw the similarities between Edith and Evelyn Nesbitt and between his outrage and that of Thaw. Determined to kill the count, he followed him from Alaska to New York to San Francisco and to Nevada.

  When the private detective he had hired told Hines that Podhorski was in Goldfield, Hines came to see for himself. He spent two weeks watching them and waiting. On March 21, 1907, he finally got his chance to even the score.

  Stars blazed across the night sky, and a crescent moon hung high over Malapai Mesa. It was nearly midnight, and in the Tenderloin, Victor Ajax’s Sunset Café was alive with raucous laughter and the tinkle of glasses. Incandescent lights cast a soft glow across the faces of those who ate and drank happily. Seated at a table near the door were Count Podhorski and Edith. Unaware of danger, Podhorski sipped a glass of wine while awaiting his meal.

  Jack Hines walked into the crowded restaurant and spotted the two lovers immediately. All the anger he held toward this man rose up inside him. Without a word of warning, he pulled his revolver and fired twice. The bullets hit their mark. Count Podhorski slid from his chair dead. Not satisfied, Hines fired two more shots at him.

  The Sunset was a frenzy of screaming as frightened patrons ducked for cover beneath their tables. Realizing they were afraid he was a madman who might also shoot them, Hines dropped his gun and held his hands up for silence.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to say that this man betrayed that woman. She was my wife. He ruined my life. And I have come seven thousand miles to kill him. Now I am prepared to pay the penalty for slaying the dog.” With those words, Hines walked to the bar and waited for the deputy to come and arrest him.

  Edith dropped to her knees, softly sobbing as she wiped blood from the count’s face. “Please, oh please, speak to me,” she begged. Someone pulled her away from the dead man, and a tablecloth was thrown over him.

  On hearing of Count Podhorski’s death, Florence Ziegfeld, creator of the famous Ziegfeld Follies, said that he and the count had been on friendly terms for several years after having met in Beirut. He was astonished that his friend had been murdered in such a way. He said, “The count was a dead shot and always went well armed. Certainly he must have been caught off guard or else he was shot from ambush. I never met the count in this country but from mutual friends I have heard that he met with financial reverses and that nearly all his fortune had disappeared. He was tall and handsome and a great favorite with the ladies.”

  The “great favorite with the ladies” was taken to the morgue just about the time his killer was being escorted to jail. Edith disappeared into the night, and the question on every person’s mind was whether or not a man should pay the ultimate penalty for killing his wife’s seducer. The Harry Thaw murder trial was still fresh in their minds. Stanford had seduced Mrs. Thaw, albeit long before she ever met Harry Thaw, but a debaucher was a debaucher. Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Surely Hines’s shooting of the count was justified under the unwritten law.

  Count Constantin Podhorski was unceremoniously laid to rest in the Goldfield Cemetery; none of his family or famous friends was in attendance, and it was a sad and lonely burial for a man of royal ancestry, a man who had traveled the world.

  At his murder trial, Hines proved that he could please a crowd. While testifying, he broke into a medley of love songs, impressing everyone in the courtroom with his fine tenor voice. This, coupled with Edith’s tearful expression of shame on the witness stand, helped to sway the jurors in his favor. He was acquitted of the murder charge and allowed to walk out of court a free man.

  Forty years later, Jack Hines touched on the killing in his book Minstrel of the Yukon. Apparently memory had not served him well. The circumstances surrounding the killing were greatly sanitized, and Edith’s name was changed to Mary. Strangest of all was his assertion that Nevada governor Sparks had visited him while he awaited trial and assured him that everyone was on his side.

  Within a few years of the publication of his book, Hines and Edith were divorced. He continued his writing and singing career until the end of his life in 1962.

  Count Podhorski’s grave. Photo by Sharon Leong.

  Not so long ago, a relative of Count Constantin Podhorski contacted Bryan Smalley for information. He traveled to Goldfield from across the world. He stopped in the Sacred Heart section of the Goldfield Cemetery and paid his respects to the long-dead ancestor who lies buried here in the desert, thousands of miles from his homeland.

  But it’s all good. You see, there are those who believe that Constantin Podhorski is one of the many ghosts who seem to be enjoying an afterlife party in the old red-light district of Goldfield night after night. During an EVP session one night in this area, the question was asked, “Can you tell us about your home?

  The reply came swiftly: “It is a long way…”

  MADAM BEVERLY HARRELL: THE MADAM WHO ISN’T THERE

  Beverly Harrell, madam of the world-famous Cottontail Ranch brothel at Lida Junction on Highway 95, would probably have appreciated the irony when the IRS took over the infamous Joe Conforte’s Mustang Ranch. He owed $16 million in back taxes and had no way to pay it. The Federal Bureau of Land Management would become the owner of the brothel. Years earlier, Harrell had faced the bureau in federal court over the way she was putting leased federal land to use. She lost the case, but the Cottontail was just a circle of mobile homes, and moving just down the highway hadn’t been all that difficult.

  Times change. Harrell was two years dead when the Mustang Ranch empire came crashing down. But her Cottontail Ranch was still going strong under her husband’s direction. People in Goldfield remember well that day in 1974 when Beverly Harrell announced her candidacy for the Assembly seat in the state’s Thirty-sixth District. She wouldn’t be the last person involved in the brothel business to run for public office in Nevada.

  As she jumped up on the bar at the Santa Fe Saloon, Harrell proudly announced, “I’m tossing my hat in the ring!”

  “I’ll show them how to run an orderly house” was her slogan. Many voters believed her. The race was as close as it gets. Her opponent beat her by a mere 122 votes. Undeterred, she wrote An Orderly House about her life as a madam of the Cottontail Ranch.

  The ranch made headlines when Melvin Dummar filed the so-called Mormon Will, claiming it to be that of Howard Hughes. According to Dummar, he stopped for the hitchhiking billionaire one night on Highway 95 near the Lida Junction.

  It was later surmised that Hughes had been visiting a girl at the Cottontail Ranch and was on his way back to Las Vegas when Dummar picked him up. Surely Beverly Harrell knew whether or not Hughes visited the Cottontail Ranch. She chose not to speak publicly on the subject.

  Her headstone in the Goldfield Cemetery is inscribed simply “A Fearless Beauty of Class and Intellect.” This is a place for those who knew and loved her to come and pay their respects. But Beverly Harrell is not buried here. She rests a thousand miles away. According to a friend of hers, Harrell is buried in Florida near her family.

  GOLDRELD’S LOST TREASURE

  Somewhere in a mine dump between Goldfield and Diamondfield, or so the story goes, two men buried twenty sacks of
high-grade gold ore worth $1,000 each. That was in 1910. Imagine what the ore would be worth on today’s market.

  Goldfield old-timers believe the buried treasure is still out there in the desert somewhere. Will it ever be found? It’s hard to say. Rather than draw themselves a map, the men consigned the exact location of their buried treasure to memory. If only they had lived long lives, but they didn’t. Nor had they counted on the vagaries of fate. Both men died before they could go back and retrieve the sacks and their valuable content.

  Over one hundred years ago, a flashflood in the middle of the Central Nevada desert came without warning. There was no escape for the two women who lost their lives in the watery onslaught that rushed into their houses and swept them away. Everything in the flood’s path was washed away and lost. According to Goldfield lore, two safes filled with gold coins were among the missing items. To this day, the safes and the loot have never been located. This isn’t for lack of trying. Everyone who ever foraged in the debris and mud came away empty-handed. If some treasure hunter was lucky enough to find the mud-encrusted safes, he or she has remained tight-lipped about the discovery.

  The Goldfield Daily Tribune of September 14, 1913, described the flood:

  The cloudburst rushed down on Goldfield yesterday afternoon at 2:15 o’clock from two sides. It had been raining heavily since an hour before noon, and for half an hour lightning had been flashing over the camp and the thunder had been deafening. Suddenly the rain changed to hail, there was a distant roar as a great black cloud that had covered all the sky to the south seemed to drop to the hills, and then the water came. Down Rabbit Springs Canyon a foaming wall many feet high tore its way, wiping out all traces of the road up the canyon, and this came down to South Main Street almost unbroken; sweeping before it the cabins that were scattered along the street and then tearing through the red light district along Main to Myers, down Myers to the center of the gulch, while another and larger body of water clung to the channel of the arroyo.

  Fire was just as deadly as a natural disaster in early day Goldfield. During the early morning hours of July 6, 1923, a fire broke out across the street from the Goldfield Hotel. This was the height of Prohibition, and some enterprising person had been operating an illegal still in the shack next door to Brown Parkers Garage. The fire started when the still exploded.

  Within minutes, the flames consumed the shack and the garage. The heat was so intense that windows in the Goldfield Hotel were destroyed. Swept up in a northeasterly wind, the flames leapt from building to building.

  David McArthur stared in disbelief as the windswept flames destroyed one edifice after another and converged on his little shoe shop on the corner of Main Street and Miners Avenue. His belongings would soon be ashes, and there was nothing he could do. He sank to his knees, as pain ripped across his chest. Stricken by a fatal heart attack, McArthur breathed his last as his shop and the adjacent Downers Brothers Assay Office crumbled in the flames.

  The luckless McArthur was the devastating fire’s only fatality. All his possessions were a pile of rubble—or were they? Rumors had circulated for years about the miserly McArthur. Perhaps there was some truth to the story that a cache of gold coins lay buried beneath his shop.

  Years passed, and most people forgot about old David McArthur, his unfortunate death and his gold coins. But some remembered. In 1936, Robert Niccovich set to work at the site with his doodlebug (dowsing rod.) Niccovich spent long hours sifting through the ruins, but he was convinced that he would eventually be rewarded.

  As he worked, others may have thought him crazy to be pursuing such a tall tale. But when his shovel hit something metal, he knew he had been right. Niccovich quickened his pace. An hour later, he withdrew a box, pried it open and stared at an old cast-iron Dutch oven. Eureka! The oven contained 1,321 twenty-dollar gold pieces.

  SANTA FE SALOON AND MOTEL: GOLDFIELD’S OTHER HAUNTED INN

  Located on the northeast side of Goldfield, the Santa Fe Saloon was built in 1905 by Hubert Maxgut and is one of Goldfield’s oldest continuously operating businesses. Ghost investigators agree that there is at least one ghost on the premises. This, they say, could be Hubert Maxgut himself. On August 27, 1912, Maxgut and F.M. Brown got into a fistfight in front of the Santa Fe. Maxgut had accused a friend of Brown’s of inappropriate behavior toward a local little girl. Maxgut got the better of Brown with three good punches until Mrs. Maxgut stepped between the men and broke up the fight. Brown went into the Santa Fe to wash the blood from his face.

  Maxgut followed him. Standing in the doorway with daylight behind him, he raised his hand to fire his pistol, but Brown ducked just in time. As Maxgut took aim for a second shot, Brown pulled his own gun and fired at his aggressor. The bullet pierced both of Maxgut’s lungs. The shooting was found to be a case of self-defense; Brown was found not guilty, and Hubert Maxgut was buried in the Goldfield Cemetery. But he doesn’t rest there, according to some.

  The Santa Fe Saloon. Photo by Anne Leong.

  The Santa Fe Saloon during an investigation. Photo by Anne Leong.

  Today, the saloon has cold beer and slot machines and is a respite for those just passing through. For the road-weary, the Santa Fe Motel offers eight units. It’s the only lodging in Goldfield, and like the saloon, it is haunted. The ghost is an old miner who silently slinks through rooms, oblivious to his surroundings.

  Years ago, I stayed at the Santa Fe and was warned about the ghost. My thoughts were on those at the Goldfield Hotel, however, and I couldn’t have cared less if the old miner made an appearance or not. He didn’t. But neither did I sleep very well that night. I tossed and turned away the hours, dreaming of an old man who came into my room in search of something he’d lost. The more I told the old guy that I didn’t have a clue about what he was looking for or where it might be found, the more agitated he became. The next time I stayed at the Santa Fe, I made it a point just before bedtime to say aloud that I wanted no bad dreams or visits from ghosts. No point in taking chances.

  Virginia Ridgway with the author in front of the historic and haunted Santa Fe Saloon. Photo by Bill Oberding.

  It does seem that skeptics and those who don’t believe in ghosts seem to have some of the best ghostly encounters. This goes double for those who take pleasure in poking fun at ghost hunters. So it was that a friend and I were in Goldfield for an all-night investigation of the Goldfield Hotel. She had brought along her new boyfriend, a nice guy who regaled us at dinner with how silly he thought we were for looking for ghosts in the decrepit old building. “Especially,” he laughed, “when everyone knows there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  We were used to people who thought that way, so we laughed it off. The plan was that he would stay the night in their room at the Santa Fe while she and I hunted ghosts.

  Several hours into the investigation, we went back to their room for coffee and snacks. Instead of teasing us about the ghosts we’d encountered, he was sullen. “Did you say this room is haunted?” he asked my friend.

  “I said the motel is haunted, and there’s a good chance the ghost might wander in,” she replied.

  “He did.”

  We stared at him, waiting for the punch line.

  “I saw him! An old man looked like he was dressed to go out into the mines. Walked right through the wall over there,” he pointed to the wall. “Then just big as you please, he walked right on through.”

  “Oh, okay,” We laughed, but his silence told us he was in earnest.

  “I want to go back to Vegas,” he said.

  “But we’ve not finished our investigation.”

  “I don’t like this room, and I want to go home,” he said.

  This ended our investigation of the Goldfield Hotel that night. And those who believe in ghostly goings-on had a new—if not happy—convert.

  Later, I asked Virginia Ridgway if she had any idea who the ghost might be. She did.

  Since Goldfield’s famous blind miner Heinie Miller had lived in
a nearby cabin, Virginia thought the ghost who wandered through the Santa Fe might just be him. After all, Miller often stopped at the Santa Fe to visit with his friend Jim Fuetsch, who owned the place.

  Heinie Miller had gone about his routine job for so many years that he could have done it in his sleep. One morning in 1927, Miller’s life was changed forever when he accidentally struck a dynamite cap. Blinded by the blast, he lost his job and couldn’t find another. No mining operation in Goldfield wanted to hire a sightless man. Mining was all he knew. If no one would give him a job, the determined Miller decided to work for himself.

  Ghost hunting in Goldfield with an infrared camera. Photo by Sharon Leong.

  He had his own claim some three miles from town, and he was certain it was worth working. The only problem would be in getting there every morning. Heinie’s friends were determined not to let his blindness keep him from his life’s work. One night in the Santa Fe Saloon, they got together and talked it over. After much debate, the men devised an ingenious plan. They strung a three-mile length of wire from Heinie’s cabin to his claim. By grasping hold of the wire, he was able to find his way to and from his mine each day, and Heinie continued doing what he knew and loved: mining.

  Word quickly spread about Goldfield’s blind miner. Here was the perfect human-interest story. The news media wanted to know more about Heinie, and he was glad to oblige. In 1937, a national radio show paid his expenses to New York so that he could appear on the show. His courage was inspiring to everyone who listened in that night. He had recently discovered a rich ore pocket, and Heinie was asked how he could tell whether or not ore was valuable. He happily explained that he could tell gold by its taste.