This Month in History - Houdini Escapable Dive Suit Patent
In the month of March, on the 1st, in 1921, Harry Houdini's patent was granted for an escapable diving suit. During his career, Houdini astonished audiences by escaping from handcuffs, straightjackets, chains and other restraints while being submerged under water. The master magician and escape artist created a diving suit which the wearer could remove easily while being submerged underwater. Diving suits of the time required assistance to both put on and take off the suits. The diving suit that Houdini had created enabled the diver to do so without assistance. Houdini's diving suit consisted of two separate parts with a latch for locking the two parts together in the middle. If a diver disengaged the latch, the two pieces would come apart. This allowed the diver to easily exit the suit, even while submerged, allowing the diver to safely swim to the water's surface. Clearly this type of suit would have been very advantageous to Houdini in performing many of his tricks. Although it is said that he never used this type of diving suit in any public performance.
Kennecott Copper Mine
The Kennecott Copper Mine in Alaska had been one of the richest copper mines in the world. A thriving mining camp developed around the mine, as was the case during the various gold and silver rushes around the country. And just like those rushes, eventually the town was abandoned and what has been left behind quite possibly could be ghosts wandering through the rusted machinery and crumbling buildings. Join us for the history and hauntings of the Kennecott Copper Mine.
The McCarthy Road follows where the former Copper River and Northwestern Railway had once had tracks. This rail line was built in 1909 and ran from Cordova, along the Copper River, to Chitina and then east to the Wrangell Mountains. This railway was meant to facilitate the transport of the copper pulled from the Kennecott Copper Mines. The road itself doesn't go all the way to Kennecott. The Kennecott River has to be crossed via a footbridge that was built in the 1990s. Kennecott is an abandoned mining camp that is a National Historic Landmark. The town is named for the nearby Kennecott Glacier, which was named by geologist Oscar Rohn in 1899 after Alaskan pioneer Robert Kennicott. The following year, 1900, two prospectors, Clarence Warner and "Tarantula Jack" Smith were near the glacier when they spotted what looked like a grass-green meadow. This was high up in a location where a meadow couldn't thrive, so they went to investigate and found out that the green was caused by malachite that was also mixed with chalcocite (cal coe site). Now malachite is pretty, but its not really valuable. It was used as a pigment in green paint in antiquity and Spanish superstition claimed that if a child wore a piece of malachite, it would help the child sleep and keep evil spirits away. And apparently it can be protective for all people when it comes to lightning and disease. Pieces of malachite were engraved with the sun during the Middle Ages for health. For Egyptians, the mineral symbolized the power of resurrection, new life and fertility. And through smelting, copper could be extracted, but it was low grade, so not really worth the effort. However, chalcocite is a highly profitable copper ore and samples proved that this find was 70% pure chalcocite. This find would be called the Bonanza Mine Outcrop.
The claims about the Bonanza Mine were confirmed by a man named Stephen Birch. He was a mining engineer who had gotten financial backing from the Havemeyer Family and James Ralph and he was looking for an opportunity to invest this money. The prospector Jack Smith wrote to Birch, "Mr. Birch, I’ve got a mountain of copper up there. There’s so much of the stuff sticking out of the ground that it looks like a green sheep pasture in Ireland when the sun is shining at its best."
So Birch started buying up shares of the Bonanza claim and formed the Alaska Copper Company of Birch, Havemeyer, Ralph and Schultz. When summer arrived in 1901, Birch headed to Alaska to map out the claim and to obtain samples for testing and his confirmation of the discovery put the world on notice that this spot in Alaska had the richest known concentration of copper in the world. There were some legal challenges and Birch spent the next couple of years in court, but by 1905, his company was ready to roll. There was just one teeny, tiny little problem. There was no way to get the copper to market. The best way would be by railroad, but most people said that building a rail line from the coast, through the mountains and over rivers was impossible. And if possible, loads of money was going to be needed. In walks the Guggenheim family and J.P. Morgan. Now there is money! The Havemayers collaborated with Morgan and the Guggenheims to form the Alaska Syndicate. The Syndicate was going to do many things. First, it would purchase the Bonanza Mine and then it would also have a majority control of the railroad, steamship transportation and the salmon industry. Alaskans were a very independent people and they weren't crazy about having these businessmen from the East Coast running their affairs. Alaskans started saying, "First [we were] a Colony of Russia, then a colony of Guggenmorgan." There were also conservationists that didn't wanting the land damaged. These battles between conservationists and the mining and railroad interests made their way into the Oval Office with U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. In the end, President Roosevelt set up the Chugach National Forest in 1908 and the Alaskan Syndicate was able to move forward with their plans.
So in the fall of 1907, railroad architect Michael J. Heney was hired to build the rail line and his crews worked over the next four years to get it done working in extreme temperatures, like forty below zero, and through some very unforgiving terrain. Stephen Birch had an entire steamship dismantled and hauled through the mountains, piece by piece, and reassembled on the Copper River. This steamship, horses and sled dogs would be used to bring in equipment and supplies and carry out ore before the railroad was completed. The railroad was completed in 1911 and the first train out of Kennecott carried $250,000 worth of copper.
Bonanza wasn't the only mine in Kennecott. There were actually five of them.The other four were Jumbo, Mother Lode, Erie and Glacier. Bonanza and Jumbo were about 3 miles from the town of Kennecott on Bonanza Ridge with Mother Lode on the east side of the ridge and Erie on the northwest end. Glacier was just an open pit mine at the end of the Bonanza, which was only mined in summer. An aerial tramway carried buckets of ore to Kennecott and then from Kennecott the ore was hauled mostly in 140-pound sacks on steel flat cars to Cordova on the rail line. Miners in Kennecott had to made of tough stuff. Mining conditions weren't good anywhere and even today can be very dangerous. But the wilds of Alaska and the extreme weather presented even harsher conditions. Men came because the salaries were higher here. They would climb up into the mountains and work seven days a week for long hours and only come down off the mountain for holidays or if they were actually going to leave Kennecott. At its height, there were around 500 miners and their families in the company town that was run as a dry town. The company provided housing in bunkhouses, which were painted red because it was the most inexpensive color at the time. There was a real community here with a school for the kids, a hospital that had the first X-ray machine in Alaska and a Recreation Hall where movies were shown and dances were held. Inger Jensen Ricci grew up in Kennecott and wrote, "They had the community dances down in the community hall a lot. In fact, it was almost every Saturday. Everybody came and the children came and danced and then afterwards they had coffee and cake. I can always remember all those delicious cakes that the women brought." Mildred Erickson Reis wrote, "We had a movie twice a week, Sundays and Wednesdays. And I got to take the tickets, if you took tickets, you got in free, otherwise you had to pay 10 cents. This was fine when I was a little girl, but when I came back up there and was 17 and one of the young men asked me to go to the show with him. The ticket salesman, said, 'Oh, is Mildred with you, well she always pays 10 cents.' I was so embarrassed, I was grown up you know. The adult fare was 35 cents."
Kennecott wasn't completely isolated. Down the hill was the town of McCarthy and the two towns would join forces for festivities on the 4th of July. Mines and mills would close for the day and the Kennecott Copper Corporation would sponsor a $200 prize to winning team at the annual baseball game between the two towns. McCarthy actually flew in a pitcher from the lower-48 for one game they were so intent on winning. This was a very important game every year! There was ice cream, a big cookout and a little bit of prohibition moonshine.
The National Park Service shares the following story we wanted to pass along, "Many families sought to take short vacations away from Kennecott to explore the surrounding countryside. Visiting George Flowers became a favorite for many of them. A man with a tenacious spirit, he became a lifelong friend of the Kennecott Kids, who still tell stories of his guitar playing and fishing lessons. A share-cropper turned gold-rusher from the American South, Mr. Flowers arrived in Seattle only to be denied passage to Alaska on the steamship because he was black. Not one to bedeterred, he walked to Alaska, arriving long after the gold rush had ended. By the mid- twenties, he settled at Long Lake where he fished, trapped and may have worked as track -walker for the railroad. After the mines closed he corresponded with former Kennecott Kids who sent him the rare care package of Alaskan necessities. Deborah Vickery House was a kid in Kennecott and she wrote of George, "...we went to Long Lake and lived in a little cabin and fished in the (creek). [George Flowers] cooked fish like no one else. He put it all in the frying pan and cooked it and then turned it all over like it was one big fish cake. It was marvelous, you could eat the whole thing."
The miners hard work paid off. They had their peak year of production in 1916 with $32.4 million in ore. Through all this success, the Alaskan Syndicate still faced opposition. There were calls that this was a monopoly and the climate in the country was turning against this use of syndicates. The feelings were so intense, that President Taft lost his re-election bid to Woodrow Wilson who promised political reforms that would make syndicates nearly impossible. The Alaskan Syndicate responded by going public in 1915 and forming a new corporation, the Kennecott Copper Corporation. The same people were in charge, but their methods changed with management.
A Kennecott geologist brought the community some bad news in 1925. The end of the high-grade ore bodies was in sight and by the early 1930s, the highest grades of ore were largely depleted. The Glacier Mine was first to close in 1929. The other mines held on for almost another decade with the Mother Lode closing at the end of July 1938. A few months later the Erie, Jumbo and Bonanza were shut down. The families of Kennecott packed up there things and the last train left Kennecott on November 10, 1938. From 1909 to 1938, the Kennecott mines produced $200 million worth of ore, which is $3 billion in today's money. And now, it was a ghost town.
Ernest Gruening became governor of the Alaska territory in 1939 and he proposed that Kennecott be preserved as a National Park. This recommendation was sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 18, 1940 and nothing happened with that. So basically, Kennecot was left deserted, but there was a family of three who stayed on as caretakers to try to preserve the town and they stayed there until 1952. And still, nothing was done at a national level to protect the ghost town. There were some businessmen who thought perhaps the tailings left over from the mines could be reprocessed and they plans to transport the ore by plane, but by the time numbers were cruched, it looked like transporting the ore would take away most of the profit. The company that still owned the land decided they wanted to demolish the ghost town because buildings were falling into disrepair and they didn't want to get sued by adventurers who would visit the town, so in the late 1960s, some of the structures were razed. They stopped after that for some reason. In 1976, The Great Kennecott Land Company was formed and it subdivided the land and the ghost town and put it up for sale to private owners. A group of doctors and lawyers from Anchorage purchased the property. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve was established on December 2, 1980 and this was the beginning of hope for the crumbling ghost town. In 1998, the National Park Service acquired many of the buildings and land and established the Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark. They started efforts to stabilize the structures and started the arduous work of restoring the buildings that continues today. They demolished any buildings beyond hope. NPS Archeologists and historians gathered artifacts that are on display in the visitor center. What is still left of the town includes a dairy barn where small cows had been kept, the Recreation Hall which hosts educational and community events, the school house which also served as a church, the rebuilt Kennecott Glacier Lodge, cottages on Silk Stocking Row that had indoor plumbing, the West Bunkhouse that was built in 1917, the Refrigeration Plant that used ammonia cooling and a mechanically cooled meat locker to keep meat and other perishables fresh even though most of the time Kennecott was full of snow, the Company Store and Post Office, the ruins of the sawmill and carpentry shop, the Train Depot, National Creek Bunkhouse, the Assay Office, East Bunkhouse, the hospital, General Manager's office, Ammonia Leaching Plant, Concentration Mill, Power Plant, Machine Shop and Electrical Shop.
When people are walking through the ghost town, they feel as though they are being watched by something they can't see. Park rangers and visitors have all claimed to experience weird things while wandering the ghost town. Disembodied footsteps are heard in buildings. There are disembodied voices and shadow figures. Sometimes the rusted out machinery is heard clanking and creaking. Strange mists float on the air and orbs have been seen and photographed.
The Railroad Line
As we shared, the Alaska Syndicate would get the Copper River and Northwestern Railway built. It consisted of two rail lines, the Copper River line and the Northwestern line. There were several bridges that needed to be constructed, one of which was known as the Million Dollar Bridge, which was completed in 1910 and was considered to be one of the great engineering feats of all time. The bridge crossed the Copper River between two active glaciers: The Childs Glacier to the west and the Miles Glacier to the east. This bridge was a multiple-span Pennsylvania truss bridge that still stands today, but can no longer be accessed. It was converted into a highway bridge in 1958. An earthquake in 1964 damaged the Million Dollar bridge and some rudimentary things were done to keep it passable. It wasn't permanently repaired until 2004. Workers died while building the railroad. One can only imagine how dangerous it was to build this thing that clung to rock walls, stretched over canyons and spanned wild rivers. It's not hard to believe that there might be ghosts along the line.
The Anchorage Daily News reported, "Over the years, travelers on the road and visitors to the present-day Kennecott historical landmark have claimed they've seen tombstones just off the old dirt path that in places where it parallels the CR & NW, the Old Copper Railroad. Thing is, on the way back from their adventures, these wayfarers have consistently reported that the grave markers are gone, vanished into the still, cool mountain air."
When a government housing tract was built near the old railroad tracks, construction workers said that they heard the sounds of long-dead miners and they described these as wails. The disembodied sounds of children were also heard. Their tools would go missing, not only from their toolboxes, but right off of their tool belts. The apparitions of workers have been seen along the route of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway. These workers would disappear when approached. Workers were hard to keep and the state decided that building the housing wasn't going to work and they abandoned the plan.
The Kennecott Cemetery
The Kennecott Cemetery is about a quarter mile south of Kennecott and is accessed by an old Wagon Road. The cemetery covers about a quarter acre and has around 50 graves markers. A white picket fence marks the border. Edward Donaldson was the first to be buried in the cemetery in 1908. The final burial was in 1938. The bulk of the people buried here were from families who couldn't afford to ship the body back to their homeland or didn't have any family at all. Some had their families in town who wanted them buried nearby. There were a few people who died from disease, but most met their end in a mining accident. People have claimed to see shadow figures darting around the tombstones. We haven't heard any stories of these tombstones disappearing, but anything is possible.
Concentration Mill
The Concentration Mill is a 14-story tall, red-painted wooden building that stands in the center of Kennecott. The mill was built on a hillside so that gravity could be used in the processing of the ore. Shipping ore to Tacoma was expensive and the copper ore needed to be concentrated. The ore was brought to the mill from the five mines via the tramway and it would go through a series of crushers and sorters that used gravity and water to move the rocks around. Waste would be removed and the concentrated ore would be loaded into burlap bags that were then loaded onto rail cars. Construction on the mill began in 1908 and took 10 years to finish. The mill was used from 1909 to 1938 and evolved as new mining processes were developed. Through the years, the NPS has stabilized and restored the mill. A $5.7 million dollar project was completed in 2021. St. Elias Alpine Guides run tours through the town and they are the only way to get access to the mill.
There are several haunting things taking place here. Phantom sounds is the most prevlent with people claiming to hear the sounds of equipment operating and the voices of miners shouting. The apparitions of workers have been seen inside the building. Debbie wrote, "When I went to the 14-stories mill, I was terrified. I got this unexplainable feeling inside the building. My friends were not affected like I was inside. Never have I felt such so uneasy and petrified. I could feel the spirits following me. After I left the mine…I no longer felt terrified. The lodge was not haunted to me. I felt nothing. But I will never enter those buildings again. Completely terrified."
Erie Mine Bunkhouse
The Erie Mine Bunkhouse was built in the early 1900s and is high atop a cliff-side and has had no restoration efforts, but still is relatively intact. How they built this thing, we'll never know, but we can see why they haven't tried to restore it. This is a really hard location to access and the hike there sounds terrifying to me. One of the stories told is about a couple of hikers who were hoping that the grand views at Kennecot would pay off with an Aurora Borealis spectacle. It was early fall and the weather was perfect, so they set out early in the morning for the long hike up the cliff-side. They figured they could camp out in the old abandoned bunkhouse, but when they looked through an open window and saw all the peeling paint and caved-in floors, they decided they would be safer setting up camp outside. The hikers set a couple of alarms so that they could wake up throughout the night to get views of the Northern Lights. The two men had just fallen asleep when one of them woke with a start after hearing footsteps. At first he assumed his partner had gotten up to perhaps relieve himself, but he saw that he was still curled up in his sleeping bag. Then there was the sound of creaking like the sound of wooden boards beneath feet. Could the sound be coming from inside the bunkhouse he wondered? The awakened hiker decided to wake up his buddy and he whispered that someone was inside the bunkhouse. They decided to call out, "H-hello, is a-anyone there?" The footsteps suddenly stopped and they heard nothing further. Neither of the men fell asleep the entire rest of the night and no person ever came out of the bunkhouse.
The Kennecott Copper Mine is probably the best-preserved example of early 20th-century industrial copper mining. It is a testament to the strength of character that these Alaskan miners and their families must have had. Are some of their spirits still hanging around the ghost town still? Is Kennecott Copper Mine haunted? That is for you to decide!
