Historian Ellen Baumler recalls a stark piece of Montana’s haunted history, Helena’s Hangman’s Tree.
John Keene was the first recorded victim who breathed his last on Helena’s infamous Hangman’s Tree. The Murderer’s Tree, as it was first known, stood at the head of Dry Gulch. Those who knew it well recalled that the ancient ponderosa pine had massive lower branches that tangled in weird contortions. The branches, bleak and devoid of foliage, protruded some twenty feet from its gnarled, moss-covered trunk. Miners, needing to cut smaller logs for cabins, let it stand.There are a lot of stories about the Hangman's Tree. Early-day resident Rachel Parkinson recalled a morning walk in 1865 when she and a friend encountered a body hanging on the scraggly tree. That same morning, children glimpsed the dangling corpse from their Rodney Street schoolyard. David Hilger remembered he and his friends used to climb the tree to examine rope burns on its lower limbs. On April 30, 1870, as the boys played marbles beneath its branches, men scattered them to carry out a double hanging, the last recorded. Afterwards, the boys resumed their game.
In 1875, Reverend W. E. Shippen cut the Hangman’s Tree into firewood. Incensed citizens crowded the neighborhood to take souvenir slivers of the wood. Energy lingers in the aftermath of all this violence. Current neighbors report strange events, midnight voices, apparitions, and footsteps in their attics. Imagine the last painful gasps of all those men whose lives were so violently snuffed. How could any of them rest in peace?
An anonymous letter, written several months after the double hanging and published on September 29, 1870 in the Rocky Mountain Gazette, tells of the first of many unexplained and eerie events in the tree’s neighborhood:
"It was nearly eleven o’clock when I started homeward. The night was cold and heavy clouds laden with snow hung overhead. I was walking rapidly down Rodney Street, when a strong impulse came upon me to go to the tree which stands, all dead and leafless, in Dry Gulch. I was in haste to get home and still this inclination led me.
I approached within twenty paces of the tree. I saw the motionless form of a man, hanging about two feet below the lower right hand limb. I thought that another criminal had been executed and I approached it to ascertain who it was. It was clad in dark garments and its back was towards me. A light breeze sighed mournfully and a house dog barked violently nearby. Coming within a few paces, I could see through it. It was hanging there without any support whatever. I had expected to see a rope pending from the limb above, but there was none!
While thoughts of everything I had read respecting apparitions rapidly passed through my hitherto skeptical mind, the shadowy form raised its arms, turned and faced me. Its features were unearthly white. With a groan, it disappeared. Since this occurrence I have studied it almost constantly. You must draw your own conclusions."
(Broadcast: "Reflections West," 07/08/15. Listen weekly on the radio, Wednesdays at 4:54 p.m.)