Montana Ghost Story: The Haunting of Red Mike

By Bennett Owen

He was quiet and contemplative, a chain smoker, a full blooded Crow Indian, leathery, skinny, almost gaunt…a WW2 Vet who’d  ‘been in the thick of it.’ Impeccably polite, a ranch hand with a voracious appetite for work, a teetotaler who’d gotten there the hard way.  We called him ‘Red Mike.’  

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We were friends of a sort. I was seven. Red Mike was ageless and the deal was that if I’d supply him with grasshoppers, he’d go down to the creek of an evening and bring home brook trout for breakfast.  A natural storyteller, Red Mike’s tales always began, “when I was your age…” then on he’d go, about growing up in a Tipi on the Crow Agency, sleeping on Buffalo hides, eating gophers baked in hot coals, the Medicine Men summoning spirits. I was always fascinated, sometimes skeptical but never frightened.  Until that night.

‘Weather’ was brewing. A late summer wind was swirling, the sunset a hideous mural of violet and scarlet.   And as I made my nightly delivery of insects, rounding out back of the barn, I felt my first moment of quiet, irrational dread.  A glance over my shoulder.  The ranch house wasn’t more than a quarter-mile away.  “He’ll think you’re a scaredy cat,” was a boy’s reasoning. And so I continued, though every ounce of instinct told me that the silhouette waiting out there on the bluff was not Red Mike.   

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And yet it was, though a side of him I’d never seen before.

“Now hear me out and be warned,” he said. The words were a deep croak. “Take your Rosary to bed with you. Cover yourself tightly and don’t move a muscle.  Wait ‘til you hear the war drums for that means you are safe. And now listen to my story,” and this is what he told me:

“I was back from boot camp, driving an old jalopy out of St. Xavier to visit my girl in Prior, heading west right into the setting sun.  There was something freakish in the air, just like tonight, something sinister. But I was too stupid to take note. On I drove, nothing but dust and desert and lots and lots of nothing. 

“When I saw him standing on the roadside my instinct was to keep on driving, but I stopped of course…do unto others… He got in and as we drove I made small talk but received no answer and within two miles, a smell permeated my old pickup that I can only describe as evil. I looked over. And what stared back at me had slits for eyes like a goat and hooves instead of feet.  It smiled and gurgled and I braked so hard I almost flew through the windshield.

“I said to the thing, ‘By the power of the Holy Spirit, I command you to get from me!’  The thing hissed and retreated, replying, ‘it’s too late for that…’

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“As it left my truck I hit the gas and sped away. I could see it in the rear view mirror, running after me and I floored it, leaving the specter in the dust. Finally I could see it no more.  My escape complete I concentrated on the road and gathering darkness ahead giving silent thanks…even as I glanced to the side…and saw the thing, running next to me, smiling, hissing. There was a bar in Prior. I never met up with my girl.”

And then Red Mike said to me, “Remember my warning. Now run.”   And I ran.  I ran to the house and up the stairs to my bed and pulled the covers tight. And waited. And late at night the drumbeats came as the first boom of thunder echoed off Bald Mountain.

Credit: Library of Congress