All right, welcome to Blood and Dust podcast. I'm joined by my esteemed
co host Matt Also, we have Haunted Bisbee here with us today, kind
of a little impromptu interview, and I saw you guys on Instagram and kind
of wanted to touch base and see what that was all about. Because we
love anything wild West in history, and for the most part, we love
ghosts and stuff like tattoo. So would you guys like to introduce yourselves?
Absolutely. My name is Joey Bravo and my wife Xandra Bravo and Xandra Opera
and owns the Haunted Bisbee. That's two ors things that we're doing in Bisbee,
Arizona. So how do you guys get into that? Well, we
moved to Bisbee in the midst of the pandemic as well as you know,
half the world moving their location, and it happened on a whim. We
were actually escaping to Arizona in August to get to flee the heat in La
might be the only people in the world who's ever done that. But I
was gonna say, I've never heard anybody say that. I used to live
in Arizona, and it's like, I don't know if that makes the primary
difference being that my mom has a house there with air conditioning and a tiny
studio without. So we drove to Bisbee to entertain ourselves one day, and
by the time we got through the approximately two and a half miles of the
main street, Joey had zillo to an apartment and a week later we signed
a lease. So we scrambled around to get jobs here. I worked at
a wine bar and Joey worked at a tour and displeased in our various experiences
at both, we fell in love with the town and found out that some
of the history was not as accurate as could be, and so we decided
that we would create our own tour. But then we found out that somebody
else had already done the historical research and created a tour of their own who
was no longer operating it, so we sought her out. Her name is
Francine Powers, and she's a respected journalist, historian, and local here in
Bisbee who wrote the book Haunted Bisbee, and she was happy to sell us
the intellectual property and the tour structure, as well as continued to stay on
as our consultant. So we picked that up and we have multiple plans for
expanding tours and operating practices for Atlas tours, but I think you're mostly here
for Haunted Bisbee. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Absolutely.
The thing is this town has such crazy stories and the people who put
this together because Bisbee didn't want to be founded. It burned down four times
in the first like twenty years of its existence, and the whole thing has
been built on a hope and a prayer. It has two thousand miles of
underground tunnel and nobody quite knows where it is. So sometimes the streets are
safe for trucks, sometimes it's ippy. It's just so all these people who
had no idea what they were doing over one hundred years, building a town
without permits. It's got a lot of stories and a lot of history,
and it's connected right to Tombstone. You know, all the criminals went from
Tombstone to Bisbee and vice versa. So I just thought, yeah, let's
just tell the truth. And the truth is strange in fiction, as they
say, until nineteen thirty five, Tombstone was actually the county seat. So
previous to nineteen thirty five, all of our criminals went to tombstone for justice.
Since we mean hanging, how about just a haunted pub? Yeah,
what are some haunted pubs around the area. Well, I guess the Grand
Hotel would be considered one of the haunted pubs we have here. So the
Grand is actually the second version of the Grand. The original fire that took
out the Grand was in the nineteen o nine, nineteen or six, I
get a little dyslexic. What happened was the Grand closet caught fire and the
neighbors across the street noticed it. Now, because Bisbee is five thousand,
five hundred feet up, the water pressure is terrible, so the firefighters could
never put anything out. Oftentimes the miners had to resort to just blowing up
buildings in the way of the fire to create a firewall, and using dynamite.
So when the Grand was torched, it actually took down all of Main
Street and many of the houses. Back in the time of nineteen o nine,
I think it was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of damage to
the whole town. And this was the time this had happened. So the
Grand went up and we built it and around it was finished for like around
the nineteen eight, so almost like one hundred years later it was finally finished.
There's a bar in there that came from Mexico and it's hand carved basted,
about one hundred and fifty to two hundred years old. We haven't done
a sample of it and tested it, but along with that bar has been
seeing a lot of people see shadow people in the bar, the women's restroom.
There's constant like banging sounds and the lights turn off and there's no lights
switch in there. You have to hit the breaker. And many of the
construction workers who were working on it throughout the eighties and a little in the
nineties kept phoning the manager and saying that this woman in white was wandering around
upstairs where they were working, and they were worried that she was going to
hurt herself on the tools or fall down up opening like shaft or something.
And there was nobody up there, and this was a recurring thing. One
of the personal stories somebody told me was that as he was working there,
they would always see this kind of shadow or cowboy figure wanders to the fireplace.
And when the fireplace was demolished over a decade ago, there was a
room just just hidden the room behind the fireplace. I thought that was interesting.
So the Grand Fire was reported on the Bisbee Daily Review on October fifteenth,
nineteen oh eight, so it would have been the day between nineteen o
eight and the headline says Bisbee has three quarters million fire loss worst disaster in
the history of Bisbee was recorded last evening. Yeah. The only reason the
fire didn't eat all the homes that were put up at the time, which
were basically one room shacks, was we had a wolves Worth and the back
building. The back of the building was brick and it incidentally created a firewall
that. Yeah, and actually nobody died in that fire, despite the entire
town billing up. Only one person did. And we had people jumping out
of buildings, being caught in blankets and stuff. After the fire it subsided.
Somebody was walking down Main Street and was looking up at all the damage,
just being curious, and part of the building fell and crushed them.
So here's here's a quote from the from the newspaper from the Bisbee Review says
from the Grand Hotel, the flames spread to the Norton building and to the
Johnson Block. There they were checked by the Elks building for many minutes,
the members of which made valiant efforts to save it from destruction, as it
had been only recently completed and expensively furnished. They pleaded in vain for water.
It was not to be had. Dynamite was used and the Bisbee Hardware
Company blown down. This gave hope for a time, but nothing could resist
for long the fierce heat which it was subjected, and it soon was roaring
with the rents rest. The records of the lodge were lost, many of
the furnishings were saved. Nothing beats an old timey newspaper. They had a
way of writing, that's for sure. They had something to prove, you
know, for a few people I could read more eloquently. So what are
some of your guys's favorite spots? Oh? Gosh, um my favorite.
That's a really good question, I think, because I gotta do the two
where in my head like real quick, I think I really love the park
that we used to be the old cemetery. It's kind of was turned into
an amphitheater, so it has these really cool acoustics so when you're up there,
it's a lot quieter than the rest of the town. That it's pretty
quiet. Let me think, I really love the library. It was voted
for the I never thought i'd say that sentence, but I think the best
library in like America in twenty twenty. I think some of were like that.
I know, Arizona and maybe New York to got his beat. I
actually just kind of like the stories, you know, I kind of like
the stories. The places themselves I really enjoy. But the whole town is
just gorgeous from end to end. My tour, because Joey is the tour
guide for the for the Haunted Bisbee tour, I do an art tour that
does art and architecture. My favorite spot is actually with one of the very
kind and generous store owners lets us go into his store. It's a sub
basement level and on the sidewalk are glass structures that you walk over that most
people think are just some sort of pretty mosaic because their colored glass it looks
like a big cripple like mosaic. And it's actually a skylight into the basement
level, so we could actually go down and take a look and you can
see the shadows of the people walking across the sidewalk. And it was because
although electricity was being used at that time, which is how come Bisby was
such a boomtown because of the copper. Not all of the buildings were outfitted
with electricity, so these skylights are sprinkled throughout the town and nobody knows about
them. Yeah, and there's like twelve feet of this space underneath a lot
of the sidewalk. Pretty cool. If you're in the basement they're looking up.
Do you see like the colors of the glass or yeah, the whole
room is tinted like this lavender color from the glass. That's really cool.
It's really neat. I have to send you a photo or because that's super
cool. Yeah, definitely, I'd love to see that. So in eighteen
seventy seven, a bunch of horses went missing from Fort Bowie and Jack Dunn,
who was considered the best scout they had, and a team of people
decided to come out and look for the horses. They had assumed the Apache
had taken them, because that was the mindset at the time. So as
they were wandering through the area Bisbee and they kept trying to set up camp,
but all of the springs were terribly like sour. They weren't good drinking
water. As they were wandering through the area, they found a really fresh
spring and this was called Apache Spring. And as they were staying up camp,
they noticed some of the rocks had some green tint to them and they
thought, well, this could be copper. This could be a lot of
money for us. But because Jack and his men were military, they couldn't
spend all day just digging holes in the ground. So they found an old
drunk guy named George Warren that they were friendly with, and they said,
George, if we'd buy you a bunch of shovels and equipment and whatnot,
will you dig for us and if you find anything, put our name on
it and we can all be rich. And George said, yeah, yeah,
I can do that, And within fifty days he started finding stuff he
did not put their name on it. So George ended up making tons of
money with his claims and found a whole bunch of stuff, and miners started
showing up and Bisbee started booming. From then, we had so much copper
and so much the city that in our courthouse has a solid copper roof,
and there's a high school that has eight hundred pound copper doors. The town
was doing fantastically in nineteen seventy three. They stopped around seventy three. The
locals keep debating me on this, but I think I'm right. Nineteen seventy
three they stopped mining and the whole town went into bankruptcy and just kind of
became a ghost town. Most people could I've talked to said they bought a
house for about a thousand dollars here. So all the hippies moved in because
they could afford to live here, and they were kind of being ostracized after
all the events of the sixties, and so the town was refurbished, rebuilt
and helped together by hippies for the last sixty seventy years and now it's this
kind of bohemian, artsy liberal thing in the middle of Tombstone and the military
town Sierra Vista. George himself, who founded that the town had all the
money, well, he lost everything in life. He was shot three times
in town and three different arguments, and he ended up losing all the money
because he got really drunk in a town called Charlton, which is between here
and Tombstone, and he bet all of his money in the mind that he
could outbase a horse on foot, so his ideas that he was going to
run next to the horse and turn around and run back, and he thought
the horse would beat him on the straight away, but he'd be so quick
at pivoting that he would win the race. And he lost all of his
money on that. He died wandering the town just sweeping floors and cleaning spittoons
for pennies. And it wasn't until about thirty years after his death at the
Elks Club actually found his grave and it just said gw that was all that
was left. Everything was worn off, and they did some scientific tests and
no idea what that was to verify that it was George, and they removed
his body and moved into a different cemetery and gave him a huge monument.
And in addition to his accomplishments and death, he's on the State Seal of
Arizona. They were looking for an old like scraggy prospector for the state Seal.
They saw him and said, yeah, that guy, and it just
happened to be the guy who did all this stuff for Bisbee. And that's
kind of like where the town came from and how it came to be,
which is a completely perfect person to have on the state seal because Bisbee was
the most productive mind in the state for a very long time. Was he
for being fleet of foot that he would make that that's a really good question.
I never heard anybody describe him as quick, you know. He was
always just like one of the characters in town. In addition, Bisbee was
named after Judge DeWitt Bisbee, and he never visited the town, which I
think is pretty gangster that you have this whole hundreds named after you and you
don't even show up. He was the attorney for the camp before it was
Bisbee, it was called Mule Gulch Mining Camp, and so he was the
attorney for However, they bureacratically set that up and then they incorporated it in
eighteen eighty and named it after him. I was had like other information,
and I'm always like, oh, wow, okay, because I'm trying.
I try to keep the two earths concise and then but there's so much information,
so it's always fun to hear and Zandraw has something new. What are
some of the more scary places that people just let's say they randomly or even
you for that matter, that you've gone into and it's just like, I
really don't like going in there. Xandra is not sensitive to any spirits whatsoever.
I, on the other hand, have a bit of a spider sense.
I don't like the going into the bank that is now the antique store.
It has the bolts still underground and that's where they put a lot of
the knickknacks. And after about thirty minutes in there, I actually had to
leave. I could not stay in there any much longer. I don't really
have any stories from there, but it's one of those places that definitely not
a huge fan of. It's funny because I was shopping in there, and
I like to linger in shop and brows and stuff, and and the whole
time I'm trying to calm myself because I don't like this. He generally doesn't.
He's not much of a lingery shopper. So I thought he was just
being anty because he wanted me to get out of there. And finally he
just like tacked me on the shoulder and he's like, aren't you getting anything?
And I'm like huh, and he's like, I go. I definitely
think the Copper Queen Hotel. Now there's all these legends in town that there's
like sixteen ghosts and they all have names and stuff in the Copper Queen Hotel.
It's one hundred and twenty year old hotel as of this year. But
on all my research, I couldn't find a lot of references to the names
and these big explosive Hollywood debts like would have been in the paper. I
mean, I have recordings of like a donkey that died in front of the
hotel, but none of this crazy stuff. But on the fourth floor,
which is said to be haunted by a spirit named Billy, who the hotel
says as a little boy, but the people who work there think it's actually
bigger than that, and so do I. The entire fourts floor feels thick
and kind of like you like swimming through it a little bit, and all
a lot of the guests say that their head feels bad or their stomach doesn't
feel good, or they feel tilted. And it's only on that floor.
And when you just walk down to the third floor like little staircase, you're
fine, You're absolutely fine, and you go back up you're like, oh,
I don't like this. And Xander was there for the first time last
night, and you didn't quite enjoy it either, did you. I felt
I didn't know how to define it, but it kind of felt thick to
me. Yeah, And then the other the other ghosts I take very seriously
is that there's a cheese shop on Main Street that used to be the old
mortuary and now that they served blue cheese, and there was a whole family
that lived there from the sixties to now, and a lot of people we've
we've done spirit box sessions because some people bring equipment. I try to be
historically accurate because I don't like to be like woh. But we've had voices
come through. UM. One girl on my tour, her name was Trinity
and her it was her birthday, and someone gave her a spirit box to
play with, and this voice was saying that we wanted to play hot Scotch
and that it was waiting for someone to play with. And in that area,
people have had rocks tossed at their ankles and feet that have followed them
through the tour. I've been on tours where we're in a hotel and you'll
hear it, oh man, another rock. People have heard voices from that
cheese shop. Some people in town have actually recognized the ghost photos that people
will have taken and been like, oh, yeah, that was my neighbor
he worked there, you know, and stuff like that. So it's got
a real eariness to it. Yeah, I've never seen something where people would
recognize the faces in the glass. That was interesting to me. I didn't
know that was something that had done because ghosts are always advertised from being like
two hundred years ago and as they are on this tour. But the last
guy died in two thousand and one or three, and his neighbors are like,
oh, yeah, that's him in the glass. So I think one
of the neat things about the Haunted Bisbee Tour is that, for the most
part the spirits phantasms goes what have you, are pretty benign. Some of
them get irritable or cranky. Some of them have been known to follow people,
but none of them have been super aggressive, except for one that we
know about in town, and that's enough private residence will be. So our
tour right now is a ninety minute walk, but that's actually just a quarter
of the length of stories we have, so we're actually saving up to buy
a cart, so in the fall and winter we'll be doing the full four
miles for everybody. There's actually a house in town that had an exercistem performed
on it by the Catholic Church in Tucson. They tried using a local Catholic
church and the priest just said it wasn't going to happen. This house actually
belonged to France and who founded this to our company. So she's a journalist,
but she was really interested by the spirit world because that's a little girl.
They had this you know, bishop show over to show up at her
house to exercise the house, and she stayed friends with him and until his
death. He maintained that he was thrown down the stairs by an entity and
she remembers seeing him thrown down the stairs. And so that's probably the darker
spot in Bisbee in terms of just because that house is still abandoned since the
seventies and it's had multiple owners and none of them keep it. One owner
even gutted the entire thing out to start remodeling it and then just left it.
So it's just this hollow shell that nobody wants to be in. And
so yeah, like that's the most negative spirit that we really have. Yeah,
So there's uh, that's about in terms of the negative ones, but
most of the ghosts, as my friend describes it, he's he's like he
said, his theory, you know, and it's with all theory. His
theory was that maybe they don't know that they're dead and they're trying to get
our attention because we're just ignoring them and it's ticking them off. Yeah,
why don't you pay attention to it? Kind of thing. We've also had
um psychics inform us that the ghosts are unhappy when the stories told about them
are rot It's kind of funny. So like, I'm trying to do both
because I love history and I want it to be accurate. And I never
if I can't prove that you're that you've died in town, you don't get
on the tour. Yeah, that's that's basically how it goes. But I
also wanted, um, I know that people have different levels of appreciation for
ghosts, and some people take it very seriously and make it their jobs.
So and as an now I am so Yeah, I brought a lot of
psychics, which is and mediums onto the tour is just to say, hey,
like, what do you think about this? So what is your perspective
on this, and they've all had a lot of interesting things to say about
it, and that you were saying, what did you just say that?
I'm sorry, I got lost on my own words about the psychics, and
which is that they report that they are not happy when the stories are wrong.
Yeah. Yeah, And that's kind of interesting because I'd even you know,
this is all just here saying whatever. But I was even doing incorrect
information when I worked for another tour and the voices that would come through the
spirit pox were like garbage and terrible beyond. Yeah. Yeah. And it's
funny because the guests would be like, oh, I don't know if that's
true, you know, the box is saying, and I'm like, oh
my god. And now that I've started, like now that I've started telling
real stories, like, it's all kind of just that stopped. And I
find that kind of funny too. Now. I mean, I could just
be imagined it all, but it's kind of funny to think that old George
Born it's heckling me from me on the gree toughest critics aren't even alive.
Man. Okay, so I was wrong, Okay. The mind did shut
down on June thirteenth, nineteen seventy five. All right, all right,
so two years before Star Wars, the mind shut down. That's how I
do, younger people, and that put an end to ninety five years of
copper mining. Damn. I think I read that there's like a thousand steps
in Bisbee, Okay, So I don't know that anyone's has actually counted them,
except for maybe all the poor bastards who decide to go on it.
There's it's a fundraiser called the Bisbee one thousand. So in the nineteen thirties
for the New Deal, the Worst Progress Administration came into Bisbee and built all
of these sidewalks and stairs because we're situated on the side of a canyon and
people would just put houses up where they found claims where they started mining before
it conglomerated by Phelps Dodge and other large mining companies, and so there's all
these houses and buildings on the side of the canyons that basically over time people
made trails to get to. And so the WPA came in installed all these
sidewalks and stairs, and the Works Progress Administration was the WPA, and this
was done in the nineteen thirties. Because we were under such economic depression,
not that we could imagine that today. That the government decided that if the
Americans built their own infrastructure in their own cities and were paid, then everyone
would win and maybe we'd have some money. So in the thirties, yeah,
all these concrete stairs are put up also about the town, but they
weren't done quite right because all the houses were put at randomly. So you
have staircases going to people's backyards front yards, a couple of staircases to nowhere.
It's a bit like the town version of the Winchester House. Yeah,
but they're still in place and in resly good condition. The Bisbee one thousand
is akin to a five K, so people sign up every year. I
think it's already sold out for this year. It takes place in October,
so there are endless amounts of stairs. There's a handful that are publicly accessed
by the Bisbee one thousand, which is operated by Bisbee Vogue, and people
go up and down these stairs like a five K. They pay to do
it, and that helps raise funds to keep them in working order. Some
of them are not in working order anymore, and some of them go through
private residences, so they're not used, and the fire deployment takes it really
seriously. They put on all their gear and they do these thousand steps twice.
Are there any stories that happen to occur on the steps or any of
the steps? I mean, I have no doubt that every year we get
a couple of people dropping. We are at a mile high and if people
haven't practiced here than they might not be accustomed to it. It's also it
does play place in October, which is past the monsoon season, and it's
very aired out here. But I don't I don't know if any specific funny,
but it is not, you know, that's interesting. There are not.
There aren't a lot of like stair stories. I imagine if you fall
or something happen where you die on a staircase, it's just kind of like
part for the course, you know, they kind of expect it versus like
a living room, you know, so I don't think it gets bitten up
too much stuff like that. The only um interesting stair story that I can
think of is the old cemetery is elevated by a pretty large staircase above the
rest of the city. And whatever I do whenever someone who brings a spirit
box or something. It's always talks about the stairs. The voices always say
stairs, stairs, stairs, and um over multiple days. Some of the
people who are more sensitive, like the side kicks and stuff, many of
them separately have talked about a little boy in that cemetery who only wants people
to walk up one of the staircases and not the other ones because he believes
that they missed his moving his mother's body and she's still in the ground and
he doesn't want people to step over her. But that's the only kind of
story I have about the stairs specifically. I think, do you have any
favorite stories from the from the wild West area? Yes, that you really
love telling people, but yeah, yeah, because I do want to keep
it wild West. This actually involves Tombstone. I'm going to do my best
to talk about the Bisbee massacre. So we're the only tour that talks about
this. This was a robbery that went awrye So on December eighth, eighteen
eighty three, and around seven pm, there was a whole gang and they
went by the name the Cowboys, and they're featured in the movie Tombstone.
Well, they set out to rob the Goldwater General Store, which is now
the Panta Art Gallery and still standing as it was when this took place.
It's the oldest building on Main Street. They were estimated that it was seven
thousand dollars six thousand dollars worth of money in the safe being put in there
that day. Because the miners were very like right wing in a sense,
so they didn't want to put their money into the bank. They wanted their
money to go into the general store in a safe for the guy that like
they knew. So when the cowboys entered the building, they held the place
up. They opened the safe and they only found about three hundred dollars,
and the owner of the store said something like, you fools, the money's
not here yet. So they stood outside in the main street and it was
kind of at a blind corner, so they thought they'd catch the cart with
the money when it arrived. It took way too long, so people in
town started noticing that these guys were robbing the general store. It was all
saloons across the street, and two guys were heavily drinking. They saw that
the place was being robbed, so they stepped out to take a look.
One of the robbers said, hey, come back in here. They said
no, and one of his friends ran back into the bar. The other
guy panic just started running drunk down the street. The guy actually drew the
cowboy drew his pistol and shot him in the head and killed him instantly in
the road. This alerted the neighbor to the right of the general store.
His name was Howard. He stepped out and was gunned down immediately. The
paper said he didn't do anything and say anything, just instantly killed. A
woman by the name of Annie Roberts heard the shots and she was either at
what now is Cafe Roca or the Object Hotel, and she looked out to
see the gunfire going on. She turned to run back into the building and
a bullet went through the door jam and struck her in the spine and killed
her. At this point, a guy named James Cribbaumb actually saw all this
going on, and he was way off in the distance, so he fired
six shots from his revolver, just trying to stop it or do anything.
One bullet struck a cowboy, but only went through his coat. At this
point, a Deputy share of D. Tom Smith was visiting from New Mexico,
and he decided he had to confront this single handedly, like he was
batman or something. So he stood in the middle of the street and identified
himself as a law enforcement, to which the taller outlaw who was guarding the
door said law enforcement, Well, you're just a man I'm looking for and
shot him in the shoulder. Smith got back up and said I am hit,
and then the cowboy said then you shall have another, and then killed
them in the street right there. Realizing that they're now going to have to
start fighting the whole town because they had killed a cop and some other people,
they decided to just get out of there, so they got on their
horses and they rode away, and as they did, they actually went past
the cart that had the thirty thousand in it six thousand and I'm sorry to
six thousand in it. Sorry sometimes numbers. Yeah, they went past the
cart and they missed the money. So this is all for nothing. James,
who fired the shawns and hit the guy in the coat, he actually
got on his horse and made it to Tombstone in two hours, trying to
get help. The rich people in town formed a mob because this was their
town then they were their rich people so he formed their own like justice mob,
and they had a guy named Heath who worked next door to the massacre
helped them figure it out. I guess he'd had like a dance hall.
Turned out Heath had planned the robbery, so whenever he was giving directions as
to where the robbers might have been, he gave him the opposite direction.
So for about three or four months these people were wandering around until they finally
figured it out. And in short everyone was tried, hung and buried in
Boothill Cemetery and they're still there to this day, except for Heath. He
got life because he didn't really kill anybody. He just planned this whole thing.
And the people of Businey they wanted them dead because he, you know,
a police officer, kid was killed. Any Roberts was killed. So
they went down to his jail still early in the morning, started banging on
the door. The jailer thought it was breakfast, so he opened the door
and let him in, and they grabbed Heath and dragged them out and gave
him a blue handkerchief and he tied it around his own eyes and he said,
whatever you do to me, please don't film me. Full of lead
so they hung him on a telegraph line and that was the Bisbee Massacre of
eighteen eighty three, and that led into eighteen eighty four. And I think
that's a really cool Old West story and kind of also shows how Tombstone dealt
the justice for the crimes that we're done in Bisbee. And the telegraph line
is still in front of the Old Tombstone courthouse in Old Tombstone. Really Yeah,
there's plenty of images of the hanging, but I think there's one also
at the courthouse. Oh wow, Yeah, Okay, so that's their too.
Yeah, So it's all kinds of the people are Stone Tombstone, the
polestone Tombstone. It's still in. The building is still standing. It's probably
the best and most direct kind of way to really put yourself back in most
in the day, like where they were in the actual places and stuff.
That's a really good story, thank you. It's it's a really complicated story
too. There's a lot of I do have one more story that's kind of
Old westy and kind of involves how we got our first library that actually involved
in They're hanging. So the short version of this was a guy in the
paper described as a Mexican and he was gamboling one of the bars and he
lost horribly, so he came back in with his rifle and just shot up
the whole place. I mean, it was a pretty descriptive newspaper article.
They caught him and hung him on the corner of Main Street just for a
day to show people, Hey, don't like kill people in town, or
we'll kill you. And this was the day that the superintendence from the mine
had arrived from New York City, so they taken the train all the way
to Bisbee. They got off and the first thing they saw was this man
hanging from a tree. And they were so appalled because this was their company
town that they said, okay, how can we stop this? So I'd
like to do this quote just because it's worded so well. This comes from
the cover Queen Libraries actual information on this. It says they decided immediately that
the town needed more civilized diversions. Um, they bought about a thousand books
and they shoved it into the company's store and created the first library. And
they thought, if people read more and we're more cultured, they stopped murdering
each other and busy. So I like that store. I like, I
like that too. Got to be more cultured. It'll be fine. Yeah,
I just read some Catcher and the Rye. You'll stop telling people to
be fine. Picture some dandy's getting off the train from New York and seeing
oh my god. Oh man. So tell us a little bit about your
tour and maybe what we would see if we took a day on it.
So, um, what our tours are? They are right now. The
Haunted Busy Tour is a ninety minute walking tour where stairs are optional, which
is great. That's an important note because, like we said, there's lots
of stairs in the in the town. But it's also there are no straight
there's no flat level walking in this town. Everything's crooked and uphill. Yeah.
So to get off Main Street is usually several stories worth of elevation.
It is one of the more difficult parts because a lot of the people visiting
our retirees or their family people, and if you have a bunch of kids
running up and down the stairs, it's kind of hard to corral them.
And if you're a retiree age I mean your knees, you just can't do
the stairs all day if you're not used to it. So the tour has
optional stairs on it depending on how people are feeling, and I like to
do kind of a three part story without being obvious about it. We travel
up one side of Main Street and I talk about the whole history of the
town, the founding, how George Warren lost all his money to the horse,
and things like that, and then we do a quick turnaround. We
walk down the other street side of main Street, and I tell the stories
of all the cowboy stuff, such as the shootings, the hangings, and
we pause and I describe and show all the landmarks for the Bisbee massacre and
kind of explain in three D space how it happened. And then I want
to get into the weird. So from there we go into the old red
light district, which she's being an official red light district in nineteen fifteen,
and this is where all the segregation was, so anyone who's Hispanic, Native
American, Asian at black, they were all segregated to the section where all
the bars are. And from that came a lot of stories. So I
talk about like the Screaming Danshee that was in the paper. People considered this
town from the newspaper articles, I have they consider it haunted as far back
as nineteen ten, So I talked about about Screaming Danshee, the old cemetery,
the time they found a human head, there, a few other crazy
things. And then we end it. We do a little loop. We
go to an underground part of Bisbee. I think I'm the only two way
to do that, and then we go to the Copper Queen Hotel. We
do a quick sweep of the fourth floor so people can kind of feel it
for themselves, because most people feel so uneasy on that fourth floor that I
think it's a nice way to kind of mind them about like the supernatural ideas
of that on the tour. And that's kind of how the tours put together.
Xandra has a separate tour right now called the Bisbee Sampler, which is
a two hour kind of hangout that goes to all the different art galleries in
town and you get to hang out well you know, you're very friendly.
Er tells the history of all the murals because the hippies have painted all over
the town. The walls have just ran it. So she talks to the
people about that and kind of walking through town. We do public art,
architecture, there's a lot of very unique architectural architectural features of the town.
Because of the fires and because it was a boomtown. The call for buildings
to be built out of stone, which most of the buildings out here at
the time we're built out of timber, invited multiple architects from all over Europe.
So if you if you are looking at Bisbee, sometimes you'll find people
talking about how it's similar to being in Europe, and it's because our town
is a hodgepodge of all these European architectural styles. Also, when they changed
over to the county seat in nineteen thirty five from Tombstone to Bisbee, there
were a lot of buildings put in that represent a fabulous Art Deco history.
So we talk about the architecture. I kind of bypassed the areas that Joey
goes onto because he does that so much better than I do, and also
because you know, we'd like people to take both our tours if they so
desire. But if you think about the main the main drag in town as
being main Street, it's actually called two different things. It's Tombstone Canyon and
Main Street. So I do more of the Tombstone Canyon and then once you
go past the primary main Street area, so I kind of get the areas
that he doesn't, and he gets the areas that I don't. Yeah,
that's a short answer. It's hard to talk. It's hard to describe because
this out it's so like like an mc etre drying or something like. It's
trying to We sometimes get caught up in like naming the places because it's so
windy and built on top of itself. It is a really neat towns looking
at pictures of it. In fact, Google Maps has a hard time if
you're anywhere off of Main Street because the switchbacks behind to get up the canyons
are so narrow that, like our house, it's best found by using the
address on main Street because it gets really confused. Yeah, just accordions itself.
So a lot of the tourists have problems because you know, they're relying
on Google Maps or whatever, and it's odd. I'd say most people I
talked to have come to this town, and we get a quarter million people
a year as of twenty thirteen, the last time they counted. They just
show up. They don't even know, like how high up the town is
they don't know that they're stairs, they don't know what's open, they don't
look up the food. They just come because like their neighbor told them to
check out Bisbee. So we kind of have to try to take care of
them the best we can. But you know, um, yeah, that's
about I would say that one of the cool things about our tour that I
like to promote in terms of promoting is that we do like small groups of
like ten people and stairs are optional. The other current big tours in town,
one of them has sixty people six zero per group, without any microphones
or anything, and they don't list that. So you'll they go up how
many flights and steps probably like six to eight. And I know when I
used to work for one of the ones that didn't tell people they were stairs,
there's a lot of times where I was actually helping people physically get up
the stairs because they already spent money on the ticket and there were no refunds
and they were like, well, I have to see this through and people
were falling, hurting themselves. So this is this is a much easier way
to go about the bound and you can actually hear us talk to you,
which is Yeah, sounds a little nicer. Yeah, Matt, did you
have anything? He did a great job. He killed at Matt exactly.
He did too. He pulled himself together for this one. If you want
to man promote yourself, tell people how they can find you and how to
get a hold of you on a website or whatever. And I will also
provide some information in the episode description as well. Yeah, you can find
us at Haunted Bisbee dot com. We're also Haunted Bisbee on the instagrams at
insta talks, and yeah, all of our information is kind of there.
You'll just go to about tours. You could sell Alexandro's Wonderful Art Tour or
my Wonderful Haunted Bisbee Historical Ghost Tour, and you can buy the tickets online
or just give me a call. I'll pick up and I'll set you guys
up. Like I said, we do groups of ten, but if somebody
wants to do more than that, we will accommodate them on a private tour.
And our rule right now is if there's more than five adults, I
do thirty percent off the entire ticket price. So somebody just bought fourteen tickets
yesterday and they staved about sixty sixty. So we want to make it affordable
and useful for people in town, because there's a lot of despair when people
don't know what to do in town. We are also dog friendly and child
friendly. Children under thirteen when accompanied by an adult, are free. We're
not going to take anybody's kids without them. And then we also if you
know, if our times don't work out for somebody, or they have a
special event, or even if they want to see something that we're not specifically
listening, we always are open to customized tours. Absolutely, that's our little
trauma, And in three to four months, hopefully by the end of July,
we will be able to expand to cart tours, and in hopefully a
few weeks. I don't have a date for it yet, but we are
going to start offering a food tour as well. Nice so you can snack
it along the tour and then get to try all the restaurants out at the
same time and kind of like decide where you want to go later on and
not have to just like take a wild gamble. You could say, oh,
I didn't like the r I did like this, and you're set.
One fantastic thing about well just not the only one. But a fantastic thing
about visiting Busybee is that these are the original buildings there, the original houses.
Our house was built in nineteen fifteen as a minors shack, and they're
strewn throughout the entire community. Some places that I won't specifically call out have
rebuilt and rebuilt and didn't decide to preserve their heritage until far past the time
that there the buildings had been taken down. And so visiting Bisbee is visiting
Bisbee as it was in the eighteen eighties and the nineteen hundreds. And in
fact, there's a film called Violent Saturday that was shot in nineteen fifty five.
Yeah, it's in color, which is odd for the time. It's
a pretty on YouTube now, Yeah, that's what. All the buildings are
only like thirty years old at the time, so it might as well be
the nineties to us, and you can kind of see how the town looked
when it was brand new and besides like and it looks the same pretty much,
yeah, exactly the same as it did in the nineteen twenties, which
is which is astounding. So it's really a step back in time and it's
not as like touristy as Tombstone. So it's more of a wait for you
just to kind of feel comfortable and enjoy the town as it is, versus
trying to, like, you know, make it happen, make it happen.
Yeah, it's an effortless time work. I like how you seem to
have a lot of relationships with some of the other businesses in the town and
you guys kind of work with each other. Yeah, it's so it's my
company and U well, my personal What I call my two pillars of this
company. First is the authenticity. When it comes to historical facts, we
use historical resources and make sure things are documented. When it comes to the
art, we talked to the primary artists when possible. But the other pillar
of it is that we want to promote a community, cultural and economic growth.
We want the other businesses to thrive just as we want to thrive,
and we believe that cooperation is the best means to do them. And that
has been a hard journey because some businesses have been kind of hardened from years
of dealing with tourists and not knowing how to communicate with them and communicate with
other businesses. So we are limited sometimes it's quite a lot of work to
tell something because when we first tried trying to add like different restaurants together,
some of them are kind of scared, like are you going to secretly charge
us? And we're like, no, no, this is this is for
you guys, and that's a kind of a concept. So we're really trying
hard to reach out and how help everybody because again, there's no maps of
Bisbee. I mean, you could find one, but it's not like accurate
accurate, and there's nothing that tells you what's open or where to eat.
So we're trying to unite everybody so at least there can be a central source
of information, even if it's just our tour that tourists can kind of figure
out where to go so it's easy for them because I don't want them to
regret coming here. So that's kind of why it's important to mash everybody together
as well instead of being our own island. And so every day we're building
up our virtual visitor center on our website every day NonStop, well easily sometimes
well I appreciate eight you guys taking the time to come on here and tell
us some stories, and honestly, next time I'm in the area, because
how do you go to Arizona every now and then? I get some friends
there, I'm probably going to have to stop by Bisbee. Never really considered
it before, to be honest, I have reason, so we're good.
That seems to be the case of most people who visit Busbey. Yeah,
they're just like, well, we don't have a Disneyland, so we might
as well go to Bisbee because we've done two Bland. There's a guy who
calls it that, so, um, yeah, come on down. We'd
be happy to show you around and stuff and take you to some of the
places and uh, you know, if there's any local characters, you could
probably just do little interview snippets and stick them on your on the podcast.
I'd be cool too. I don't tour, we interact with some of the
locals, which means every tour gets a unique little bonus. Yeah. I've
done tours where some guy was like, you want to see my house,
okay, and we all go an the house and like it's beautiful, or
like one guy was renting out the top of the one of the castles in
County. It was like, hey, you want to see the top floor
like going to see a whole tour. Yeah, and the whole tour just
went up and we got to see it. So like people are there are
very really opening on a tour. You never know where we're going to go
or end up. I like that. It's pretty awesome. Now, yeah,
we call it. People say that Bisbee is a Mayberry on acid.
That all Mayberry. I love it. All right, Well, thank you
again. Would you like to say anything before we sign off? Nope,
I want to thank you guys for coming on. And that was some great
stories. Any time with more, I'm going to take you up on that.
Awesome Well, thanks, happy us on pleasures all on this side of
the microphone. I love hearing about history, whether it's towns or hauntings or
wild wet pretty much anything. I'm honestly like you on the podcast that I
do. I'm very very peculiar about the historical fact. Specifically, even if
I'm covering a haunting on my other podcast, if if the history doesn't match
the story, it really really bothers me. Yeah, it's like I can
appreciate the fact that you actually try to be historically accurate. Well, thank
you. Yes, it's quite a bit of work, but it's it's important
because you know, at the end of the day, like the ghosts are
fun and stuff, but these aren't also people and how they built the stuff
that came before us. And I mean, yeah, it's important just to
be to be honest about the people being people. We strive to respect all
the residents of Bisbee, living or dead. That is all right. So
all right, well, I guess enjoy the rest of your Saturday. And
again I appreciate you guys coming on. Thank you very much. Thanks great
to talk to you guys. All right, have a good one, all
right, bye bye. All right, that was cool. Yeah, I
like that, man, that was pretty That was pretty cool. Sounds like
a really interesting town. Yeah. I was looking at pictures of it and
those steps just like creep around the town like because nothing there is straight.
Well, after you guys started talking about that, I actually was over here
googling too and looking at pictures and it was like, holy crap, man,
it's just like it looks like it's just on the side of a mountain
or yeah, just kind of built in. I had never even thought of
ever going there, but it's it looks like a place I would love.
I know, dude, I was looking at pictures. I was like,
Wow, that is a beautiful little town man or I shouldn't say a little
town, but yeah, it's freaking pretty nice. Man. It's like I
never even can considered ever going there. M hm hm Planet in I aver
minute, a minute, minute of minute plant. I have a bed of
a minute and a minute minute