Bicknell Newspaper Employees Spooked By Spoof of Ghostly Coal Miners

This is another wonderful tale submitted by professional journalist Betty Ducharme, who is a one-woman publishing machine.

Subject: coal miners
Date:     Thu, 8 Jan 1998 15:44:40 -0500
From:     Betty Ducharme 
To:        rking@indian.vinu.edu

I worked for many years at the Knox County Daily News, its predecessors and successors. During the years I was employed with the newspaper it changed homes five times; from afternoon to a morning publication and from a six days to five, back to six, then from a weekly to a twice-a-week issue. Shortly after I arrived for work one afternoon while the newspaper was located on North Main Street, one of the young men who worked in composing stopped at my desk to chat for a bit. The ad load had been unusually heavy and the young man was required to work several additional hours, some in the early morning and others late at night. During these extra hours he was in the building alone with lights on only in the room where he was working. While telling me he had been alone in the building during the late night and early morning, he admitted he had heard some strange noises. I asked if the noises seemed to come from the two back rooms: the pressroom and the combination darkroom and camera room. Looking at me a bit strangely, he nodded.

"Don't worry," I told him. "It's just the miners. They won't bother you, I don't think. At least they have never bothered me." I honestly said this as a joke, never dreaming he would take me so literally.

He kept pressing for an explanation, so I told the story.

Many years before the two buildings that comprised the Daily News offices were two, actually three, separate businesses. The building where I worked was the office of the Hoosier Gas Company and the building where my co-worker set ads was used for two businesses The front room was a restaurant dining room while the back room provided a meeting place for the mine rescue crew and housed their equipment. Well, in the early 1940s -- 1942, I think -- an explosion ripped through a local coal mine, The Panhandle, killing 12 or 14 coal miners in the worst disaster Bicknell has ever seen.

There were two funeral homes in town but they did not have enough space to handle all of these bodies, so while awaiting preparation and services, some of the bodies were kept in garages at the funeral homes while others were laid out in the mine rescue station and the back room of the gas office, or so I had been told.

Now, I had worked many, many late hours in the newspaper office alone and had never heard any strange noises, but my coworker insisted he had, so I told him it was the coal miners who had been killed in the explosion returning to the mine rescue station to thank the brave men who had brought their lifeless bodies back to the surface so their families could claim them and bury them properly. I told him he had nothing to fear, I didn't think, because he came from a family of coal miners and probably some of his relatives, perhaps his grandfather, had been one of the rescue team.

He asked if I was afraid and I said no because my Dad had worked with these men in this mine and he had helped find and bring up the men, so they would feel kindly toward me. Besides I had two uncles who had lost their lives in this mine, and I felt I was "protected."

My co-worker swallowed this story hook, line and sinker and I grinned at his gullibility. Later, a young girl came to work at The News. One evening she worked late after everyone else had gone home and the next day, she mentioned the strange noises she heard, so out came the coal miner story. Soon it seemed every time we had a new employee, someone brought up the tale about the coal miners, until everyone began to believe the building really was haunted. At some time or another, everyone who was alone in the building "heard" the noises, except me. The first person to whom I told the story stayed and worked there for two or three years, but he never was the last one to leave the building.