“Who you gonna call?”

The summer smash of 1984 hit theaters June 8 and pulled in a whopping $13,612,564 opening weekend. One website ranks it fourth in a list of The 30 Best Summer Blockbusters Ever. Of course I’m talking about Ghostbusters.  Here’s a bit I wrote about the Ghostbusters splash a decade after. I confess now to making some minor alterations and corrections in the transcription process. For some reason I don’t have an electronic file from when I wrote this in 1994, though if I could find it I couldn’t open the original Lotus Word Pro file anyway; thankfully I saved a hard copy. My, how times have changed.

 

Friday the 13^th on Urraca Mesa

When the “paranormal” craze swept the nation in 1984 with the release of the movie Ghostbusters, the staff at Philmont was not left out. Never mind that viewing the movie that summer required a trip to Colorado or some other distant destination. Those who were willing to make the journey returned babbling phrases like “Who you gonna call?” and “I ain’t afraid of no ghost!” Soon we were all caught up in the madness that surrounds a box office smash.

Note the highest ground to the left.

As any Philmont staffer knows – we all heard the stories during training – the ranch has a few paranormal focal points of its own. Perhaps the best know is Urraca Mesa (take a look on your Philmap and note how its contour forms a skull in profile). Needless to say, when we noted that July 13^th came on a Friday that year, we began plotting our own ghostbustin’ adventure.

Soon some of my buddies from the big trading post in Base Camp and I began planning our days off for a fright-filled night on top of the haunted mesa on Friday the 13^th. It was a night none of us would ever forget.

Although I was working the Cantina del Duke at Abreu, just on the other side of Urraca Mesa, I decided to meet Pete Steinhoff and Tom Bolland in Base Camp rather than hike over to Urraca alone from Adobe Central. We hitched a ride on a bus to the Stockade turn-around and hit the trail from there. Along the way we met up with “Doc,” the cook from Beaubien. We enjoyed the sunny day, watching wild turkeys and checking out new (to us) views of the Tooth of Time, for we knew the night would bring a chilling darkness and that some of us might never see the light of day again.

Tooth of Time to the left, Urraca Mesa to the right, under tree limb.

On the way up to the camp we talked about what we knew of the mesa. Its name means “magpie” – the Devil’s messenger bird. It was said to  be haunted by the ghosts of lost scouts, old ranchers, mountain men and Indians. The remains of one mountain man were reportedly found at the base of the rock face, supposedly by a staffer who was heeding the call of nature. That was about the extent of our knowledge on the subject, though.

We arrived in camp too late to take in program, but we talked with some other staffers who shared our idea and got psyched for the evening campfire. Later, as the Urraca staff began spinning some ever-so-believable yarns about the mesa’s haunted history, we began to doubt the wisdom of our adventure. While I remember precious little of the ghost stories we heard that night (just the story of the spirit of a lost scout often seen on the mesa and accounts of locals who fear that geological feature of Philmont), the details of our own experience on that special eve are carved into my memory more permanently than the wretched graffiti in any backcountry latrine.

We had lost track of Doc, so Tom and Pete and I departed for the mesa’s top after the campfire, never learning whether he went to the top or stayed below where it was safe. Smartly seeking security in a crowd, we joined a crew or two and some other staffers led by the same adventurous spirit on their way to the top. We tried our best to not talk about the tales we had just been told, and laughed heartily when someone joked about seeing shimmering images or will-o-the-wisps. In an attempt to fortify ourselves, we even made a few nervous jokes of our own.

It was late when we reached the top, and our puny flashlights were straining to provide enough illumination to lead us to a suitable spot for sleeping. We finally did locate a few soft, grassy patches amid a jumble of large rocks close enough to make us feel secure in each other’s presence. As we lay down to sleep, we were jolted upright by a loud (m)ooooooooo…

“W-w-what was that?” whispered Pete.

I couldn’t answer. I had scrunched down inside my mummy bag and pulled the hood tight. But Tom, ever the curious intellectual, was scanning the vicinity with his light. The beam settled on a large, dark blob and he laughed.

“It’s a cow! You chickens ought to recognize the call of your barnyard brethren,” he teased.

“Thanks a lot,” I called from deep within my sleeping bag.

The presence of the cattle nearby  was a bit unsettling in itself, but we figured the big rocks among our sleeping bags would keep our bodies from getting crunched under the hooves of some boneheaded bovine in the middle of our nightmare-laden slumber. Soon we nodded off and had a relatively uneventful sleep under the stars of the southwestern sky.

No ghosts were seen, no disembodied voices heard, and no mysterious messages appeared in the grass or in the sky. When the three of us woke, we were relieved to see familiar faces around us. We had survived a night (Friday the 13^th, no less) on Urraca Mesa. We jumped up out of our bags for a brief victory dance and rendition of the Ghostbusters theme song … and brief it was. We froze in mid-dance as we realized that our sleeping bags were uncomfortably outside the protective jumble of rocks amid which we had bedded down the night before. Pete’s bag was a good ten feet from its original location. My bag and Tom’s were at least that far removed.

“How did you get over there?” Tom asked Pete.

“You tell me, you’re the ghostbustin’ expert,” Pete shot back. Tom was, after all, the only one of us who had traveled to Colorado to see the movie.

“Why don’t we just get out of here,” I said, adding my two cents’ worth.

So we hastily packed up our gear and hit the trail without so much breakfast as a granola bar. There’s be time for food when we reached a safer location.

I miss Philmont to this day, and I’ll never forget that ghostbustin’ expedition of July 13, 1984. But at least today, in the comfort of my own home in the middle of Illinois, I know where I’ll wake up in the morning.