G & C Summer 2017
Blogpost 019
July 20th, 2017
Ghost Stories
of Jerome: #3
“Lady Jane”
United Verde Smelter, Jerome AZ 1909
I’ve mentioned before that Jerome’s
popularity was in part due to its lax prostitution laws, which gave rise to a
sprawling red-light district. The next stop of our tour was in said district,
which hasn’t been active in decades, save for a repurposed building and an
abandoned tin-roofed shack. The brothels stood on either side of the same
street; the “skinny girls” were in the tin-roofed shacks as one’s worth in such
an industry was consequential to their weight. It might seem topsy-turvy now
with today’s beauty standards, but back in the day, sexy wasn’t starvation.
Women with meat on their bones were known as the, “French girls,” not because
any hailed from France but that such was a euphemism for “experienced,” who
would see a maximum of three-five clients a day for a dollar a visit. To put in
perspective the “skinny” girls were expected to see up to thirty clients a day
for a couple kopecks apiece.
Lady
Jane was a “French” girl and a rather successful one at that. Story goes that
later in her career she started losing weight from contracting a virulent disease,
possibly lupus. Back then treatment was expensive, painful, and often just as
fatal as the infliction itself. Jane didn’t see much hope for her future and
knew that when she died she’d probably be forgotten so she devised a plan to
leave this world in an act of impeccable infamy.
Her
plan was to throw the most over the top funeral anyone had ever seen in all of
Jerome’s short yet prominent history but in order to pull it off she’d need a
lot more money and in not much time. To achieve this Lady Jane handed in her
letter of resignation with the mistress of the “French girls,” bought a shack
for one, placed it in the middle of the street between the “big” and “skinny”
girls, and became an independent contractor for five dollars a session. Lady
Jane became quite successful in her short yet prominent time as Jerome’s most
expensive workingwoman and she managed to reach her monitory goal with just
enough time to make the arrangements before her passing.
Lady
Jane had purchased a slick ebony casket for her body, paid in advance for
embalmment services, paid off the preacher for a plot in the “executive”
cemetery, arranged for a jet-black hearse from the next town over (the one in
Jerome was alabaster and unsatisfactory to Jane) to carry her coffin through
the town, and hired six of the most handsome men in Jerome to be her
pallbearers for the procession. I’ve never heard such a story that better
personifies the American Dream.
There
was just one, tiny, issue in Jane’s plan. Upon her death the town’s coroner had
discovered that there was a “stem attached to the apple.” Lady Jane’s real name
was Tom, which was more than a little controversial at the time. Sadly, Jane
never got her big, expensive last hurrah but there is a silver lining; Lady
Jane did receive her wish to live on in infamy and has since become one
of Jerome’s most popular spirits whose deeds and exploits live on non-corporeal
eternity.
Ghost Stories
of Jerome: #4
“The
Boogeywoman of Jerome”
The next location our guide brought
us too was of an old collection of historic buildings that had been left
unscathed by modern renovation. It is separated from the public with the
addition of an iron gate. One section of this collection was of an empty lot
overgrown with grass, yet surrounded by walls on three sides minus a ceiling.
This was where the printing press of Ann Hopkins was stored and used by the
boogeywoman herself.
Ann Hopkins work apartment
Ann
Hopkins was wife to John Hopkins who’d given her a printing press for an
anniversary gift, as one does, and she used it to great effect. Ann was a
literate lady and began printing newspapers that highlighted all the depressing
facts of life the real commoners of Jerome were experiencing in their
day-to-day lives. Ann was a proud, vocal feminist and focused heavily on
subjects pertaining to inequality and the hard truths of the world they lived
in, which did not settle well for the people. Needless to say, her paper didn’t
sell very well. But Ann had a clever head on her shoulders and figured that if
the public despised her paper that much, they would pay good money for another
paper making fun of her ramblings. Ann continued to write, print, and sell her
down-to-earth papers in the morning but this time she also wrote, printed, and
sold opposition papers in the afternoon; papers that were dedicated to bashing
her morning papers which were written “anonymously” and flew off the racks like
vultures to road kill. The kicker is that once the good people of Jerome bought
one of Ann’s argumentative papers in the evening they’d have to buy her
truth-papers from the morning to make sense of it all. Ann Hopkins ended up
doubling her profits and readers and set the example for future mass media
outlets that revel in pinning both “sides” against one another.
Unfortunately,
this was the height of Mrs. Hopkins’ fortune. Not too long after her new found
success as a journalist did she find Mr. Hopkins leaving the Conner hotel in the
arms of a young, blonde schoolteacher. Understandably, Ann was set into a furor
of immense proportions. She later found the two again having a meal back at the
hotel when she calmly approached the schoolteacher and threw diluted carbolic
acid taken from her press and threw it in her cuckqueen’s face.
Ann
was sentenced to 14 years in Yuma, a female penitentiary that was Arizona’s
most dangerous women’s jail. Most inmates died only after six months. Against
all odds, Ann completed her sentence and returned back to Jerome but in doing
so discovered that she was no longer married, her only daughter was dead, and
her grandchild born while she was imprisoned had been sent off somewhere that
no one knew where. She continued to live along on the streets of Jerome
penniless and insane until her death one year after her release. Ann continues
to walk the streets of Jerome in the pitch-black hours of the night as a
vengeful banshee who scratches off the face of unfaithful lovers.
I’m
downright appalled by the lack of any films based on Ann Hopkins or for the
whole of Jerome for that matter.
Doorway to abandoned building
Ghost Stories
of Jerome: #4
“The Smelter”
The last part of our tour was taken
to ye old historic smelter of Jerome which was very much the heart of the town
in that it was where all the minerals of the mountain were purified and pressed
into ingots. It was also the primary tool used in the town’s mortician services
for Jerome’s poor, social rejects, and disenfranchised. Because the smelter’s
flames were always a-blowing bodies could be cremated for cheap and with Jerome’s
super high death toll most were subjected to this fate.
The
bodies were stuffed into the iron dome of hellfire and incinerated into a
mineral-ash mixture called “slag.” Slag is a malleable stony material, which at
first was just thrown off the side of the mountain, but as persistent fires
leveled streets and buildings the town needed new and inexpensive material to
replace the foundations. You can guess where this is going.
Every
deceased citizen of Jerome AZ who was not well off and buried proper would
become apart of the town, forever. Betty Gotly, Lady Jane, Ann Hopkins, the
victims of the Conner hotel, and the thousands upon thousands of ill-fortuned
miners were literally beneath our feet the entire time; making Jerome a town
literally built on death. I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised that there’s so
much paranormal activity in this quite mountain town but rather that it hasn’t
flat out become an open portal into the valley of the dead (Poltergeist
style).
An outhouse tourists throw coins in
(inside one of the abandoned buildings)
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