The blaze wasn’t a serious one. It was discovered while small and attacked for some time at close quarters, yet the insignificant flame developed into a deadly disaster.
That was 1911.
For sometime since, the old Belmont mine has been left to rot, abandonment and what ever nervy tourist or rock hound wishes to explore its depths. But the locals around Tonopah know the ineffable horrors dwelling in those depths of the isolated silver mine.
Miners complained about the many bad omens surrounding the dig. Along with the ever-present disembodied voices, attributed to Tommy Knockers, there were the numerous carrion crows living in the subterranean vaults as well as the neighing of startled horses along the numerous passageways at unseen entities.
But the miners’ pleas went unheard, resulting in the catastrophic fire that led directly to 17 deaths. Their bodies, including that of ‘Big John’ Murphy lay in the hard ground of the Old Tonopah Cemetery.
Whispers exchanged over mugs of beer and shots of whiskey at the Mizpah tell of possible survivors — trapped miners entombed in the tunnels honeycombing the earth’s pyretic bowels beneath the town. And how occasionally, the ground opens up swallowing things: dilapidated sheds, corners of houses, vehicles and sometimes people.
Jimmy Brannigan set out to explore the place that day, wanting to put to rest the rumors of misfortune and fright. He and Eddie Mann, his best friend slowly drove the length of Dynamite Road, then towards the peak of Ararat Mountain along Mountain Loop Road.
Soon they were hiking across the the old rucks, the man-made landscape, abandoned, nature working to reclaim what it once possessed. The gravelly tailings wheezed at the two, after decades of exposure to temperamental Nevada winds.
Walking up the hill, they avoided the mud puddles, formed by a midnight thundershower. Clouds of mist still hovered above the hole threateningly, whispering, ‘turn back,’ to return to the familiar comforts of the town below: Cisco’s, the Burger King, even the Clown Motel and the haunted historical, but still dismal cemetery next to it.
Beyond, lay the trail, marked by a rusty chain-linked fence. They approached, mindful of the eroded metal fencing poking up out of the gelatinous earth; sharp and menacing.
Twenty paces further and they were upon it: the Desert Queen shaft! And it was more blasphemous than imagined.
Their imagination was settled tales of people falling in; curious children mysteriously disappearing; pets that strayed to far only to vanish. All were declared victims of whatever roamed the unfathomable passageways at the bottom of that accursed pit.
Then — movement from below. The movement came in the form of a sound: a shuffling, labored progression; the sound of frail, ashen hands clutching blindly at unseen hand-holds in the rocky sides of the crumbling shaft.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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