COAL MINE SUPERSTITIONS.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 23, Issue 6, 23 January 1912, Page 2

COAL MINE SUPERSTITIONS.

Superstitions have good breedingground in the thick darkness, silence, and solitude of the under-world,, and in the race-complexity of the workers of the coal mines are found reasons for the many varieties of spooks and ghosts. Mr, Joseph Husband, in the “Atlantic Monthly,’’ instances some characteristic superstitions in a mine in central Illinois : One night wiien Carlson, the general manager, was sitting in his office, there was a knock at the door, and two loaders, from the Hartz Mountains, came into the room, talking excitedly, with Little Dick, the interpreter. Their story was disconnected, but Carlson gathered the main facts. They had been working in the north-west corner of the mine, in an older part of the workings, and on their way out that afternoon, as they were passing an abandoned room, they had noticed several lights far up at the heading. Knowing that the room was no longer being worked, and curious as to who should be there, they had walked up quietly towards the lights. Here their story became confused. There were two men, they insisted —

and they were certain that they were dwarfs. They had noticed them , carefully, and described them as little men, with groat picks, who were digging or burying something in the clay floor at the foot of one of the props. A sudden terror had seized them, and they had not delayed to make further investigations ; but on the way out they had talked together and had decided that these two strange creatures had been burying some treasure —“a pot of gold,” one of them argued. Carlson was interested. The questions and answers grew more definite and more startling. The two men whom they ■ had seen were certainly hump-backed. They were wielding enormous picks, and one of the loaders believed that he had seen them put something into the hole. Then came their request that they might be allowed to go back that night into the mine, and with their own tools go to this abandoned room and dig for the buried treasure. It was against precedent to allow any but the night shift into the mine, but superstitions are demoralising, and the best remedy seemed to be to allow them to prove themselves mistaken. An hour later they were lowered on the hoist ; and all that night alone in the silence of the mine, they dug steadily in the heading of the abandoned room, but no treasure was discovered. All the next day they dug, and it was not until seven nights’Jiabour had turned over a foot qnd a .half of the hard clay of the entire heading that they abandoned their search. It is the custonj, of the men, when they leave the mine at the close of the shift, to hide their tools ; and the imaginations of the loaders, worked upon by their eight hours of solitary work, had doubtless seen in the forms of two of their companionEf who were hiding , their shovels the traditional gnomes of their own Hartz Mountains.

In another part of the mine another} superstition was given birth that led to a more unfortunate result. This time it happened among the Croatians, and, unfortunately, the story was told throughout the boardinghouses before the bosses learned of it, and one morning a great section of the mine was abandoned by the men. Up in the headings of one of the entries—so the story went—lived the ghost of a white mule. As the men worked with the coal before them, the black emptiness of the tunnel behind, this phantom mule would materialise silently from the wall of the entry, and, with the most diabolical expression upon its face, creep quietly down behind its intended victim, who—all unconscious of its presence—would be occupied in loading his car. If the man turned, and for'even the fraction of a second, his eyes rested upon the phantom, the shape would suddenly disappear ; but if he were less fortunate and that unconscious feeling of a presence behind him did not compell him to turn his eyes, the phantom mule would sink his material teeth deep into the miner’s shoulder and death would foljow. It was fortunate, indeed, that the only two men who had been visited by this unpleasant apparition had turned and observed him.

Perhaps it had been the sudden white glare cast from the headlights of a locomotive far down the entry, or perhaps it had been entirely the imagination, but, at all events, a man had come from his work early one afternoon inspired with this strange vision, and next day another man also had seen it. The story was noised around, and two days later the men stuck firmly to their determination that they would not enter that part of the mine. Fortunately for the superintendent, a crowd of Bulgarians had just arrived from east St. Louis seeking employment. The Oroati'ans were sent into another part of the mine to work, a mile from the haunted entries, where there were no unpleasant ghosts of white mules to disturb their labour ; and so long os the mine remained in operation there was no further record of the unpleasant ramblings of this fantastical animal ; at least, none of the Bulgarians ever saw it. With thosjnule came the ghost of a little white dog ; but for some curious reason,, although the dog was reported by many to have run out from abandoned rooms and barked at the men as they stumbled up the entry, but little attention was paid to, it, and it seemed to possess no particularly disturbing influence.