The Camel Riding Corpse
Aka “The Red Ghost” and “Fantasia Colorado.”
Incidents
Eagle Creek, Arizona Territory, 1883. Two women were left alone in an adobe house with their children. One of the women went out to fetch water. The remaining woman looked out the window when she heard the first screaming.
She said that what she saw was red, enormous, and ridden by a devil.
When the men of the house returned, they found the first woman dead. She was trampled almost flat, surrounded by large cloven hoof-prints. A few red hairs clung to the broken bushes.
The coroner from Solomonsville ultimately ruled it “death in some manner unknown.”
A few weeks before, some miners reported having their tents trampled by a similar creature.
There is another report that a few weeks after the woman was trampled two prospectors were awakened in the middle of the night when their tent was torn down. They reported the sounds of a loud scream and pounding hooves and an impossibly large horse disappearing into the night. Large hoofprints and red hairs were found once again.
Around this time it became known as the “Red Ghost.”
About a month after the woman was killed and eighty miles northwest of Eagle Creek, a rancher named Cyrus Hamblin spotted a huge reddish animal while searching for stray cattle.
He recognized the animal as a camel.
But upon the hump of it’s back was something unusual. Hamblin said it looked to him to be a man. And not a living one at that.
Some scoffed his claim of a camel ridden by a dead man, until a few weeks later and sixty miles away near the Verde River, the Red Ghost appeared to five prospectors. They tried to shoot it but it ran off. But as it did, something fell off it’s back.
It was a human skull with bits of hair and flesh still clinging to it.
A few weeks later a wagon freighter carrying whiskey and stopping for the night reported that a screaming beast 30 feet tall with black wings landed and knocked over wagons and teamsters before fleeing into the night.
A cowboy who encountered the beast at an abandoned corral tried to lasso it, but it charged knocking him and his horse to the ground. He said that the load upon the camels back had “once been a man.”
Almost ten years later the camel was shot dead by a rancher named Mizoo Hastings. The camel had no skeleton on it’s back, but it’s body was by a network of knotted rawhide strips that had cut their way into and scarred the animal’s flesh.
Camels in America?
Camels – like horses and elephants (mammoths) – were once indigineous to the Americas but have been extinct for millenia.
Shortly before the American Civil War the United States Army formed the experimental United States Camel Corps. This involved importing camels in an attempt to use them in the Southwest United States for communication and cargo.
Ultimately the project was considered a failure and the remaining camels were auctioned off in 1864.
Do Camels Kill?
Camels are potentially deadly. The CNN article linked below describes the trampling death of two people by a camel.
Why was the man tied to the camel?
One theory was that the man was a weary traveler who tied himself to his camel in the hopes that the animal would find water.
But when the rawhide strips on the dead camel were examined, they could not have been tied in that manner by the rider.
The Mohave County Miner newspaper said, “The only question is whether the man was tied on for revenge or merely as an ugly piece of humor by someone who had a camel and a corpse for which he had no use.”
Was the man still alive when lashed to the camel’s back?
Links
April 1961 American Heritage Article:
https://www.americanheritage.com/red-ghost
The Arizona Republic Article:
United States Camel Corps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Camel_Corps
Deadly Camel Attack Article:
https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/11/us/camel-attack-deaths/index.html
Camel Sounds: