Yellowstone Ghost Stories, by Shellie Larios, paper back, 112 pages, Riverbend Publishing, $9.95.
"Have you seen the little lost boy who appears and disappears among the tourists watching Old Faithful geyser?
?Do you know the story of the headless bride who haunts the Old Faithful Inn?
?Have you heard ... the whispers of the drowned on Yellowstone Lake?
?Have you seen the restless ghost of Wahb, the great silver-tipped grizzly bear, slipping silently through Yellowstone?s forests?
?Is a frozen corpse still playing poker at Norris Ranger Station? And is a skeleton wrangler still saddling horses at Roosevelt Lodge??
These are squibs on the back cover of ?Yellowstone Ghost Stories.? The editor who wrote these promo blurbs should have written the rest of the book.
Shellie Herzog Larios has visited Yellowstone National Park practically every year since she was born, according to the bio at the end of the book. Her father taught her to love nature and told ghost stories around the campfire.
She graduated from Weber State University in Utah, served 10 years in the Air Force, is married and has two children. She reports a love of investigating ghost stories from old, historic places. One wonders what Larios does with that research. She put precious little of it in some of her tales.
One of my favorite tales is the story of Wahb, the ghost grizzly. Larios writes: ?Wahb was born in the mountains east of Yellowstone National Park. There he played with his brothers without care until one day ... his family was destroyed by gunfire ... .?
The orphaned Wahb roams the wilderness, collects ?wounds and wisdom from man and animal? and grows into a mighty giant. He finds himself in ursine utopia when he stumbles onto the park?s garbage dump.
Life is fine at the dump. Plenty of food to munch at night and hot springs to soak in between naps during the day.
Wahb grows old and decides it?s time to call it quits before being challenged by his young rival, a ?a little roach-back grizzly.? Ol? Wahb ambles off to ?Death Gulch? where toxic gases leaking from the ground kill all plant and animal life. After committing suicide (or perhaps committing euthanasia) Wahb is seen moving silently though the forest.
The truth is, Wahb was born not in the mountains of Eastern Montana but in the mind of an Englishman, Ernest Thompson Seton. Seton was the author of many kids? books, specializing in make believe in natural settings. His ?Biography of a Grizzly,? published in 1899 is a classic and still in print. Larios gives Seton credit but then goes on to retell the fictional story of Wahb. Go figure.
Was the book all that bad? No. Not all of it. One story, ?The Vanishing Hitchhiker,? is a well crafted and charming tale that fits the ghost story tradition of plot twists, turns and a surprise ending.
Larios notes that the vanishing hitchhiker is a tale that originated around the turn of the century somewhere east of the Mississippi. She says the story crops up again about once a decade in a new location. Her Yellowstone Park version is worth the price of the book.
http://www.billingsnews.com/story?story ... &issue=336
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