Ghost Story

So the other day my 2 brothers, one of our friends and me went out mine exploring.  We have really started to get into this mine exploration thing and have tried to go out at least once a month.  Well we went out a week or so ago and visited a mine (not sure of the name).  We really had to work to get to this mine entrance and then to get into the actual mine was a bit of an adventure in itself.  Anyways we got down in and explored some of the major levels.  We had been down there for about 4 hours and had heard various noises like water dropping, pipes banging together when we would lean on them and rocks tumbling when we would slip or lose our footing a little.  But when we would sit still for a break we wouldn't hear anything and when we would turn our lights out it was absolutely dark and quiet.  It was actually kind of eerie because of that.

Well we started to make our 2000' ascent up the main tunnel of this mine.  When you are going down it doesn't seem that bad but when you turn around and start to make your way up it is a bugger.  We are all about in the same physical shape so we could climb a few hundred feet at a time then take a break for 10 or so minutes.  Whenever we would stop we would look down the slope and see how far we had come and you could see a long way down the slope.  On one particular occasion we were about 500' from the top and decided to take one last good break then make our way to the top and out.  On our way up to our last break our friend asked it we could hear that noise.  We could all hear it but played it off as rocks falling down the slope since we were walking up and when a rock fell you could hear it for a minute as it traveled down the slope.  We finally made it to our resting spot and sat down.  We started visiting and planning our exit strategy.  Our friend once again said he could still hear that noise.  Again we told him we had just stopped and the rocks we still probably falling.  After about 10 minutes he told us to shut up and listen to the noise.  It was a distinct metal on metal a couple of times, then a scrape and dump.  We sat there for a minute and listened.  It didn't get farther away, it didn't slow down and it wasn't random.  Then we could hear faint voices.  When I say faint they might have been louder but I am partially deaf and could hear them.  I pulled out my camera and my iphone and started a voice recoding on my phone and a video on my camera.  We turned our lights out to try and see if we could see any lights down below and to sharpen our other senses.  We did this for about 7 minutes and the noise was going the whole time.  So, total time so far for this noise was about 25 minutes of it going nonstop.  We knew nobody else was in this mine because of the weather and the remote location of it and the difficulty getting to where we were.  It was definitely a couple of guys working the mine.  We talked for a minute where we were and decided that we needed to get a move on so that we weren't hiking in the dark.  The last thing we did before we moved out was to try something I've seen on Ghost Adventures.  I yelled, "Shift's over fellas.  Let's pack up and go home."  The noise instantly stopped.  How weird is that; the noise was constant for 25 minutes then stops after I say something.  It's either a strange coincident or it was some miners from days past that were still working their old mine.

It was really a neat experience and I truly believe that there were some miners down there with us and that they were just doing their job.  I don't think that they were bad ghosts or anything they were just down doing what they always did and that was mine.  Next time we go out we are going to take a voice recorder with us and try to hear something.  I'm not going to do a paranormal investigation but we are going to try to hear the miner again.