A night with the ghosts at Fort Caspar

CASPER — If you’re a ghost on the grounds of what formerly was Fort Caspar, you might very well be a young soldier who died during the Battle of Platte Bridge in 1865. You liked playing checkers and maybe smoking a cigar and thinking of a pretty girl back home, all the way on the other side of the Mississippi River.

You could also be a child who drowned in that same vicious river while trying to get to what is now Oregon or Utah or Montana.

You might, if you’re really aware, be in awe that people who now use that same river for recreation and that there’s a bridge that you can walk right across, no swimming required.

You might be a spirit who came attached to the various artifacts that ended up at the museum around the time it was first established.

Or you might be the woman who lived in the 1950s, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who crashed her car into the group’s pillar that guards the road leading up to the Ford Caspar Museum — a brutal way to die.

You might run across the field next to the pillar in your era-appropriate clothes for several years after.

That’s all to say that there are a lot of posthumous possibilities for you at Fort Caspar.

The Fort Caspar Museum Association partners with the museum to host ghost tours — really, investigations — for the public twice a year.

After all, there’s plenty of activity, and not only during the night. Soldiers who ate, worked and slept on fort grounds are probably the most accessible for the public to interact with.

Since they would have been sleeping through the night, they’re also usually the most active in the daytime.

But staff also give tours by the cemetery and the rest of the grounds, places where there are different kinds of activity.

“We want to give them [the public] the opportunity to come here and actually try what they see on TV,” said Con Trumbull, president of the museum association.

On a chilly April night, the sky is a dour shade of gray, the air crisp with humidity that is somewhat rare for Casper.

You probably don’t really internalize the weather if you’re a ghost, though. If you are a soldier, you’ve hit the jackpot: there’s going to be a lot of people crawling around the grounds for most of the evening, ready and willing to chat with you. They’re searching for you with temperature guns, electromagnetic field meters, REM pods, divining rods and laser grids. Some of them might try to goad you with obvious questions or off-color statements. You still have the upper hand, though; If they’re annoying you, you can just stop responding.

When asked, you confirm that there are spirits in the barracks, using the swinging copper arms of the divining rods.

You do know where the telegraph office is. One of you stands next to Johanna Wickman, vice president of the museum association, the other next to Trumbull. And you know, without the reporter’s name being spoken in your presence, who the Star-Tribune staffer was and where she stood.

“They’re dead, not dumb,” Trumbull said of the ghosts.

When later asked by a tour goer if you like the food in the mess hall, you swing the rods out in opposite directions. No, you don’t like it, not at all. They don’t even give you real onions on the table. They’re all for show for the guests. But what they do give you are checkerboards and pieces.

Using a spirit box, you can answer the tour guides questions about where you want the pieces moved.

Whole games have been played this way, Trumbull said: one person moving pieces for the ghosts, another person playing for themselves. You’ll know if they try to cheat, though. Trumbull tried that once when he swept all the pieces off the board in jest and walked away. When he heard screams coming from behind him, though, he whipped around.

“That’s okay,” you said through the spirit box, startling tour goers. “You cheated. We’ll play again, but we like you.”

During one of the first tours on that chilly April night, you’re still startling them.

Some of them search for you just with their hands, using perceived temperature changes to guess where you are. Others use the temp guns. The rods are always popular, but the laser grid, not so much.

They’re still convinced you’re there, though. Sometimes you don’t even need tools to make yourself known.

Sometimes, all they have to feel is a presence against their foreheads or a sense of impending doom telling them to get out or a rapid heartbeat or some mix of all three.

But you’re ultimately not dangerous, and Wickman will back you up on this. You’re just a 20-something soldier guy who likes to mess around.

“It’s almost like what you would imagine a bunch of 18, 20-something-year-old army guys to be like. They’ll mess with you and startle you and stuff like that,” Wickman said. “A lot of pranks.”

You were still, once, a real person who had dreams and fears, hopes and worries, feelings and ideas, thoughts and passions. You and/or your friends may have been bloodied and broken in battle, but none of you are zombies, as Wickman quipped.

Maybe the most appropriate way to put it is that your spirit lives on, sans your body, into the present day. Maybe, like the historians at Fort Caspar, you just want to preserve your lived experiences.