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What's the Masonic mystery in Deadwood?

By Milo Dailey, Butte County Post staff

Everyone has felt the touch of something that can't be explained that doesn't have anything to do with religion. It's more a feeling that comes from a place.

The Northern Hills has more than its share of places like that. The gulch where Deadwood has battled changing economics and Lead is moving from gold mine to underground physics lab is part of the tale, too.

Some of that special feeling can be explained from the high rock walls or the whispering creeks that can bring up phantoms of everyone's memory to overlay the here and now. Sometimes there doesn't seem to be an explanation.

Interesting evening

A paranormal investigator from Minnesota asked David Soma, the costumed Deadwood re-enactor of Bill Hickock and Seth Bullock, to hold two divining rods as she searched for answers about the past and paranormal vibrations of today.

Soma said, "She had me asking 'yes' or 'no' questions at Wild Bill's grave and the rods would answer. They moved themselves in my hands. I started getting answers from Hickock."

When asked what Bill would think of a person reenacting his character today, Soma got a response: "Hickock was pleased someone was playing him the way he wanted to be played."

That meant, Soma said, someone who liked people and was peaceful, but wary of those around him.

"After this lady was here," Soma said, "I decided to go up and spend the night on the grave."

Whether it was a dream, a ghost or simply energy from a parallel universe, Soma said of Hickock: "He has never left Deadwood for some reason. He had written to his wife, Agnes, that he had a premonition that this was his last stop. He felt that he was not going to get out of this town, and he hasn't."

"It was an interesting evening," he added.

Soma's wife, Kathleen Lane, said she has been told that Indian tribes of historic times didn't camp long in the Black Hills because they believed the power of the area is so strong that a departed spirit remains there forever.

Paranormal understanding

Mount Moriah Cemetery today is a legend as well as a tourist attraction. It's neither Deadwood's first cemetery, nor its only cemetery.

But it's part of a mystery that involves modern physics as much as the mile-deep Homestake gold mine. The mine is becoming the world's premier underground physics laboratory to help mankind learn more about space and time.

The cemetery's place in legend is more than the grave of Wild Bill Hickock.

Soma said that after the underground lab was announced, he came to believe there is something special along the gulch and that the lab may be perfectly placed on the earth's geography.

Soma and Lane believe it may well help find doorways for modern physics to explain strange happenings in and around Deadwood and the Northern Hills from Devils Tower to Belle Fourche, Deadwood to Bear Butte.

Soma and Lane believe the parallel universes predicted by modern physics' membrane universe theories may explain the strong connection to the past found in Deadwood and Mount Moriah.

"I believe and accept that to have a paranormal understanding," Soma said, "it is not only in your belief structure, but in your environment."

Masonic influence

Deadwood's Freemasons designed the cemetery. The street names are out of Masonic lore that was old before four Lodges in London went public in 1717. Since then, millions of men around the world learned of Jachin and Boaz in morality lessons veiled in poetic metaphor.

Those and other street names in the cemetery reflect that lore. Some claim that even the original placement of graves east and west reflect a belief among Masons of early Deadwood: On Judgment Day, the dead may arise facing the east, the place of light.

Another Masonic factor comes from a satellite view of the Northern Hills.

Devils Tower and Bear Butte to the east and west, Mount Moriah between the two on the south, form an outline of a Masonic lodge.

The Belle Fourche River between the two huge buttes traces the path taken to pass the confirmation of a Masonic secret as a Masonic meeting begins.

Soma came to Deadwood to direct gun-fighting displays that have been part of the community after residents realized another kind of gold came from entertaining tourists drawn by a living Wild West history.

Not all Freemasons may agree with their fraternity brother's perspective on Deadwood ghosts (Soma is a Mason himself), but he does have a spiritualist side.

Soma and Lane both are trying to make sense out of a strange combination of the most modern theories of physics, what seem to be spiritualist apparitions, and what it all means to them and the world beyond.

The Masonic lodge room's setup seems either part of the Deadwood puzzle or part of the solution, Soma said.

"It may be that this kind of activity takes place anywhere on the planet," he said. "But here it seems to be very powerful, and another of the vortexes is in Arizona at Tucson. Both places have an ancient history of volcanism."

Next: Parallel universes? Ever feel like the next card would be the one?