TOMBSTONE, Ariz. — In the Wild West town of Tombstone, history and legend sometimes blur together.
It is a place where visitors can walk in the footsteps of Wyatt Earp and see the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral — or at least a reenactment done three times a day.
On the outskirts of the old mining town, there is a lesser-known haunted relic of Tombstone’s not-too-distant past: A boarded-up building where restless spirits of outlaws and drifters are still believed to wander.
The town's former Circle K may be the most haunted convenience store -- or former convenience store -- in America.
Dwight and Rhonda Hull feel small vibrations when they stand atop the old c-store's cracked parking lot, now overgrown with weeds. The husband and wife are authors and psychic mediums with more than 50 years of combined experience investigating the paranormal — phenomena beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding.
“That’s the beautiful part of the paranormal because you go into a place like this, some place like a Circle K and in your mind, you think well how can that be haunted? It’s a business, it’s bustling with people. This particular Circle K is incredibly haunted,” Dwight said.
The store closed years ago when a larger one was built across the road on West Bruce Stree,t but Dwight said there is still plenty of paranormal activity at the original store.
The night manager used to be his neighbor.
“[She] was experiencing the doors on the freezers and refrigerators opening by themselves,” Dwight said. “She would hear voices at night when there has been nobody in there, she would hear [footsteps] when nobody was in there.”
Dwight was called in to investigate during the 90s. He tried to rule out the obvious.
“I tried opening the front door to the building to see if the pressure differential would open the doors in the back. Nope that didn’t work,” Dwight said. “I tried opening the back doors, the exit doors and everything else to see if I could create some kind of a suction, that didn’t work.”
He conducted several EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) sessions, a common tactic among paranormal investigators to record voices of the dead which are often too faint for mortal ears. Dwight said he heard several spirits when he played back the tape.
“Some of them said ‘I’m here,’ some of them said ‘Cold,’ some of them said ‘Leave here,’ and I got one that was super clear that said ‘Mine, my place,’” Dwight remembers. “It was that one that made the night manager immediately the next day ask if she could be put on day shift.”
So, why would spirits want to haunt a convenience store?
One theory is that the former gas station was built on top of an old cemetery — something straight out of “Poltergeist.”
The story around town is that construction workers found human remains when they were digging fuel tanks and had to call in archaeologists from the University of Arizona to handle the bones.
12News reached out to the U of A’s Repatriation Office, which oversees the disturbance of human remains on state and private land in Arizona. It's the agency construction crews are required by law to call when they discover possible archaeological remains — those that appear to be more than 50 years old.
The office had no record of human remains being discovered at the property. Remains were found in Tombstone in 1998, but nowhere near the Circle K.
The Hulls remain convinced the property is part of the old Boothill graveyard, another place in Tombstone where fact and fiction are interwoven and, as a tourist site, is probably Arizona's most commercially successful burial ground.
The Tombstone Chamber of Commerce describes it as a place where “cowboys who died with their boots on lie next to housewives, business men and women, miners, gamblers, ladies of the red-light district and all the famous and not so famous occupants that contributed to Tombstone’s early history.”
Dwight argues it would have been easy to build over the cemetery, since many of the headstones were not actually made of stone, but rather, wood, which rotted.
“This used to be a place where loved ones could come and visit them or visit their mortal remains once they were buried,” Dwight said. “Once that was taken away and the markers were gone and there was a pavement parking lot over it, they were forgotten and a lot of them didn’t want to be forgotten apparently.”
Maybe that’s why the device Rhonda and Dwight brought with them started to beep.
“Whenever an electromagnetic energy, even a human if they get too close to the antenna, it will go off without touching it,” Dwight said. “Since our spirits are energy, that is the theory behind it.”
The round box with a telescoping antenna on top is called a REM pod. The Hulls set the device in different areas around the property and stood several feet away.
“You just have to touch that antenna, the thing sticking up from the box,” Rhonda told any spirits who may be nearby.
The device immediately chirped.
“Do it again really quick,” Dwight said.
There was silence, so Dwight moved the REM pod closer to the store’s entrance. A few minutes later, it started beep again.
“Am I standing on your grave?” Rhonda asked. “Is this your space?”
The device kept beeping.
“I think we may have just disturbed a cranky one that just wants to be left alone,” Dwight said.
Whether or not a spirit was behind the beeps, the town of Tombstone will always be tied to ghosts and hauntings. It is a town too tough to die.
“All the death, the ruckus, the gambling, the high energy of the mining and the gambling and the prostitution and what they called having a body for breakfast every morning meaning someone got killed mostly every day here; it was a very violent town,” Dwight said. “It was a very active town so that builds up that energy and it just doesn’t go away – it still stays and permeates even the buildings that are still out here today.”
Oh, by the way, the old Circle K is still for sale. The spirits may convey with the building.
