All right, welcome to Blood and Dust podcast. I'm joined by my esteemed co host Matt Also, we have Haunted Bisbee here with us today, kind of a little impromptu interview, and I saw you guys on Instagram and kind of wanted to touch base and see what that was all about. Because we love anything wild West in history, and for the most part, we love ghosts and stuff like tattoo. So would you guys like to introduce yourselves?
Absolutely. My name is Joey Bravo and my wife Xandra Bravo and Xandra Opera and owns the Haunted Bisbee. That's two ors things that we're doing in Bisbee, Arizona. So how do you guys get into that? Well, we moved to Bisbee in the midst of the pandemic as well as you know, half the world moving their location, and it happened on a whim. We were actually escaping to Arizona in August to get to flee the heat in La might be the only people in the world who's ever done that. But I
was gonna say, I've never heard anybody say that. I used to live in Arizona, and it's like, I don't know if that makes the primary difference being that my mom has a house there with air conditioning and a tiny studio without. So we drove to Bisbee to entertain ourselves one day, and by the time we got through the approximately two and a half miles of the main street, Joey had zillo to an apartment and a week later we signed
a lease. So we scrambled around to get jobs here. I worked at a wine bar and Joey worked at a tour and displeased in our various experiences at both, we fell in love with the town and found out that some of the history was not as accurate as could be, and so we decided that we would create our own tour. But then we found out that somebody else had already done the historical research and created a tour of their own who
was no longer operating it, so we sought her out. Her name is Francine Powers, and she's a respected journalist, historian, and local here in Bisbee who wrote the book Haunted Bisbee, and she was happy to sell us the intellectual property and the tour structure, as well as continued to stay on as our consultant. So we picked that up and we have multiple plans for expanding tours and operating practices for Atlas tours, but I think you're mostly here
for Haunted Bisbee. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Absolutely. The thing is this town has such crazy stories and the people who put this together because Bisbee didn't want to be founded. It burned down four times in the first like twenty years of its existence, and the whole thing has been built on a hope and a prayer. It has two thousand miles of underground tunnel and nobody quite knows where it is. So sometimes the streets are
safe for trucks, sometimes it's ippy. It's just so all these people who had no idea what they were doing over one hundred years, building a town without permits. It's got a lot of stories and a lot of history, and it's connected right to Tombstone. You know, all the criminals went from Tombstone to Bisbee and vice versa. So I just thought, yeah, let's just tell the truth. And the truth is strange in fiction, as they
say, until nineteen thirty five, Tombstone was actually the county seat. So previous to nineteen thirty five, all of our criminals went to tombstone for justice. Since we mean hanging, how about just a haunted pub? Yeah, what are some haunted pubs around the area. Well, I guess the Grand Hotel would be considered one of the haunted pubs we have here. So the Grand is actually the second version of the Grand. The original fire that took out the Grand was in the nineteen o nine, nineteen or six, I
get a little dyslexic. What happened was the Grand closet caught fire and the neighbors across the street noticed it. Now, because Bisbee is five thousand, five hundred feet up, the water pressure is terrible, so the firefighters could never put anything out. Oftentimes the miners had to resort to just blowing up buildings in the way of the fire to create a firewall, and using dynamite. So when the Grand was torched, it actually took down all of Main
Street and many of the houses. Back in the time of nineteen o nine, I think it was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of damage to the whole town. And this was the time this had happened. So the Grand went up and we built it and around it was finished for like around the nineteen eight, so almost like one hundred years later it was finally finished. There's a bar in there that came from Mexico and it's hand carved basted,
about one hundred and fifty to two hundred years old. We haven't done a sample of it and tested it, but along with that bar has been seeing a lot of people see shadow people in the bar, the women's restroom. There's constant like banging sounds and the lights turn off and there's no lights
switch in there. You have to hit the breaker. And many of the construction workers who were working on it throughout the eighties and a little in the nineties kept phoning the manager and saying that this woman in white was wandering around upstairs where they were working, and they were worried that she was going to hurt herself on the tools or fall down up opening like shaft or something.
And there was nobody up there, and this was a recurring thing. One of the personal stories somebody told me was that as he was working there, they would always see this kind of shadow or cowboy figure wanders to the fireplace. And when the fireplace was demolished over a decade ago, there was a room just just hidden the room behind the fireplace. I thought that was interesting.
So the Grand Fire was reported on the Bisbee Daily Review on October fifteenth, nineteen oh eight, so it would have been the day between nineteen o eight and the headline says Bisbee has three quarters million fire loss worst disaster in the history of Bisbee was recorded last evening. Yeah. The only reason the fire didn't eat all the homes that were put up at the time, which were basically one room shacks, was we had a wolves Worth and the back
building. The back of the building was brick and it incidentally created a firewall that. Yeah, and actually nobody died in that fire, despite the entire town billing up. Only one person did. And we had people jumping out of buildings, being caught in blankets and stuff. After the fire it subsided. Somebody was walking down Main Street and was looking up at all the damage, just being curious, and part of the building fell and crushed them.
So here's here's a quote from the from the newspaper from the Bisbee Review says from the Grand Hotel, the flames spread to the Norton building and to the Johnson Block. There they were checked by the Elks building for many minutes, the members of which made valiant efforts to save it from destruction, as it had been only recently completed and expensively furnished. They pleaded in vain for water. It was not to be had. Dynamite was used and the Bisbee Hardware
Company blown down. This gave hope for a time, but nothing could resist for long the fierce heat which it was subjected, and it soon was roaring with the rents rest. The records of the lodge were lost, many of the furnishings were saved. Nothing beats an old timey newspaper. They had a way of writing, that's for sure. They had something to prove, you know, for a few people I could read more eloquently. So what are some of your guys's favorite spots? Oh? Gosh, um my favorite.
That's a really good question, I think, because I gotta do the two where in my head like real quick, I think I really love the park that we used to be the old cemetery. It's kind of was turned into an amphitheater, so it has these really cool acoustics so when you're up there, it's a lot quieter than the rest of the town. That it's pretty quiet. Let me think, I really love the library. It was voted for the I never thought i'd say that sentence, but I think the best
library in like America in twenty twenty. I think some of were like that. I know, Arizona and maybe New York to got his beat. I actually just kind of like the stories, you know, I kind of like the stories. The places themselves I really enjoy. But the whole town is just gorgeous from end to end. My tour, because Joey is the tour guide for the for the Haunted Bisbee tour, I do an art tour that does art and architecture. My favorite spot is actually with one of the very
kind and generous store owners lets us go into his store. It's a sub basement level and on the sidewalk are glass structures that you walk over that most people think are just some sort of pretty mosaic because their colored glass it looks like a big cripple like mosaic. And it's actually a skylight into the basement level, so we could actually go down and take a look and you can
see the shadows of the people walking across the sidewalk. And it was because although electricity was being used at that time, which is how come Bisby was such a boomtown because of the copper. Not all of the buildings were outfitted with electricity, so these skylights are sprinkled throughout the town and nobody knows about them. Yeah, and there's like twelve feet of this space underneath a lot of the sidewalk. Pretty cool. If you're in the basement they're looking up.
Do you see like the colors of the glass or yeah, the whole room is tinted like this lavender color from the glass. That's really cool. It's really neat. I have to send you a photo or because that's super cool. Yeah, definitely, I'd love to see that. So in eighteen seventy seven, a bunch of horses went missing from Fort Bowie and Jack Dunn, who was considered the best scout they had, and a team of people decided to come out and look for the horses. They had assumed the Apache
had taken them, because that was the mindset at the time. So as they were wandering through the area Bisbee and they kept trying to set up camp, but all of the springs were terribly like sour. They weren't good drinking water. As they were wandering through the area, they found a really fresh spring and this was called Apache Spring. And as they were staying up camp, they noticed some of the rocks had some green tint to them and they thought, well, this could be copper. This could be a lot of
money for us. But because Jack and his men were military, they couldn't spend all day just digging holes in the ground. So they found an old drunk guy named George Warren that they were friendly with, and they said, George, if we'd buy you a bunch of shovels and equipment and whatnot, will you dig for us and if you find anything, put our name on it and we can all be rich. And George said, yeah, yeah, I can do that, And within fifty days he started finding stuff he
did not put their name on it. So George ended up making tons of money with his claims and found a whole bunch of stuff, and miners started showing up and Bisbee started booming. From then, we had so much copper and so much the city that in our courthouse has a solid copper roof, and there's a high school that has eight hundred pound copper doors. The town was doing fantastically in nineteen seventy three. They stopped around seventy three. The
locals keep debating me on this, but I think I'm right. Nineteen seventy three they stopped mining and the whole town went into bankruptcy and just kind of became a ghost town. Most people could I've talked to said they bought a
house for about a thousand dollars here. So all the hippies moved in because they could afford to live here, and they were kind of being ostracized after all the events of the sixties, and so the town was refurbished, rebuilt and helped together by hippies for the last sixty seventy years and now it's this kind of bohemian, artsy liberal thing in the middle of Tombstone and the military town Sierra Vista. George himself, who founded that the town had all the
money, well, he lost everything in life. He was shot three times in town and three different arguments, and he ended up losing all the money because he got really drunk in a town called Charlton, which is between here and Tombstone, and he bet all of his money in the mind that he could outbase a horse on foot, so his ideas that he was going to run next to the horse and turn around and run back, and he thought the horse would beat him on the straight away, but he'd be so quick
at pivoting that he would win the race. And he lost all of his money on that. He died wandering the town just sweeping floors and cleaning spittoons for pennies. And it wasn't until about thirty years after his death at the Elks Club actually found his grave and it just said gw that was all that
was left. Everything was worn off, and they did some scientific tests and no idea what that was to verify that it was George, and they removed his body and moved into a different cemetery and gave him a huge monument. And in addition to his accomplishments and death, he's on the State Seal of Arizona. They were looking for an old like scraggy prospector for the state Seal. They saw him and said, yeah, that guy, and it just
happened to be the guy who did all this stuff for Bisbee. And that's kind of like where the town came from and how it came to be, which is a completely perfect person to have on the state seal because Bisbee was the most productive mind in the state for a very long time. Was he for being fleet of foot that he would make that that's a really good question. I never heard anybody describe him as quick, you know. He was
always just like one of the characters in town. In addition, Bisbee was named after Judge DeWitt Bisbee, and he never visited the town, which I think is pretty gangster that you have this whole hundreds named after you and you don't even show up. He was the attorney for the camp before it was Bisbee, it was called Mule Gulch Mining Camp, and so he was the attorney for However, they bureacratically set that up and then they incorporated it in
eighteen eighty and named it after him. I was had like other information, and I'm always like, oh, wow, okay, because I'm trying. I try to keep the two earths concise and then but there's so much information, so it's always fun to hear and Zandraw has something new. What are some of the more scary places that people just let's say they randomly or even you for that matter, that you've gone into and it's just like, I
really don't like going in there. Xandra is not sensitive to any spirits whatsoever. I, on the other hand, have a bit of a spider sense. I don't like the going into the bank that is now the antique store. It has the bolts still underground and that's where they put a lot of the knickknacks. And after about thirty minutes in there, I actually had to leave. I could not stay in there any much longer. I don't really have any stories from there, but it's one of those places that definitely not
a huge fan of. It's funny because I was shopping in there, and I like to linger in shop and brows and stuff, and and the whole time I'm trying to calm myself because I don't like this. He generally doesn't. He's not much of a lingery shopper. So I thought he was just being anty because he wanted me to get out of there. And finally he just like tacked me on the shoulder and he's like, aren't you getting anything? And I'm like huh, and he's like, I go. I definitely
think the Copper Queen Hotel. Now there's all these legends in town that there's like sixteen ghosts and they all have names and stuff in the Copper Queen Hotel. It's one hundred and twenty year old hotel as of this year. But on all my research, I couldn't find a lot of references to the names and these big explosive Hollywood debts like would have been in the paper. I mean, I have recordings of like a donkey that died in front of the
hotel, but none of this crazy stuff. But on the fourth floor, which is said to be haunted by a spirit named Billy, who the hotel says as a little boy, but the people who work there think it's actually bigger than that, and so do I. The entire fourts floor feels thick and kind of like you like swimming through it a little bit, and all a lot of the guests say that their head feels bad or their stomach doesn't feel good, or they feel tilted. And it's only on that floor.
And when you just walk down to the third floor like little staircase, you're fine, You're absolutely fine, and you go back up you're like, oh, I don't like this. And Xander was there for the first time last night, and you didn't quite enjoy it either, did you. I felt I didn't know how to define it, but it kind of felt thick to
me. Yeah, And then the other the other ghosts I take very seriously is that there's a cheese shop on Main Street that used to be the old mortuary and now that they served blue cheese, and there was a whole family that lived there from the sixties to now, and a lot of people we've we've done spirit box sessions because some people bring equipment. I try to be historically accurate because I don't like to be like woh. But we've had voices
come through. UM. One girl on my tour, her name was Trinity and her it was her birthday, and someone gave her a spirit box to play with, and this voice was saying that we wanted to play hot Scotch and that it was waiting for someone to play with. And in that area, people have had rocks tossed at their ankles and feet that have followed them through the tour. I've been on tours where we're in a hotel and you'll hear it, oh man, another rock. People have heard voices from that
cheese shop. Some people in town have actually recognized the ghost photos that people will have taken and been like, oh, yeah, that was my neighbor he worked there, you know, and stuff like that. So it's got a real eariness to it. Yeah, I've never seen something where people would recognize the faces in the glass. That was interesting to me. I didn't know that was something that had done because ghosts are always advertised from being like
two hundred years ago and as they are on this tour. But the last guy died in two thousand and one or three, and his neighbors are like, oh, yeah, that's him in the glass. So I think one of the neat things about the Haunted Bisbee Tour is that, for the most part the spirits phantasms goes what have you, are pretty benign. Some of them get irritable or cranky. Some of them have been known to follow people, but none of them have been super aggressive, except for one that we
know about in town, and that's enough private residence will be. So our tour right now is a ninety minute walk, but that's actually just a quarter of the length of stories we have, so we're actually saving up to buy a cart, so in the fall and winter we'll be doing the full four miles for everybody. There's actually a house in town that had an exercistem performed on it by the Catholic Church in Tucson. They tried using a local Catholic
church and the priest just said it wasn't going to happen. This house actually belonged to France and who founded this to our company. So she's a journalist, but she was really interested by the spirit world because that's a little girl. They had this you know, bishop show over to show up at her house to exercise the house, and she stayed friends with him and until his death. He maintained that he was thrown down the stairs by an entity and
she remembers seeing him thrown down the stairs. And so that's probably the darker spot in Bisbee in terms of just because that house is still abandoned since the seventies and it's had multiple owners and none of them keep it. One owner even gutted the entire thing out to start remodeling it and then just left it. So it's just this hollow shell that nobody wants to be in. And
so yeah, like that's the most negative spirit that we really have. Yeah, So there's uh, that's about in terms of the negative ones, but most of the ghosts, as my friend describes it, he's he's like he said, his theory, you know, and it's with all theory. His theory was that maybe they don't know that they're dead and they're trying to get our attention because we're just ignoring them and it's ticking them off. Yeah,
why don't you pay attention to it? Kind of thing. We've also had um psychics inform us that the ghosts are unhappy when the stories told about them are rot It's kind of funny. So like, I'm trying to do both because I love history and I want it to be accurate. And I never if I can't prove that you're that you've died in town, you don't get
on the tour. Yeah, that's that's basically how it goes. But I also wanted, um, I know that people have different levels of appreciation for ghosts, and some people take it very seriously and make it their jobs. So and as an now I am so Yeah, I brought a lot of psychics, which is and mediums onto the tour is just to say, hey,
like, what do you think about this? So what is your perspective on this, and they've all had a lot of interesting things to say about it, and that you were saying, what did you just say that? I'm sorry, I got lost on my own words about the psychics, and which is that they report that they are not happy when the stories are wrong. Yeah. Yeah, And that's kind of interesting because I'd even you know,
this is all just here saying whatever. But I was even doing incorrect information when I worked for another tour and the voices that would come through the spirit pox were like garbage and terrible beyond. Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny because the guests would be like, oh, I don't know if that's true, you know, the box is saying, and I'm like, oh my god. And now that I've started, like now that I've started telling real stories, like, it's all kind of just that stopped. And I
find that kind of funny too. Now. I mean, I could just be imagined it all, but it's kind of funny to think that old George Born it's heckling me from me on the gree toughest critics aren't even alive. Man. Okay, so I was wrong, Okay. The mind did shut down on June thirteenth, nineteen seventy five. All right, all right, so two years before Star Wars, the mind shut down. That's how I do, younger people, and that put an end to ninety five years of
copper mining. Damn. I think I read that there's like a thousand steps in Bisbee, Okay, So I don't know that anyone's has actually counted them, except for maybe all the poor bastards who decide to go on it.
There's it's a fundraiser called the Bisbee one thousand. So in the nineteen thirties for the New Deal, the Worst Progress Administration came into Bisbee and built all of these sidewalks and stairs because we're situated on the side of a canyon and people would just put houses up where they found claims where they started mining before it conglomerated by Phelps Dodge and other large mining companies, and so there's all
these houses and buildings on the side of the canyons that basically over time people made trails to get to. And so the WPA came in installed all these sidewalks and stairs, and the Works Progress Administration was the WPA, and this was done in the nineteen thirties. Because we were under such economic depression, not that we could imagine that today. That the government decided that if the Americans built their own infrastructure in their own cities and were paid, then everyone
would win and maybe we'd have some money. So in the thirties, yeah, all these concrete stairs are put up also about the town, but they weren't done quite right because all the houses were put at randomly. So you have staircases going to people's backyards front yards, a couple of staircases to nowhere. It's a bit like the town version of the Winchester House. Yeah, but they're still in place and in resly good condition. The Bisbee one thousand is akin to a five K, so people sign up every year. I
think it's already sold out for this year. It takes place in October, so there are endless amounts of stairs. There's a handful that are publicly accessed by the Bisbee one thousand, which is operated by Bisbee Vogue, and people go up and down these stairs like a five K. They pay to do
it, and that helps raise funds to keep them in working order. Some of them are not in working order anymore, and some of them go through private residences, so they're not used, and the fire deployment takes it really seriously. They put on all their gear and they do these thousand steps twice. Are there any stories that happen to occur on the steps or any of the steps? I mean, I have no doubt that every year we get a couple of people dropping. We are at a mile high and if people
haven't practiced here than they might not be accustomed to it. It's also it does play place in October, which is past the monsoon season, and it's very aired out here. But I don't I don't know if any specific funny, but it is not, you know, that's interesting. There are not.
There aren't a lot of like stair stories. I imagine if you fall or something happen where you die on a staircase, it's just kind of like part for the course, you know, they kind of expect it versus like a living room, you know, so I don't think it gets bitten up too much stuff like that. The only um interesting stair story that I can think of is the old cemetery is elevated by a pretty large staircase above the rest of the city. And whatever I do whenever someone who brings a spirit
box or something. It's always talks about the stairs. The voices always say stairs, stairs, stairs, and um over multiple days. Some of the people who are more sensitive, like the side kicks and stuff, many of them separately have talked about a little boy in that cemetery who only wants people to walk up one of the staircases and not the other ones because he believes that they missed his moving his mother's body and she's still in the ground and
he doesn't want people to step over her. But that's the only kind of story I have about the stairs specifically. I think, do you have any favorite stories from the from the wild West area? Yes, that you really love telling people, but yeah, yeah, because I do want to keep it wild West. This actually involves Tombstone. I'm going to do my best to talk about the Bisbee massacre. So we're the only tour that talks about
this. This was a robbery that went awrye So on December eighth, eighteen eighty three, and around seven pm, there was a whole gang and they went by the name the Cowboys, and they're featured in the movie Tombstone. Well, they set out to rob the Goldwater General Store, which is now the Panta Art Gallery and still standing as it was when this took place.
It's the oldest building on Main Street. They were estimated that it was seven thousand dollars six thousand dollars worth of money in the safe being put in there that day. Because the miners were very like right wing in a sense, so they didn't want to put their money into the bank. They wanted their money to go into the general store in a safe for the guy that like they knew. So when the cowboys entered the building, they held the place
up. They opened the safe and they only found about three hundred dollars, and the owner of the store said something like, you fools, the money's not here yet. So they stood outside in the main street and it was kind of at a blind corner, so they thought they'd catch the cart with the money when it arrived. It took way too long, so people in town started noticing that these guys were robbing the general store. It was all
saloons across the street, and two guys were heavily drinking. They saw that the place was being robbed, so they stepped out to take a look. One of the robbers said, hey, come back in here. They said no, and one of his friends ran back into the bar. The other guy panic just started running drunk down the street. The guy actually drew the cowboy drew his pistol and shot him in the head and killed him instantly in the road. This alerted the neighbor to the right of the general store.
His name was Howard. He stepped out and was gunned down immediately. The paper said he didn't do anything and say anything, just instantly killed. A woman by the name of Annie Roberts heard the shots and she was either at what now is Cafe Roca or the Object Hotel, and she looked out to see the gunfire going on. She turned to run back into the building and a bullet went through the door jam and struck her in the spine and killed
her. At this point, a guy named James Cribbaumb actually saw all this going on, and he was way off in the distance, so he fired six shots from his revolver, just trying to stop it or do anything. One bullet struck a cowboy, but only went through his coat. At this point, a Deputy share of D. Tom Smith was visiting from New Mexico, and he decided he had to confront this single handedly, like he was
batman or something. So he stood in the middle of the street and identified himself as a law enforcement, to which the taller outlaw who was guarding the door said law enforcement, Well, you're just a man I'm looking for and shot him in the shoulder. Smith got back up and said I am hit, and then the cowboy said then you shall have another, and then killed
them in the street right there. Realizing that they're now going to have to start fighting the whole town because they had killed a cop and some other people, they decided to just get out of there, so they got on their horses and they rode away, and as they did, they actually went past the cart that had the thirty thousand in it six thousand and I'm sorry to six thousand in it. Sorry sometimes numbers. Yeah, they went past the
cart and they missed the money. So this is all for nothing. James, who fired the shawns and hit the guy in the coat, he actually got on his horse and made it to Tombstone in two hours, trying to get help. The rich people in town formed a mob because this was their town then they were their rich people so he formed their own like justice mob, and they had a guy named Heath who worked next door to the massacre helped them figure it out. I guess he'd had like a dance hall.
Turned out Heath had planned the robbery, so whenever he was giving directions as to where the robbers might have been, he gave him the opposite direction. So for about three or four months these people were wandering around until they finally figured it out. And in short everyone was tried, hung and buried in Boothill Cemetery and they're still there to this day, except for Heath. He got life because he didn't really kill anybody. He just planned this whole thing.
And the people of Businey they wanted them dead because he, you know, a police officer, kid was killed. Any Roberts was killed. So they went down to his jail still early in the morning, started banging on the door. The jailer thought it was breakfast, so he opened the door and let him in, and they grabbed Heath and dragged them out and gave him a blue handkerchief and he tied it around his own eyes and he said,
whatever you do to me, please don't film me. Full of lead so they hung him on a telegraph line and that was the Bisbee Massacre of eighteen eighty three, and that led into eighteen eighty four. And I think that's a really cool Old West story and kind of also shows how Tombstone dealt the justice for the crimes that we're done in Bisbee. And the telegraph line
is still in front of the Old Tombstone courthouse in Old Tombstone. Really Yeah, there's plenty of images of the hanging, but I think there's one also at the courthouse. Oh wow, Yeah, Okay, so that's their too. Yeah, So it's all kinds of the people are Stone Tombstone, the polestone Tombstone. It's still in. The building is still standing. It's probably the best and most direct kind of way to really put yourself back in most in the day, like where they were in the actual places and stuff.
That's a really good story, thank you. It's it's a really complicated story too. There's a lot of I do have one more story that's kind of Old westy and kind of involves how we got our first library that actually involved in They're hanging. So the short version of this was a guy in the paper described as a Mexican and he was gamboling one of the bars and he lost horribly, so he came back in with his rifle and just shot up the whole place. I mean, it was a pretty descriptive newspaper article.
They caught him and hung him on the corner of Main Street just for a day to show people, Hey, don't like kill people in town, or we'll kill you. And this was the day that the superintendence from the mine had arrived from New York City, so they taken the train all the way to Bisbee. They got off and the first thing they saw was this man hanging from a tree. And they were so appalled because this was their company town that they said, okay, how can we stop this? So I'd
like to do this quote just because it's worded so well. This comes from the cover Queen Libraries actual information on this. It says they decided immediately that the town needed more civilized diversions. Um, they bought about a thousand books and they shoved it into the company's store and created the first library. And they thought, if people read more and we're more cultured, they stopped murdering each other and busy. So I like that store. I like, I
like that too. Got to be more cultured. It'll be fine. Yeah, I just read some Catcher and the Rye. You'll stop telling people to be fine. Picture some dandy's getting off the train from New York and seeing oh my god. Oh man. So tell us a little bit about your tour and maybe what we would see if we took a day on it. So, um, what our tours are? They are right now. The Haunted Busy Tour is a ninety minute walking tour where stairs are optional, which
is great. That's an important note because, like we said, there's lots of stairs in the in the town. But it's also there are no straight there's no flat level walking in this town. Everything's crooked and uphill. Yeah. So to get off Main Street is usually several stories worth of elevation.
It is one of the more difficult parts because a lot of the people visiting our retirees or their family people, and if you have a bunch of kids running up and down the stairs, it's kind of hard to corral them. And if you're a retiree age I mean your knees, you just can't do the stairs all day if you're not used to it. So the tour has optional stairs on it depending on how people are feeling, and I like to
do kind of a three part story without being obvious about it. We travel up one side of Main Street and I talk about the whole history of the town, the founding, how George Warren lost all his money to the horse, and things like that, and then we do a quick turnaround. We walk down the other street side of main Street, and I tell the stories of all the cowboy stuff, such as the shootings, the hangings, and we pause and I describe and show all the landmarks for the Bisbee massacre and
kind of explain in three D space how it happened. And then I want to get into the weird. So from there we go into the old red light district, which she's being an official red light district in nineteen fifteen, and this is where all the segregation was, so anyone who's Hispanic, Native American, Asian at black, they were all segregated to the section where all the bars are. And from that came a lot of stories. So I
talk about like the Screaming Danshee that was in the paper. People considered this town from the newspaper articles, I have they consider it haunted as far back as nineteen ten, So I talked about about Screaming Danshee, the old cemetery, the time they found a human head, there, a few other crazy things. And then we end it. We do a little loop. We go to an underground part of Bisbee. I think I'm the only two way
to do that, and then we go to the Copper Queen Hotel. We do a quick sweep of the fourth floor so people can kind of feel it for themselves, because most people feel so uneasy on that fourth floor that I think it's a nice way to kind of mind them about like the supernatural ideas of that on the tour. And that's kind of how the tours put together.
Xandra has a separate tour right now called the Bisbee Sampler, which is a two hour kind of hangout that goes to all the different art galleries in town and you get to hang out well you know, you're very friendly. Er tells the history of all the murals because the hippies have painted all over the town. The walls have just ran it. So she talks to the
people about that and kind of walking through town. We do public art, architecture, there's a lot of very unique architectural architectural features of the town. Because of the fires and because it was a boomtown. The call for buildings to be built out of stone, which most of the buildings out here at the time we're built out of timber, invited multiple architects from all over Europe.
So if you if you are looking at Bisbee, sometimes you'll find people talking about how it's similar to being in Europe, and it's because our town is a hodgepodge of all these European architectural styles. Also, when they changed over to the county seat in nineteen thirty five from Tombstone to Bisbee, there were a lot of buildings put in that represent a fabulous Art Deco history.
So we talk about the architecture. I kind of bypassed the areas that Joey goes onto because he does that so much better than I do, and also because you know, we'd like people to take both our tours if they so desire. But if you think about the main the main drag in town as being main Street, it's actually called two different things. It's Tombstone Canyon and Main Street. So I do more of the Tombstone Canyon and then once you go past the primary main Street area, so I kind of get the areas
that he doesn't, and he gets the areas that I don't. Yeah, that's a short answer. It's hard to talk. It's hard to describe because this out it's so like like an mc etre drying or something like. It's trying to We sometimes get caught up in like naming the places because it's so windy and built on top of itself. It is a really neat towns looking
at pictures of it. In fact, Google Maps has a hard time if you're anywhere off of Main Street because the switchbacks behind to get up the canyons are so narrow that, like our house, it's best found by using the address on main Street because it gets really confused. Yeah, just accordions itself. So a lot of the tourists have problems because you know, they're relying
on Google Maps or whatever, and it's odd. I'd say most people I talked to have come to this town, and we get a quarter million people a year as of twenty thirteen, the last time they counted. They just show up. They don't even know, like how high up the town is they don't know that they're stairs, they don't know what's open, they don't look up the food. They just come because like their neighbor told them to check out Bisbee. So we kind of have to try to take care of
them the best we can. But you know, um, yeah, that's about I would say that one of the cool things about our tour that I like to promote in terms of promoting is that we do like small groups of like ten people and stairs are optional. The other current big tours in town, one of them has sixty people six zero per group, without any microphones or anything, and they don't list that. So you'll they go up how
many flights and steps probably like six to eight. And I know when I used to work for one of the ones that didn't tell people they were stairs, there's a lot of times where I was actually helping people physically get up the stairs because they already spent money on the ticket and there were no refunds and they were like, well, I have to see this through and people
were falling, hurting themselves. So this is this is a much easier way to go about the bound and you can actually hear us talk to you, which is Yeah, sounds a little nicer. Yeah, Matt, did you have anything? He did a great job. He killed at Matt exactly. He did too. He pulled himself together for this one. If you want to man promote yourself, tell people how they can find you and how to get a hold of you on a website or whatever. And I will also
provide some information in the episode description as well. Yeah, you can find us at Haunted Bisbee dot com. We're also Haunted Bisbee on the instagrams at insta talks, and yeah, all of our information is kind of there. You'll just go to about tours. You could sell Alexandro's Wonderful Art Tour or my Wonderful Haunted Bisbee Historical Ghost Tour, and you can buy the tickets online or just give me a call. I'll pick up and I'll set you guys
up. Like I said, we do groups of ten, but if somebody wants to do more than that, we will accommodate them on a private tour. And our rule right now is if there's more than five adults, I do thirty percent off the entire ticket price. So somebody just bought fourteen tickets yesterday and they staved about sixty sixty. So we want to make it affordable and useful for people in town, because there's a lot of despair when people don't know what to do in town. We are also dog friendly and child
friendly. Children under thirteen when accompanied by an adult, are free. We're not going to take anybody's kids without them. And then we also if you know, if our times don't work out for somebody, or they have a special event, or even if they want to see something that we're not specifically
listening, we always are open to customized tours. Absolutely, that's our little trauma, And in three to four months, hopefully by the end of July, we will be able to expand to cart tours, and in hopefully a few weeks. I don't have a date for it yet, but we are going to start offering a food tour as well. Nice so you can snack it along the tour and then get to try all the restaurants out at the same time and kind of like decide where you want to go later on and
not have to just like take a wild gamble. You could say, oh, I didn't like the r I did like this, and you're set. One fantastic thing about well just not the only one. But a fantastic thing about visiting Busybee is that these are the original buildings there, the original houses. Our house was built in nineteen fifteen as a minors shack, and they're
strewn throughout the entire community. Some places that I won't specifically call out have rebuilt and rebuilt and didn't decide to preserve their heritage until far past the time that there the buildings had been taken down. And so visiting Bisbee is visiting Bisbee as it was in the eighteen eighties and the nineteen hundreds. And in fact, there's a film called Violent Saturday that was shot in nineteen fifty five. Yeah, it's in color, which is odd for the time. It's
a pretty on YouTube now, Yeah, that's what. All the buildings are only like thirty years old at the time, so it might as well be the nineties to us, and you can kind of see how the town looked when it was brand new and besides like and it looks the same pretty much, yeah, exactly the same as it did in the nineteen twenties, which
is which is astounding. So it's really a step back in time and it's not as like touristy as Tombstone. So it's more of a wait for you just to kind of feel comfortable and enjoy the town as it is, versus trying to, like, you know, make it happen, make it happen. Yeah, it's an effortless time work. I like how you seem to have a lot of relationships with some of the other businesses in the town and
you guys kind of work with each other. Yeah, it's so it's my company and U well, my personal What I call my two pillars of this company. First is the authenticity. When it comes to historical facts, we use historical resources and make sure things are documented. When it comes to the art, we talked to the primary artists when possible. But the other pillar of it is that we want to promote a community, cultural and economic growth. We want the other businesses to thrive just as we want to thrive,
and we believe that cooperation is the best means to do them. And that has been a hard journey because some businesses have been kind of hardened from years of dealing with tourists and not knowing how to communicate with them and communicate with other businesses. So we are limited sometimes it's quite a lot of work to tell something because when we first tried trying to add like different restaurants together, some of them are kind of scared, like are you going to secretly charge
us? And we're like, no, no, this is this is for you guys, and that's a kind of a concept. So we're really trying hard to reach out and how help everybody because again, there's no maps of Bisbee. I mean, you could find one, but it's not like accurate accurate, and there's nothing that tells you what's open or where to eat.
So we're trying to unite everybody so at least there can be a central source of information, even if it's just our tour that tourists can kind of figure out where to go so it's easy for them because I don't want them to regret coming here. So that's kind of why it's important to mash everybody together
as well instead of being our own island. And so every day we're building up our virtual visitor center on our website every day NonStop, well easily sometimes well I appreciate eight you guys taking the time to come on here and tell us some stories, and honestly, next time I'm in the area, because how do you go to Arizona every now and then? I get some friends there, I'm probably going to have to stop by Bisbee. Never really considered it before, to be honest, I have reason, so we're good.
That seems to be the case of most people who visit Busbey. Yeah, they're just like, well, we don't have a Disneyland, so we might as well go to Bisbee because we've done two Bland. There's a guy who calls it that, so, um, yeah, come on down. We'd be happy to show you around and stuff and take you to some of the places and uh, you know, if there's any local characters, you could probably just do little interview snippets and stick them on your on the podcast.
I'd be cool too. I don't tour, we interact with some of the locals, which means every tour gets a unique little bonus. Yeah. I've done tours where some guy was like, you want to see my house, okay, and we all go an the house and like it's beautiful, or like one guy was renting out the top of the one of the castles in County. It was like, hey, you want to see the top floor like going to see a whole tour. Yeah, and the whole tour just went up and we got to see it. So like people are there are
very really opening on a tour. You never know where we're going to go or end up. I like that. It's pretty awesome. Now, yeah, we call it. People say that Bisbee is a Mayberry on acid. That all Mayberry. I love it. All right, Well, thank you again. Would you like to say anything before we sign off? Nope, I want to thank you guys for coming on. And that was some great stories. Any time with more, I'm going to take you up on that. Awesome Well, thanks, happy us on pleasures all on this side of
the microphone. I love hearing about history, whether it's towns or hauntings or wild wet pretty much anything. I'm honestly like you on the podcast that I do. I'm very very peculiar about the historical fact. Specifically, even if I'm covering a haunting on my other podcast, if if the history doesn't match the story, it really really bothers me. Yeah, it's like I can appreciate the fact that you actually try to be historically accurate. Well, thank
you. Yes, it's quite a bit of work, but it's it's important because you know, at the end of the day, like the ghosts are fun and stuff, but these aren't also people and how they built the stuff that came before us. And I mean, yeah, it's important just to be to be honest about the people being people. We strive to respect all the residents of Bisbee, living or dead. That is all right. So all right, well, I guess enjoy the rest of your Saturday. And
again I appreciate you guys coming on. Thank you very much. Thanks great to talk to you guys. All right, have a good one, all right, bye bye. All right, that was cool. Yeah, I like that, man, that was pretty That was pretty cool. Sounds like a really interesting town. Yeah. I was looking at pictures of it and those steps just like creep around the town like because nothing there is straight.
Well, after you guys started talking about that, I actually was over here googling too and looking at pictures and it was like, holy crap, man, it's just like it looks like it's just on the side of a mountain or yeah, just kind of built in. I had never even thought of ever going there, but it's it looks like a place I would love. I know, dude, I was looking at pictures. I was like, Wow, that is a beautiful little town man or I shouldn't say a little
town, but yeah, it's freaking pretty nice. Man. It's like I never even can considered ever going there. M hm hm Planet in I aver minute, a minute, minute of minute plant. I have a bed of a minute and a minute minute