BUTTE ELKS LODGE
Fraternal Lodge — 206 W. Galena St., Butte, Montana
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/butte-elks-lodge-butte-montana/

Historic lodge with recording claims.

A fraternal lodge in Butte, Montana, Butte Elks Lodge is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Historic lodge with recording claims. It sits in the archive under haunted locations. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip. Names, dates and reports are filed together here, so the record stays honest about which is which.

The Butte Elks' building at the corner of Galena and Montana streets opened to the public on November 21, 1925 — Lodge No. 240's third home since the order organized in Butte in 1892 with fifty-one charter members, meeting first at Good Templars Hall on West Broadway and later above an undertaker's warehouse on East Quartz. The new lodge's ground floor had spent its first life as a Studebaker dealership; when a developer bought the building a century later and began renovating, his crew found the dealership's terrazzo showroom floor intact under later concrete.
The lodge's most extravagant artifact predates the building entirely. For the 1916 state Elks convention, which drew a claimed 30,000 members to a Butte fat on 28-cent copper, Broadway Theater set designer Edmund Carns built a 62-foot electrified elk that straddled the intersection of Broadway and Main — five tons of wire mesh, glue-soaked fabric and plaster mixed with copper ore, red bulbs for eyes blinking every five seconds, the order's 'Hello Bill' greeting spelled in lights along its flanks. The $4,000 beast stood through the convention's five days; schemes to re-erect it on Big Butte or at Columbia Gardens came to nothing.

WHAT THE RECORD KEEPS
The haunting entry is thin and the file keeps it that way. Southwest Montana's haunted-places page recounts EVP interpretations of voices and dancing attributed to the lodge; the research notes are explicit that tourism calls the recordings 'verified' while this dataset records only an investigation claim — compelling inside a team's log, unverifiable outside it.
What is documented is the harder story: a lodge that counted over 3,000 members in the 1970s shrinking below 200, until the burden of a ten-decade-old building passed to a developer who now renovates it in phases while the Elks keep their bar and their rooms. The premises remain a membership lodge; no general entry permission is established.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Investigation claim] evp claim: Southwest Montana recounts EVP interpretations of voices and dancing. The site in Butte, Montana gives the account a documented setting: real place, real history, unresolved reports. It originates in investigator claims — compelling inside the team's log, unverifiable outside it. The account appears in 'Southwest Montana’s Haunted Places'. Investigators logged it; the interpretation remains the investigator's own.
  source: Southwest Montana’s Haunted Places (https://southwestmt.com/ghosts/haunted-places/)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Southwest Montana’s Haunted Places — Southwest Montana
  https://southwestmt.com/ghosts/haunted-places/

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/