{"id":317,"slug":"spokane-custer-south-dakota","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Sixteen miles northeast of Custer, just off the Iron Mountain Road, Spokane is the Black Hills' tidy argument that a mine town's name guarantees nothing. It was founded in 1890 by the Judd family and named — a continent away from logic — after the silver camp at Spokane, Washington. The Spokane Mine was meant to produce gold; what it actually yielded was a hardware store of metals — silver, lead, copper, zinc, plus mica, beryl, hematite and graphite — profitable only when several markets happened to smile at once.","Its best year came late: 1927, when the mine shipped roughly $145,000 in ore and the town put the money into a schoolhouse. For four decades it lived and sagged with commodity prices, a pattern the Inlander's retrospective called living and dying by the market."]},{"heading":"The long fade","paragraphs":["The mine closed in 1940 and never reopened — 1950s revival attempts came to nothing, and one later owner reportedly treated the workings as an illegal dump for hazardous chemicals. Fire took the mine buildings; the Forest Service demolished what it judged unsafe; yet a hired watchman lived on at Spokane into the mid-1980s, and the research notes are right to separate broad abandonment in 1940 from that final residency.","What survives — the schoolhouse, a barn, the watchman's house, mine remnants, and the grave of James Shepard, murdered in a 1908 claim dispute — makes Spokane one of the more intact Black Hills ghost towns. Tourism guidance is blunt about its condition: look, don't enter or climb. The file keeps it as documented abandonment; no haunting claim is made."]}],"name":"Spokane","aliases":[],"type":"GHOST_TOWN","type_label":"Ghost Town","cats":["GHOST_TOWN"],"groups":["ghost-towns"],"desc":"Ghost town documented in historical or public cultural sources.","full_desc":"A ghost town in Custer, South Dakota, Spokane is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Ghost town documented in historical or public cultural sources. HauntHunt files it with ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. It stands abandoned — what remains is the shell and the record.","address":null,"city":"Custer","county":null,"state":"South Dakota","postal":null,"region":"Midwest","lat":43.766732,"lon":-103.599636,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"ABANDONED","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":"Tourism instructs visitors not to enter or climb structures.","ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Approximately 16 miles from Custer. Distinguish town decline from final occupancy. Exact legal access and current structural conditions need verification.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":49.3,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":null,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[],"history":[{"description":"Mining settlement with fragile surviving structures; tourism dates broad abandonment to 1940 and final residential departure to the 1970s. The town's documented rise and abandonment is the record the rest of the file stands on. Media accounts document it — reported history rather than legend. The record appears in 'History in the Hills: Old West Legends, Mines and Ghost…'. The date is part of the site's documented spine.","evidence":"MEDIA_REPORTED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"History in the Hills: Old West Legends, Mines and Ghost Towns Near 385","url":"https://www.blackhillsbadlands.com/blog/post/old-west-legends-mines-ghost-towns-route-reimagined/","publisher":"Black Hills and Badlands Tourism Association","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"History in the Hills: Old West Legends, Mines and Ghost Towns Near 385","url":"https://www.blackhillsbadlands.com/blog/post/old-west-legends-mines-ghost-towns-route-reimagined/","publisher":"Black Hills and Badlands Tourism Association","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":0,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}