The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department have preserved this area as a heritage site. Most of the time, this is when Joe Bush’s ghost was heard and seen. One would have to leave to inform the boss, the Dredge master, while the other one-usually the junior crew member-had to stay behind to keep an eye on the machine. They state the scariest times were when the dredge would break down at night-then the lights would go out. Most disturbing of all was the fact that his wet, bare footprints were often spotted on the dredge’s various decks.Īll this activity, according to old-timers Wes Dickison and Norm Hansen, who worked on the dredge in the 40s and 50s, caused such a ruckus that men refused to work at Sumpter. If the lights flickered, his spirit was always blamed. Workman in the Sumpter Valley in the 1940s and 50s state that Joe’s ghost would move their tools and eat their forgotten lunches. His ghost is the one connected to most stories told today about the haunted third dredge. He was the second man who was killed while working on this machine. In the 1940s, a mechanic named Joe Bush worked on the dredge. Rowe’s ghost, who had been spotted by a workman in the hull of the first machine was said to follow the old gears into the new mechanism, for his ghost was now seen in this new dredge. Years later, when the second of the three dredges was brought in to replace the first, the gears from the first one were transferred to the new machine. In 1918, Chris Rowe while greasing the dredge’s gears was sucked in and crushed to death. When this happened, especially in the middle of the night, things got scary. This dredge ran 24/7 with one exception–when it broke down. Between 19, dredges were used to extract rock and dirt from the riverbank and then this machine would separate the gold from the sediment. In 1862 gold was discovered in this valley nestled in the Elkhorn Mountain Range.
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