(Red River, New Mexico)
(Before the update, the original story for you new readers…)
MILDRED PACKER
Wolf!! Wolf!!
You remember the story of the boy who cried “WOLF!”? That is my current predicament. On my blog, I published so many fictional, outrageous stories, that anything truly non-fictional that I might choose to write is quickly dismissed as being another figment of my warped imagination.
It is time to cry “WOLF!” again.
Believe what you want, but this story is true.
2008.
We had just returned home from Red River, New Mexico where we spent the last 10 days escaping the heat of another North Texas summer. All of you that know me know that I like to hike in the mountains on nearly a daily basis while I am in Red River. This year was no different. In the course of one of my routine hikes, I encountered a gentleman that will forever change my view of Red River, the supernatural and unknown, and life as we know it. Forever more, during future visits, I will be hiking with one eye on the trail ahead and one eye nervously scanning the forest around me.
Looking for Mildred Packer.
This hike was a routine one that I had done nearly a dozen times in the past. In Red River, there is a nature trail that follows the Red River through town and then the trail enters the forest and switchbacks back and forth up the side of the mountain that the town’s ski slope is situated on. The trail ends in a small open area of aspen trees with a makeshift wood bench to rest on before turning and heading back down to town. The overall hike is probably 3 miles round trip from the beginning of the trail.
This year, hiking alone as always, I easily reached the meadow at the top of the trail and was walking towards the bench to have a short rest when I noticed an older man seated on the bench. Nearby, two of the biggest dogs I have ever seen were frantically running back and forth through the woods. These dogs were the sizes of small horses and made loud grunting noises as they dashed in and out of the trees. Every once and a while, they would each run to the seated man and he would pat their heads and send them back off into the forest.
I walked about the last 50 yards to the bench and asked the man if I could join him while I rested. He smiled, motioned for me to sit down, and then assured me that his dogs would not be eating me for lunch, at least not today that is.
The man introduced himself as “Leo”. He said his last name but my encroaching Alzheimer’s, the high altitude, and the lingering fear of becoming dog food, will not allow me to remember what the old guy’s last name was. I shook his hand, introduced myself as “Mark” and sat down on the bench.
Leo asked if I was hiking alone. I nodded yes and then wondered if that was the wisest thing to do as visions of a psychotic hiker-killing woodsman and his two flesh-eating death hounds quickly filled my oxygen-deprived brain.
Leo then asked if I had passed anyone else on the trail on my way up the mountain. Again, like an Idiot, I nodded “NO” as further visions of hiker mutilations and large dogs chewing on femur bones rushed through my head.
Leo then asked if I had seen anyone off in the woods, off of the trail. He specifically asked if I had seen a woman anywhere off of the trail.
I told him that I had not seen a soul during my hike either on the trail or in the woods. I asked about why their would be a woman off in the woods, off the trail and as I asked this, he got a huge grin on his face. He asked me if I had a few minutes for a “real good story” or if I needed to get back down the mountain.
I told him I had plenty of time.
I wished I had instead turned and hobbled down the mountain as fast as my crippled legs would carry me.
This is story that LEO told me as best I can remember it. It only took him probably 10 minutes to tell this story, but it sure felt like I was listening intently for hours.
Leo had gotten a call from the manager of one of the Condo Hotels in town near the trail entrance. This manager had just spoken to a woman guest who had been hiking on the nature trail, THIS nature trail, with her two kids. The lady told the manager that her and the kids were on the trail high up in the woods when they rounded a bend and encountered a young looking woman wearing a light blue dress standing in the middle of the trail about 30 yards ahead of them. The woman says that she was in front of her children and when she noticed the lady ahead, she instinctively turned around and told her her kids to move over to one side of the trail so that the lady ahead could pass. When she turned back around, the lady in the blue dress was gone. This apparently really freaked her out because the frantic woman claims that she had turned around for less than 5 seconds and she could clearly see the trail ahead for at least 100 yards behind where she had seen the woman, and yet the woman had just vanished. The hotel manager asked the kids what they had seen and he stated that the woman’s daughter about age 5 said that she had seen “Cinderella” in the woods, while the woman’s son who looked to be about 8-10 years old said that he didn’t see “anything”.
(The Nature Trail, close to the area in question)
The hotel manager finished talking to the mother and kids and then came inside and called Leo, explaining that he had another possible sighting of Mildred Packer.
Leo then told me that he has lived in Red River for 42 years and that one of his favorite past-times over those many years has been looking for Mildred Packer.
Leo then got into the heart of the story.
Mildred Packer was a young woman from rural Kansas who came to Red River in the summer of 1971. Her and her husband came for a few weeks each summer and always stayed in the same hotel. Her husband became popular with the drinking crowd in town while Mildred tended to spend all day in and around the hotel. According to local legend, she was a shy, timid woman with an alcoholic husband who abused her both emotionally and physically for years. According to local legend, this summer of 1971 saw the husband spending the couple’s “vacation” fishing all day with other men and then drinking all night long in the town’s saloons and bars while his wife stayed back in their hotel room alone. According to legend, after about a week in town, Mildred Packer’s husband promised her that he would take her square dancing at the Red River Community House that evening after he had another long day of drinking and fishing.
He never made it back to the hotel to take his wife out square-dancing as he had promised. The town Marshall found him in a local saloon at 1:30am that night where he was drunk and passed out on a corner table, only to have to tell him that his wife was dead.
Mildred Packer had hung herself in the couples hotel room. When she was discovered, she was wearing a light-blue square dancing dress. She was found by a hotel maid who went into the room to investigate a series of loud thumps and crashes that other guests reported hearing from the Packer’s room. Apparently, the death by hanging suicide that Mildred Packer had chosen was not quite as quick and painless as she had probably hoped because authorities found a number of furniture pieces knocked over and scuff marks on the walls and furniture where her flailing legs and feet had clawed for support as she swung at the end of the rope. It had apparently been a very slow and painful death for poor Mildred Packer.
(The Hotel in which Mildred Packer died)
The story goes that the husband showed little or no remorse for his dead wife and in-fact, quickly packed up and left town to return to Kansas without even bothering to claim his poor wife’s body. News of the death spread quickly around the tiny town along with instant suspicion that somehow that woman was the victim of foul play at the hands of her low-life husband and was not in-fact a victim of a suicide alone in a small hotel room hundreds of miles from home.
By the next morning, through witnesses who had seen Mildred Packer in the hotel, and through Alibi witnesses who had spent all night drinking with Mr. Packer in the town’s bars, it was clear that no foul play had been involved.
The Town authorities tried in vain to locate any relatives in Kansas to release Mildred Packer’s body to, but could find none. The Town Judge in Red River then informed the Medical Examiners office in nearby Taos that the body was to be cremated and the ashes scattered since no relatives could be located.
A local business-owner in Red River, rumored to be the owner of the Hotel she had died in, contacted the town Judge and made the necessary arrangements and paid the required fees so that Mildred Packer could be buried and given a proper Christian burial in the local cemetery.
Mildred Packer was buried in the Red River town cemetery in August of 1971.
The story of her death lingered around town for a few years and while many people made claims of seeing her haunting the hotel and specifically, the room she died in, Leo says that no one with any credibility ever reported seeing anything out of the ordinary.
(The Idiot on the trail)
Until 1977.
In 1977, the Town Marshal was on late night “bear patrol” cruising the dark streets of Red River one July night. While he as was officially patrolling for prowlers or any drunks stumbling back to their hotels, the Marshal’s main job was to scare away any bears that happened to be picking through the many dumpsters in town. According to the story, the Marshal was in the town’s patrol car and had just turned a corner when the sight of an adult woman standing the in the street right in the middle of his headlights appeared in front of him. He says he slammed on the brakes and got a great look at a woman, with blonde hair, wearing a large light-blue dress. The Marshal says that he reached over to roll down his window to call out to the woman and then was amazed when she simply vanished right before his eyes.
Leo, my bench mate and storyteller, says that he was working as the dispatcher at the town police station that night and that he took the call from the frantic Marshal. The Marshal had only lived in Red River for about 6 months and knew nothing about the events in August 1971 but Leo immediately thought of Mildred Packer when he heard the Marshal describe the blue dress that the woman in his headlights was wearing. Leo remembered back to when Mildred Packer had been buried. The rumor was that she had indeed been buried in the very blue square-dancing dress that she had been wearing when she took her own life.
Leo says that this is when he became “really” interested in Mildred Packer for the first time.
Later that summer of 1977, more reports started popping up around town of people seeing a woman in a blue dress in odd places. Many reports were from tourists and visitors who would have had no knowledge of the Mildred Packer story. Some reports came from locals who many knew to have serious alcohol problems, so those stories were generally dismissed. The small, tight-knit group of local business-owners decided that news of a ghostly apparition roaming around the tiny mountain town was probably not good for tourist business so the business-owners and locals decided as a group to keep the sightings quiet and to downplay them as much as possible. According to Leo, Mildred Packer died in 1971 and her ghost has been sighted on dozens of occasions since reappearing in 1977, yet not one single article about the sightings has ever appeared in any local magazine or newspaper. The town boasts many repeat visitors who come back every summer, my in-laws included, who have never heard the name Mildred Packer. Yet, you whisper her name to any long-time local and you will draw a serious stare and a murmur of “no comment”.
(Intermission. Go to the bathroom, go try to find your kids that crawled off 15 minutes ago, get a drink, for some of you..get multiple drinks, light another cigarette, go check and see what is burning in the kitchen, and YOU!…yes you!!….for God’s sakes! Go put some pants on!!)
Leo said that as the police dispatcher, he had unique access to most of the sightings that occurred over the years after 1977. A frantic tourist would see a woman in a blue dress that would just simply vanish, would call the police department, and Leo would end up taking the calls and dispatching an officer to calm the distressed tourist. Leo claims that he kept a personal log of all Mildred Packer calls that he personally took from 1977-2001 (when he retired) and that his log shows well over “a hundred” sightings.
Leo claims to have seen Mildred Packer himself in the summer of 1983. Red River sits in a steep valley high in the Southern Rocky Mountains. In the center of town, is a large, steep hill that overlooks the entire city. Generally, this hill is far too steep to attempt to hike but every once in a while, some idiots will try to hike it and throngs of people in the town below gawk upwards and wait and watch for the idiots to lose their balance and plummet to their deaths below. No one has actually ever died falling from the hill as far as I know, but it doesn’t stop people from watching and hoping…
In 1983, Leo claims that he stood in a group of about 20 tourists at the bottom of the ski lift that were all entranced by what they were watching take place on the side of the steep hill in town. Leo says that nearly 2/3 of the way up the hill was a lone, apparent female figure, dressed in what appeared to be a blue dress, making it’s way up the mountain with apparent ease and without the use of any kind of hiking stick or any other type of gear. Whereas a normal hiker would practically be crawling on hands and knees trying to scale the hill, this figure in a blue dress was literally gliding up the hill at an amazing speed. Leo did as many of the tourists were doing and took out his camera. Leo says he took the 6 remaining photos on his roll of film. Remember, this was 1983. No Digital Cameras back then, just hand-wound 35mm cameras with poor manual focus and zoom capabilities.
Leo says he watched the figure for about 3 minutes, took all his photos, and then observed the figure go into a thicket of trees, only to never appear again. The group watched for 10-15 minutes but no sign of the person ever appeared. The tourists all laughed and joked about it having to be some idiot professional climber with a dress fetish, but Leo knew what had seen. He had finally seen Mildred Packer himself, though he said nothing to the tourists around him. Leo says that he went and added his own encounter to his Mildred Packer logbook.
His film was developed the next day. Leo said he was not surprised to find that nothing out of the ordinary appeared on the film. Each photo showed blurry images of grass, trees, rocks, and sky but no sign of any dress-clad woman appeared on any photo. Leo said that he had heard of previous encounters where a photo of the woman was taken and had not heard of anything actually showing up on the developed picture.
Leo spread word around the locals that he had actually seen Mildred Packer himself and let them know of the log he was personally keeping about each sighting. Soon, local business-owners would start calling Leo whenever they or a guest had a sighting. As usual, everything was kept quiet and in the backrooms of town, nothing was printed in the media, and no one publicly discussed Mildred Packer, a tradition that continues to this very day.
Leo told me of a young SKI instructor back in the mid 1990′s that encountered Mildred Packer while skiing down the mountain during a raging blizzard. The instructor was alone, was coming down one of the expert slopes, and had just emerged around a bend in the slope when he nearly ran over a lone woman standing right in the middle of the slope. The woman had her back turned and was facing down the mountain as if she were looking down on the town through the snow. The instructor said that he had slammed on the brakes and reached up to remove his ski goggles only to discover the woman was now gone. He skied over to where she had been standing and could find no sign of her and said that were no visible footprints or ski marks in the snow where she had been. When he made it down the mountain, he told the ski school manager about his encounter and was shocked when the manager asked if she was wearing a blue dress before the instructor even had time to finish his story and describe what she was wearing. The manager told the ski instructor the story of the Ghost of Mildred Packer. The instructor quit his job the next day and left town, never to return.
Now we catch up to the present time. Leo told me that the reason that he and his dogs were in that high meadow that morning was because of the sighting that very morning of Mildred Packer on the trail that I had just hiked up….alone. Here it is August of 2008, and she is still roaming the town and it’s surrounding mountains.
That tingle you just felt? That is the hair standing up on the back of your neck!
But, there was more……
Then, Leo dropped the final bombshell. According to Leo, There is proof of Mildred Packer’s Ghost and I could see it for myself!! There is a single photograph of Mildred Packer, taken after her death, in existence and in full public view. The “public” just doesn’t know about the full extent of what they are looking at. The locals all know of the photo of Mildred Packer but according to Leo, he is the only one willing to talk about it. I asked Leo why he had told me all of these secret town stories and he said that he was simply getting old and that some stories were too good to go untold. According to Leo, most of the locals wish he would just shut up or move away, two things Leo has no plans on doing.
Now, to the picture of Mildred Packer.
Leo told me that the Community Center in Red River has a number of historic photos hanging on it’s walls. This Community Center is the same building where Mildred Packer had hoped to go square dancing the night she took her own life. Leo told me to find a specific photograph hanging on the east wall about 15 feet from the main entrance. He told me it would be a color photo that would have a caption that it was taken in 1989. Then, with a laugh, he told me to make sure and her look at her “shoes”.
(The community center that contained the photograph)
He then shook my hand, gathered up his huge dogs, and he started lumbering farther up the trail indicating that he was going to continue the hunt for Mildred Packer.
I turned and walked down the trail, my head nervously scanning the woods around me, looking for any sign of a blue-dress clad woman roaming the woods. I made it back down to town in record time and walked to the community center in search of the photo that Leo had told me about.
I went inside and found the walls adorned with dozens of photos of the Community Center and it’s many events and uses that it has had over the 70 years since it was built. I went to the wall that Leo had directed me to and quickly found the photo that he had described.
My heart about jumped out of my chest.
The photo was labeled “Children’s Arts Festival October 1989″. It showed a number of kids doing what appeared to be arts and crafts outside on picnic tables set up in front of the Community Center. It must have been cold because the kids and the few adults in the picture are all wearing heavy coats or sweaters. The Community Center itself is in the background with the large front porch visible behind the kids seated at the picnic tables. On the porch, you can make out two children seated in a porch swing on the left side of the photograph, while the right side of the porch shows a lone female figure, wearing a large pale-blue dress, standing alone, looking out over the kids.
Mildred Packer.
I then remembered Leo.
“Look at the shoes”.
I looked and was shocked at what I saw. The woman is wearing a pale blue dress that comes to just about knee level. You can make out either white or gray stockings going down to just above her ankle and then….nothing! Where her feet are supposed to be…….is just brown wood from the front wall of the building. She has no feet! You could look at this photograph and not spot a single thing wrong with it unless you consciously look at the woman and her feet and notice that she has just air where her feet are supposed to be. Knowing Leo, the town’s locals all know of this photo and the lack of feet, but such is the pattern over the last nearly 40 years, that all is kept quiet.
If you were to press a local about the photo, they would probably tell you that the photo was altered, or the film was flawed, etc. etc. but you will never get an admission that this is the only known photo of Mildred Packer.
Mildred Packer, apparently floating or hovering, on the porch of the Community Center, 18 long years after her death….
One final note. I knew that if I went back and told my family about this story, they would think I’m nuts. I write goofy fictional stories. I have a fertile, childlike imagination. This surely was just another goofy blog post I had concocted in my head while hiking alone in the woods.
I did one last bit of investigating on my own. I hiked down to the town cemetery and spent about 30 minutes looking at head stones before I came upon a simple stone cross.
On it read,
MILDRED PACKER
DIED AUG 21, 1971
That was it. Nothing more.
I got back to our condo with every intention of telling this story to everyone that would listen. At the time, a large group of family was gathered around a campfire and my Brother-in-Law was trying to coax the kids in our group into a scary story-telling competition. I knew that if I brought this story up, it would quickly be dismissed as just another of “Crazy Uncle Mark’s stories”.
Obviously, I did finally publish this story on my blog. As expected, most people said that it was a good “story”, but knowing me, that they knew it was just a “story” and was not in any way true. Anyone under the age of 12 that read the story, was scared to death of ever going to Red River again.
In the summer of 2009, I ran into Leo again while walking through town. Surprisingly, he instantly remembered me. I told him that I had published the story of Mildred Packer on my blog, which at that time did not have a huge number of readers, and had none in the northern New Mexico area as far as I was aware.
Leo laughed and told me that “someone” in town must have found my story, because the photograph of Mildred Packer had long since been removed from the Community Center wall, without comment or explanation. Someone wanted to make sure that photograph was never seen by public eyes again.
I told Leo that there was still the gravestone marker in the Cemetery to add credence to the story, and I quickly was met with another laugh from Leo. The Spring of 2009 had seen torrential rains in the canyon and at one point, a large mud and rock slide had struck a small area of the town cemetery. A number of headstones were destroyed. All the headstones were eventually replaced with new markers, except for one.
Mildred Packer.
Without the photograph and the grave marker, seemingly all physical traces of Mildred Packer had now been removed from the town.
Late in 2009, with my blog now enjoying a large increase in readership, I recieved a call from a producer of the SyFy Channel show “Ghost Hunters”. The producer had found my story of Mildred Packer while doing a search engine query for ghost stories. The first thing the producer asked was “Is this story true?”.
I again went through the whole story about Leo, the photograph, the grave site, etc.
The Producer said she would “get back to me”.
About a month went by.
One day, I got a call from the Producer. She had called the Mayor of Red River, the Town Marshal, and the owners of three prominent businesses in town. She told them that she was researching “Mildred Packer” for possible inclusion in an upcoming episode of the show.
She spoke to five people.
All five told her two words.
“No comment”
Now you know the secret story of Mildred Packer.
If ever you are in Red River, New Mexico, and are hiking alone in the woods, keep an eye out…..you never know who or what may be lurking around the next corner.
Mildred Packer is in town…
a town she has NEVER been able to leave……
***Update April 2012. I got an email from Leo a few weeks ago. The town is now closed down for the off-season and is real quiet, with most everybody closing down for a few months once Spring Break and Ski Season ended late last month. The week after Spring Break, a housekeeper was cleaning guest rooms in The Lodge at Red River in preparation for closing up until late May. This housekeeper, who speaks no English, was working alone in the bathroom of one guest room, in the middle of the afternoon, when she heard music playing, as if coming from a radio. She left the bathroom and went into the guest room, where she was greeted by the sight of a young woman seated on the bed, sobbing. This caught the housekeeper off-guard since the Hotel was closed and the last of the guests had checked out a week earlier. She turned and went back into the bathroom to get the sobbing woman some tissue. When she returned no more than 10 seconds later, there was no sign of the woman anywhere. The housekeeper then went down the hall and located another of the housekeepers. She told the story to this other housekeeper. Both ladies then went back to the guest room in question. When they arrived, both housekeepers would later tell of both of them smelling the distinct aroma of women’s perfume lingering in the room. The second housekeeper did not hear any music playing, as the rooms do not have any radios or clock-radios, and did not see any sign of the sobbing woman. Both housekeepers then went to the manager, with the english-speaking housekeeper then telling the story of what the first housekeeper had seen and heard. Later that day, the manager called up Leo and told him the story, laughing that it appeared that Mildred Packer had made yet another appearance in the very hotel in which she had died all those many years ago. The following day, Leo went up to the hotel, where the two housekeepers were still cleaning rooms, and he had a chance to talk to both women. He used the english-speaking lady as a translator and had the Spanish-speaking housekeeper again explain her encounter. At one point, Leo interrupted and asked the translator to ask if the sobbing woman was wearing a blue dress. The translator asked the housekeeper in Spanish and then the young woman’s eyes got as wide as saucers. Through the other housekeeper, she said that “Yes, this young woman was wearing a large blue dress…”, but was shocked because she had not bothered to tell anyone that detail. Leo knew right then that Mildred Packer had indeed made another appearance. Leo later talked to the manager again and asked if there was any way to find out if that very room was the same room that Mildred had died in. The Manager did not have any record and could not think of how they might verify that little fact. Leo is convinced that this HAD TO BE the same room in which Mildred died. She is still there, in that room, in her square-dancing dress, sobbing, waiting for her drunk excuse for a husband to come back to take her to the dance ****
