This weekend, 78 lucky people will see another side of Bonanzaville - a darker side.
On Friday, Oct. 21, and Saturday night, the Cass County Historical Society is hosting its first round of ghost tours at the historic site. The first night filled up shortly after the Facebook event went up, and there was so much interest, organizers added a second night, which was immediately filled from a waiting list.
But don't worry - if you're dying to find out what kind of spooky stories lie within Bonanzaville's borders, you'll have a chance next year. Based on the interest, Melissa Warren and Lynsay Flory, who planned the tour, have already booked three weekends in October 2017 for it.
"We knew it would be a hit, but it was above and beyond what anybody anticipated," says Warren, special events and wedding coordinator. "We're already looking forward to high demand next year."
The two came up with the idea for a ghost tour while brainstorming ideas for a Halloween event. Warren says she'd wanted to do something for Halloween since she started, and Flory wanted to do something that fit into the historical education component of the organization's mission.
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"I wanted to do something for teens, 20s, 30s, that dynamic, which is, I think, the group that we're getting, which makes me happy," says Flory, curator.
The 45-minute tour, lead by Flory, was capped at a dozen people (they squeezed in a 13th for each, making it a "nice Halloween number") because of the narrow entrances and hallways of the buildings.
Although the tour will include reenactments by members of the Fargo North High School history club, led by history teacher Colin Kloster, Warren and Flory say everything it includes is based on factual events they learned through their research.
"The things that people will see are things that actually happened in the Red River Valley back in the day. That's the part I'm really excited about," Flory says, adding, "The truth is stranger than fiction, and it's scarier than anything I would've come up with."
Flory and Warren say "ghost activity" has been documented in two of the buildings on the tour, the Houston Mansion and the Brass Rail Saloon. Although she hasn't witnessed anything in the Houston house, Warren did have an unsettling experience in the saloon when she was locking up by herself one night.
"I kind of got an eerie feeling," she says. "There's an upstairs - the hotel part of the Brass Rail - so I locked up downstairs, and as I was reaching for the door to go upstairs, something hit the floor very, very hard - I mean, shook the floor, it hit so hard.
"But the crazy thing is, there were renovations going on at that time and there was nothing up there. It was pretty much gutted - nothing that could have fallen off of a wall onto the floor or something. I didn't see anything, but I didn't stick around, either."
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