Ghost Children in Elkhorn, Montana

Frozen in time: the slanting buildings, the wagon wheels, and the children's birth-death dates on headstones instill a chill for the visitor to Elkhorn, Montana. This is one of the most haunting places in Montana due to the number of children who died here during a diphtheria epidemic.

Colleen Clancy Hansen's story Ghost Children transports you to Montana's Elkhorn of the past, when it was a thriving mining town. Through the eyes of Pansy, a young girl who escaped the fate of so many other Elkhorn children, we experience the tragedy that devastated the once prosperous town in the harsh year of 1889.

While Pansy and her mother left Elkhorn for Boston to care for her grandmother, young Pansy's friends are struck by diphtheria, and the grief-stricken town reels in the wake of their children dying so quickly. Even sisters are taken within days.

Hansen illustrates the tragic story with haunting photos of what is left of Elkhorn today--a ghost town.