   POLARIS: The journey from Tucson to the remote ghost town of Ruby was an all-day adventure over rutted roads and through isolated valleys that haven’t seen any real human presence in decades. Located a mere five miles from the US-Mexico border, Ruby is as much on the frontier of the Wild West today as it was a century ago. The area is an infamous passageway for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers heading north, something that was not lost on our team when we first began preparing for our trip in December 2009. Naturally, we debated the situation along the border and what possible risks it would mean for a group of unarmed men, women and children. None of us wanted to be alarmists, but we needed to be careful for some obvious reasons. The violence from the Mexican government’s ongoing war against the drug cartels was spilling across the international boundary. Tens of thousands had been killed in Mexico and there were plenty of stories about the brutality the cartels were willing to use against anyone who opposed them. Would we be safe so close to the border? What was the reality of the situation? Would the scattered Border Patrol units that roamed the hills like marshals of old be any help if we needed it?
The reality of the current border situation aside, there was another issue that was weighing on all our minds. We were going to Ruby primarily to investigate two incidents where Mexican bandits rode across the border and murdered American citizens. It struck us all as both ironic and unsettling how little had changed in the ninety years that separated our visit from those tragic crimes. And I would be lying if I said that we didn’t wonder if we were tempting Fate by trying to reach Ruby.
In the end, however, our curiosity trumped our fear. All of us were glad it did, for Ruby is a place we would not have liked to miss.
Curiously, the aforementioned murders occurred at the same location in Ruby almost exactly two years apart. It is these dual homicides which gives the town its infamous, albeit unfair reputation. Contemporary accounts from the people who lived and worked in Ruby seem to indicate that it was an isolated and tranquil community. Even as the mining industry floundered during the first two decades of the twentieth century, residents were still able to eek out a living through cattle ranching and providing goods and services to frontier families, miners, cattlemen and the military. Perhaps the most successful business in Ruby was the general store. Originally built and operated by a respected entrepreneur named Phil Clarke, by 1919 Clark was eager to sell the prosperous mercantile. Whether he had a premonition or was just savvy to the ugly political situation on the US-Mexico border, Clark wanted to retreat from the frontier and resettle in Tucson.
 The Mexican Revolution had begun ten years earlier, and although the worst of the violence had abated the country was far from stable. During this era, Americans living close to the border routinely had to fear both Mexican bandits and revolutionaries like Pancho Villa, who had raided and burned a town in New Mexico just a few years earlier. Clarke was so aware of the precarious situation on the borderlands that he kept loaded guns secreted in every corner of the general store and even told tall tales about having installed a sophisticated poison gas system to kill any potential threat. By January 1920, Clarke was able to sell the store to longtime residents Alexander and John Fraser. He quickly moved his family north to Tucson.
The Fraser brothers, who were originally from Canada but had traveled all over the United States in search of gold, had yet to strike it rich. They mined an area of land near Ruby for several years but operation failed to produce. Anxious for a steady and reliable source of income, they eagerly purchased the Ruby general store, perhaps unaware that its lucrative trade and rural location made it an appealing target to bandits.
Only eleven days after the Fraser brothers had purchased the store, two Mexican bandits with long criminal histories, murdered them both. John survived his injuries long enough to identify the assailants as Ezequiel Lara and Manuel Garcia. (In a tragic twist of fate, one of the men had worked for the Frasers during their failed gold-mining attempts.) Both American and Mexican authorities, outraged by the cold-blooded murder of two popular and respected men, formed posses to track down the bandits. Garcia was eventually gunned down by Pima County Sheriff's deputies in the small mining camp of Twin Buttes, just south of Tucson. Lara would stay at large longer but was eventually captured and imprisoned on the Mexican side of the border after he murdered a Chinese merchant.
Shortly after the Fraser murders, another enterprising family came forward and offered to buy the mercantile from Clarke. Frank and Myrtle Pearson had just started their family and were eager for new opportunities. Frank came from a cattle ranching family in Texas and Myrtle was a teacher who worked down the hill at the Ruby School. They had a four-year old daughter named Margaret who would go on to witness their deaths.
Phil Clarke later recollected that he was reluctant to sell the store after the killings, but Frank Pearson made a compelling argument that “it certainly wasn’t likely that lightning would strike twice.” It would turn out that the argument was tragically misguided.
Once the Pearsons had control of the store, they set about cleaning, repainting and restocking it. Perhaps their efforts were partially to rid the place of its dark memories and lure back the frontier men and women who had traded there in the past. Early on the morning of August 26, 1921, a Mexican bootlegger named Manuel Martinez entered the store and pretended to be interested in some of the merchandise. In actuality, Martinez was casing the mercantile to see how many men were inside and if they were armed. Bolstered by the fact that the shop was being watched primarily by women and young girls – including Margaret’s aunts – Martinez later returned with six other men. Frank Pearson was the first to be gunned down, without provocation. When Myrtle came running into the room, she too was shot. The younger females, including the two aunts, escaped serious injury and hid in a nearby bunkhouse for hours, terrified to return to the mercantile. When other patrons happened by, they found a grisly sight:
 “Chairs were overturned in the store, drawers were pulled out, papers scattered, the safe rifled, blood spattered on the floor, and boxes, bottles and canned goods strewn about. [Mr.] Pearson lay behind the counter in a pool of blood with two bullet [wounds], stiff in death. His wife’s lifeless body lay sprawled on the floor. Her skull was fractured, a bullet had entered her left temple and come out at the back of the head... Her jaw was broken her lips horribly mashed and lacerated. Many of her teeth had been knocked out...” [Eyewitness account from Santa Cruz County Ranger Oliver Palmer as recorded in the book Ruby, Arizona: Mining, Mayhem and Murder by Bob Ring, Al Ring and Tallia Pfrimmer Cahoon.]
In another incident that might possibly be attributed to precognition, just days before the shooting Myrtle Pearson had asked her sister (one of the aunts in the store at the time of the shootings) to care for Margaret should anything tragic ever befall her. The aunt followed through on her promise and escorted little Margaret out of the state along with the coffins of her parents.
So, two gruesome sets of murders in less than two years in the same place. For the Outcast Earth team, this seemed a likely spot for some kind of residual psychic energy if we could locate the remains of the old mercantile.
The old store is now in ruins. After the town was abandoned in the 1940s, local ranchers removed the building's heavy ceiling timbers to build corrals and other structures. Without the protection of the roof, the adobe walls began to crumble and fall. Today, what’s left of them marks the general perimeter of the store. The front door of is still in place, but twisted on its deteriorating frame. The sales floor is now strewn with weeds and cactus. The weird rusted hulk of the mercantile’s ice machine, a novelty at the time, sits off to one side. It did not seem much to work with if we were seeking any latent energy from the now-distant murders. The lone caretaker on the property had wished us luck with our ghost hunt. He told us that other hunters had been out over the years but had never produced anything that would indicate that the Fraser brothers or the Pearsons were still in residence.
Still, we had to try.
Of our team, I was the only one who had any knowledge of the store’s blood-soaked past. This is standard operating procedure for us to preserve our objectivity. Our survey of the town took all day and I arranged it so the mercantile was one of the last spots we visited. That may have been a mistake in retrospect, as everyone was hot and tired from the excursion. Still, we did get some interesting results despite our lethargy.
We started our walking-tour of the hilltop where the store sits at the bottom where the Ruby School still stands. Ash and Echo were particularly amused by the almost-irresponsibly precipitous slide that still sits behind the main building. We remembered seeing a very similar slide near the schoolhouse in Vulture City and there was some debate over whether this type of playground equipment was common for the area. Despite our amusement at the school, no one reported anything odd even though Myrtle Pearson had worked here. But this was probably a happy place for her. It was the ruins on the peak of the hill where I felt we would be more likely to sense her.
 We next walked to the narrow concrete jail which had been constructed by the Ruby residents mainly to control drunkenness. We weren't able to enter the jail as its great iron door was locked but many of us lingered there, intrigued by its tomb-like feel. Again, this structure was possibly related to the Pearson murders, providing a hiding spot for the young aunts traumatized by the murders of their siblings.
Finally we came to the mercantile itself. Without the roof and most of the walls, the building had to be appreciated more in the mind's eye but it was fascinating to walk through the ruins and try to imagine how it had looked nearly a century earlier. Of the five team members participating in the survey (I excluded myself), four reported feeling "unsettled or nervous" in the mercantile when they did not report these feelings at either the school or the jail. Mist went slightly farther, saying that she felt "claustrophobic" and like she "wanted to run away."
But the most chilling reports came from Rune and Ash. Rune had been standing at the far end of the mercantile on a small rise. During the murders, this would have been the area where the living quarters for the family were located. She called to me and Mist as we were wandering nearby and asked if we had heard children crying. Neither of us had, but about ten minutes later Ash walked through the ruins like he was looking for something.
“Who’s doing all the shouting up here?” he asked me.
“No one’s shouting,” I replied. “What are you talking about?”
“I heard high-pitch girl squeals,” he said. “I thought it was Echo and Mist.”
“They’re not even up here. They walked back down to the jail.”
He shrugged and clearly wasn’t thinking that the audio hallucination might be paranormal in nature.
“What kind of shouts were they?” I pressed. “Like laughter?”
“No, more like someone had hurt themselves and was crying.”
A shiver ran up my spine but I didn’t say anything more to Ash. Were he and Rune somehow sensing the anguish of the Pearson aunts? To be fair, we found that sound moved in strange ways in Ruby. The town is constructed between a variety of hills and mountains, so echos could bounce or seem to materialize from no obvious source. But later, when I interrogated Mist, Echo and Meridian, none of them claimed to be shouting or “squealing." Other than the caretaker and an older couple who were camping down by the lakes, there were no other people in Ruby that day, and certainly no young girls. The “squeals,” like Ruby itself, remain an alluring mystery.
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