The Arizona frontier, mid-1880s. Sparse outposts, sprawling deserts, and stories swapped around flickering campfires by miners, settlers, and cowboys. A gigantic camel, tinged red, supposedly haunted these barren lands, with a human skeleton strapped to its back like a sick, fleshless rider. They called it the Red Ghost, and for over a decade, sightings of this dreadful creature terrified folks across the Southwest.
Some swore it stomped a woman to death, others saw it careen through tent camps, dropping human remains along the way. It’s no wonder the legend of the Red Ghost caught on — what's more terrifying than a beast straight out of an otherworldly nightmare?
A failed army experiment
But the truth beneath this ghost story? Bureaucratic stupidity and missteps. Before we embrace the eerie legend, let’s acknowledge the reason these camels roamed in the first place. This wasn’t nature’s plan; this was a U.S. government brainwave gone terribly wrong.
In the mid-1800s, during the push westward, Congress thought, "Why not camels?" Horses and mules struggled across the endless deserts of the Southwest, but camels, known for their endurance in harsh climates, seemed perfect. Enter Jefferson Davis, yes, the future Confederate President, then Secretary of War, and a big camel fan. Davis convinced Congress to drop $30,000 on these foreign beasts to create the U.S. Army Camel Corps.
So off went Maj. Henry Wayne and Lt. David D. Porter to the Ottoman Empire, with a mission to bring back the most awkward cavalry the American West had ever seen. They returned with 75 camels (dromedaries and Bactrians) and some camel handlers, including the infamous Hadji Ali, aka "Hi Jolly". Picture these creatures awkwardly trudging through Arizona’s scrubland, spitting at anyone foolish enough to approach. Mules bolted at the sight of them. Cowboys hated them. Camels were strong, sure, but they were a nightmare to manage: ornery, prone to biting, and they ate like kings. Not the heroes of efficiency Congress had hoped for.
From military mishap to terrifying myth
Predictably, the Camel Corps fell apart as quickly as it started. The Civil War redirected attention and money elsewhere. The camels? They were sold off, abandoned, or just set free. Enter the legend of the Red Ghost, a twisted side effect of an already ludicrous story.
Around 1883, the first recorded sighting happened near Eagle Creek. Two women were at home while the men were off managing livestock. Screams pierced the air, followed by their dogs' frantic barking. When the men returned, they found one of the women crushed and dead, trampled as though by a monstrous beast. The only clues left behind were oversized, cloven hoofprints and long, reddish hairs.
Reports soon spread: this wasn’t just a rogue animal, it was carrying something eerie. Miners saw the beast tear through their camp, leaving behind a skull. Ranchers claimed the creature had a man on its back, except the man was very much dead, strapped tightly with leather straps. Every sighting was like something out of a fever dream. People described a hulking camel ridden by a ghostly figure, its skeletal form bleached and pale, forever bound to the beast.
Sightings across the West
The legend kept growing. The Mohave County Miner, Kingman’s local newspaper, amplified the tale with each new sighting. Si Hamlin (sometimes called Cyrus Hamblin) saw it up close. He confirmed what others had whispered: it was a camel, all right, but with a dead rider still lashed to it. A group of prospectors tried to shoot the beast but missed; as it escaped, something fell to the ground; a human skull, weathered and skeletal, yet still bearing scraps of flesh and hair.
One story claimed that the camel, in its maddened rampage, once knocked over a wagon and even supposedly fought a grizzly bear. Another said it vanished into thin air like a ghost, a supernatural specter of the Old West. The rumors swirled, each more bizarre and macabre than the last, until the Red Ghost wasn’t just an animal anymore; it was something else entirely, something from another world.
The sightings went on for years, terrifying anyone unlucky enough to encounter this unholy beast. Folks dubbed it "Fantasia Colorado" (the Colorado Phantom) in an attempt to rationalize the absurd.
Hi Jolly and the last camels
One of the most colorful characters in this strange chapter of history was Hi Jolly, the Syrian camel driver hired to wrangle the camels through the desert. Hi Jolly tried, long after the army abandoned the idea, to make camels work commercially. He even started a freight company, using camels to transport goods across Arizona, but it failed. Eventually, like many others, he let his camels loose.
The camels roamed across the desert for decades, fading from a failed military experiment into whispers and campfire tales. Hi Jolly became a minor local legend in his own right; when he died, a monument was erected in Quartzite, Arizona, with a camel etched atop it — a nod to the absurdity of the Camel Corps and his role in it. Hi Jolly may have been the one sensible camel handler, but even he couldn’t save the military’s disastrous endeavor.
The ghost lives on
In 1893, the Red Ghost's luck ran out. A farmer named Mizoo Hastings found the creature grazing in his garden and, tired of the fear and the stories, shot it dead. The truth came out then: there was no ghost, only a camel covered in tight rawhide straps, scarred by years of carrying a burden it could never shake.
But the legend didn't die with the camel. The story of the Red Ghost became folklore, a symbol of the strangeness of the American frontier — a tale of a beast that was never supposed to be there, carrying the weight of a dead man into the Arizona night. It was a perfect storm of human folly, military overreach, and the boundless imagination of the Old West.
The Red Ghost wasn’t a supernatural specter. It wasn’t some mystical omen. It was the embodiment of the absurd, a reminder of how ridiculous reality can be when bureaucracy meets the harsh unforgiving landscape of the American Southwest. And like all good ghost stories, it continues to haunt the imagination — stripped of its skeleton, but full of the red, unyielding spirit of the West.
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