5 case files, newest first.
At about ten on a Sunday night in October 1894, one brilliant fireball crossed Arizona Territory. Flagstaff saw it burst over the Elden mountains, Mesa “just this side of Superstition,” and Globe felt a detonation that “shook the earth.” Mohave County had it hit Wallapai mountain, and Tucson called it “the first dispatch from Mars.”
Haunted Canyon, in the mountains between Superior and Globe, is said to have been named by a prospector who sat out a terrifying monsoon there in 1891. That story is hard to pin down. What the papers do show is the name in casual use by 1893, and by 1896 a Phoenix paper selling the canyon as “an ideal summer resort.”
In the summer of 1891 the Colorado River spilled into the dry Salton Sink and made a real new lake. Within days a “special” dispatch had put a fifty-foot sea serpent in it. Some papers played along, one claimed to confirm it, and Yuma's paper later dismissed the serpent stories as “trash.” Part one of a two-part case.
For a month in the autumn of 1894, people on South Main Street in Tucson reported a night prowler that changed shape: a dog, a hog, a burro, a man on all fours. Armed parties hunted it, and rumor blamed an elderly Tohono O'odham woman. Then the Citizen announced that “the Main street spook has been laid.” It was a thief in a pillow-case mask.
Six weeks after Phoenix's Salton sea serpent, a Tucson paper told how a fire bell, a frightened teamster and a moonlit crowd led to a seven-headed monster rising from the flooded Santa Cruz and preaching a sermon about rain and real estate. Yuma's paper called it “trash.” Part two of the Salton serpent case.
