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.”
In December 1900, families living in the ruins of the abandoned Fort Lowell said a tall figure in high boots and a soldier's uniform was coming out of the walls at night. Shots and dogs couldn't catch it. Within weeks two territorial papers had turned it into a running joke, and the people who first reported it were nearly written out of their own story.
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.”
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.
Not an anomaly, just the history of a holiday. In 1885 a Yuma paper had to explain Halloween as a custom from back East. By 1901 Tombstone boys were swapping the lawyer's and the grocer's signs, and by 1910 Winslow parties had a haunted house and a witch's den.
