A Haunted Drug Store from 1980 in McGill [251003]

 (Posted 251011) We're not "ghost hunters", don't make a habit of visiting haunted places (quite the opposite, in fact), and didn't even know that our next stop was (potentially) haunted before going there.  It just sort of came up in casual conversation along the way.

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We awoke to the pitter patter of rain on the roof Friday morning, but thought if we stayed in bed and ignored it it would go away.  It worked - for awhile.  We got up around 8 am and did our regular morning routine, and then headed to the showers - at which time the rain returned.  By the time Tom went outside to do the final pre-departure dump+fill, there was a steady light rain falling.  We pulled out of the Valley View RV Park for the last time around 10:40 am.

We headed east, then south, for 171 miles towards the small town of McGill.  Along the way we passed by Beverly Hills but couldn't understand why everyone is always claiming that it's so fancy there, since it just looked like acres and acres of desert brush to us. 😜

After travelling for almost 3 hours through scenery that looked like this . . .

. . . we arrived in McGill and parked across the street from the McGill Drug Store Museum and headed over.  Open in 1908, the drug store was abruptly abandoned in 1980 with all its contents intact when the town's economy collapsed with the closure of the mine it had been created to support.  The store (and its contents) was later donated to the town, which turned it into a museum.  It’s billed as a time capsule of sorts, capturing the moment in 1980 when it closed.

Our visit seemed off to a rocky start when we found the door locked and this note posted to the glass.  We called the number listed and told the person on the other end that we were at the museum, and a 90 year old man came ambling over (as fast as a 90 year old man can amble).

Keith, the curator/guide, actually ended up being one of the chattiest, friendliest guys you could hope to meet.  He grew up in McGill, and has been personally involved with the restoration of the store (from unpacking/sorting countless boxes of stuff stacked in the back - the owners were depression-era folks who never threw anything away, to the repair/restoration of the physical structure, to the archiving of documents) for years.

When he saw Tom's Nikon, he figured we'd be interested in the contents of the camera case and opened it for us, inviting us to take out and examine whatever we wanted to inside - a treasure trove of old cameras, hundreds of brand new disposable flash bulbs, film stock in formats that don't exist any more, equipment for home developing of film, and tons of other stuff we didn't have time to examine closely.

Ah yes, good ol' Cheracol D; cough syrups like this (and cherry flavored cough drops, like Sucrets) are the reason why to this day Tom won't eat cherries or anything cherry flavored.

As we browsed the shelves of 1980's items and recognized labels from our medicine cabinets of yesteryear, we had fun reciting their little taglines/slogans and singing their little jingles (there seems to be an abnormally high number of them rattling around Tom's head - an artifact of a misspent youth, perhaps?) and trying to remember whether some of the products still exist today and we just stopped using them ages ago, or they were actually discontinued.

Ah, Geritol: one of the main sponsors of the Lawrence Welk Show!  (And if you look very closely in the lower right corner you can see boxes of Lorann Oils - the fine flavorings we use in our truffles every Christmas.)

Tom remembered using a pack of construction paper that looked exactly like this one, to complete many a' school project.

Of all the items in the store, the shampoos - particularly the ones in the clear/translucent bottles - showed the worst signs of age.  While the containers themselves looked fine, the liquid inside had separated out into layers, some of which had turned some decidedly un-shampoo-like colors.

Who remembers having so many different kinds of typewriter paper?

Keen eyes will spy a bottle of the "original" Rose Milk hand lotion - another of the proud sponsors of the Lawrence Welk Show.

Oddly the correction tape, Liquid Paper, and typewriter ribbons were several displays over from where the typewriter paper was.  Keith admitted that the original owners' layout wasn't necessarily the most organized.

Among the more "vintage" (obviously pre-1980) items still on the sales floor were this pair of old-fashioned fire extinguishers . . .

. . . and this doohickey we had never seen before, but Keith explained was an arch shaper.  Apparently, shoes used to come with steel arch supports in them and if they didn't fit your feet properly you'd take them out and pop them into one of these machines to re-shape them (it came with different shaped heads you could swap in to get different fits).

The side store room was almost as interesting as the sales floor.  A later expansion to the the original store after it was constructed (and massively cleaned and organized by Keith in recent years) it now contains a small office area . . .

. . . overflow storage for inventory that doesn't fit in the showroom outside, . . . 

. . . old store equipment, . . .

. . . and also historic records.  The tall books contain all the sales invoices for pretty much every purchase made in the store.  The smaller boxes contain all of the (hand written) doctor's prescriptions that were filled by the pharmacy.  All have been sorted and then meticulously scanned, for two reasons.  The first is that the scans are being sent to the National Archives for one of their collections.

Keith also recounted for us a memory from his youth growing up here of working his 5 am paper route.  He'd be out delivering papers well before sunrise, but occasionally the sky would light up "bright as day" when the military was running one of their tests.  The government told the residents that "it was perfectly safe" of course - but years later an awful lot of them starting mysteriously coming down with cancer.  The government eventually admitted that living close to atomic testing areas was not as safe as originally claimed, and classified these folks as "downwinders".  Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in the '90s to make some small monetary compensation available for affected folks - but they have to be able to prove that they lived in one of the affected areas during the times tests were being conducted.  Mine company records sufficed for the adults actually employed by the company, and school records could help serve as documentation for school-aged children; the sales and prescription records found at the store helped fill in the gaps for the some of the remaining folks.

The rear storage room has been cleared out now, and staged with some seasonal backdrops created from the store's various holiday decorations that kids like to come in and take photos with (because who doesn't want to take a Christmas photo in the middle of summer?).  We apparently were so enthralled with the stories that we failed to take any photos of that area at all.  🤦

Behind the pharmacists' counter, we saw a Prohibition-era prescription for whiskey - apparently the only legal way to obtain it during that period.

Oh yea, about that maybe-ghost we had led in with.  At one point, Keith had decided to gather up a number of the certificates and photos that were displayed in other parts of the store and display them all above the pharmacist's desk.  He had arranged them the way he wanted, and made sure they were all hung nice and straight.  He came back one day, and found them like this:

He tried fixing them a few times, but they'd invariably end up going skewed "on their own" again eventually so he finally gave up.  And then one day, he found a pair of white cotton gloves sitting on the pharmacy counter, when he's sure he hadn't left them there (he's the only one with keys to the store).

And lastly, there are the little army men who seem to just move around the store on their own once in awhile.

Tom spied this thing up on a wall that looked suspiciously cremains-urn-like - but apparently it's just a trophy of some sort. 🤣

So is there a poltergeist hanging around the old store, who likes moving stuff around once in a while?  Or is this all just microquakes and a 90 year old man forgetting where he's put things?  We can't say for sure - but Keith seems to be a pretty sharp-minded guy, as far as we could tell from our time with him!

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We continued another 13 miles southwest to the town of Ely, where we'd be spending the next day or so.  Our options for the night were either the parking lot at Love's, or the gravel area behind a Shell or Chevron, so we decided to check them all out.  While at Love's, we got the opportunity to give away the first of our "B"ee Bags - to Celia and John, owners of  23/22K with a beautiful custom greyscale bar strip down the side.  We caught them just as they were about to pull out, and had a fun little chat with them (it turns out they're fellow TOWB members, and replied to one of our posts later with a "thank you" photo of their new bag being used a banana hanger 😊).

We also ventured out to the Ely library to check out the WiFi availability there, but the library has no parking lot of its own, is set back far up a hill from the street parking, and has barely any signal even when standing directly outside the building so it was a bust all around.  We popped into the McDonalds parking lot on the way back with similar results; Ely appears to be a WiFi desert.

After a brief second evaluation of the Love's parking lot, we finally decided that our best bet for a level quiet evening was going to be the gravel lot behind the Shell station and headed there for the evening, pulling in a respectable distance from the one other RV that was already parked in the huge gravel lot.

Things were nice and peaceful there - until an hour and half later when a huge 5th wheel pulled in and decided the best place to park was between us and the other RV - and then proceeded to fire up their noisy, droning generator.  🙄

Dinner that night was leftover Lo Mein for Christine and a previously purchased Meat Lover's Lasagna for Tom, with a shared Mixed Veggie Medley.  We took our trash out to the trash bin after dinner, and checked out the store in the Shell station.  The neighbor's generator was still running when we got back, so we decided to move farther away from them, which made a huge difference.  We still had 15GB of data left on Tom's RedPocket service with only a little over a week left on the billing cycle, so we started working on the third Nevada blog post on cellular data.

Even though Ely is "technically" a town, the gravel lot we were parked was surrounded by open field on 3 sides so we decided that mouse deterrent lights would still be prudent.  We fired them up around 9:30, making sure to support the cord weight from the running board instead of the power plug this time.

A tanker truck pulled into the gravel lot around 10 and noisily idled his engine for (not sure why he wasn't at Love's with the rest of the trucks - their truck parking lot was full maybe?  He doesn't like hanging out with other truckers?) but things were quiet again when he finally turned his engine off an hour and a half later.

We headed to bed ourselves just before midnight.

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