One of the most gruesome murders recorded in Lewis and Clark County occurred in September of 1880. Authorities discovered the crime when they went to check on Charles Tacke who had a ranch four miles east of Helena in the Prickly Pear valley.

Tacke's brother had reported him missing. An awful stench led authorities to the rancher's bloody corpse buried under several barrels of lime. An ax clotted with blood lay buried with the victim. Tufts of hair and pools of blood revealed how the killer had dragged the body to its final resting place. The subsequent arrest, trial, and hanging of Peter Pelkey led to a series of ghostly visitations witnessed by hundreds of local residents.

Peter Pelkey was a 24-year-old French-Canadian who drifted from the lumber camps of Maine to New Hampshire and Minnesota before ending up in Tacke's employ. Tacke was something of a recluse, a thrifty bachelor who lived in a very old log cabin despite his prosperity. Pelkey and Tacke made a strange combination but seemed to get along well.

According to Pelkey,'s testimony, he and Tacke were in the log stable catching hogs. Tacke bent down to grab one as Pelkey picked up the ax to toss it out of the way. He accidentally hit Tacke on the head causing a wound that bled profusely.

The sight of blood made Pelkey crazy. He struck Tacke twice more over the head, killing him. Pelkey feared the hogs would eat Tacke's body, so he dragged the dead man into the manger and poured two barrels of lime over him. When Pelkey noticed one of Tacke's feet sticking out of the lime, he took up the ax and chopped it off, then jumped on it to bury it in the lime as well.

Pelkey rifled Tacke's pockets, took what money he could find, and made his getaway. But there was a witness to the ghoulish business. Tacke's fine stallion, stabled next to the lime-covered corpse, had seen the murder. Pelkey saddled the valuable animal intending to ride hell-bent for Fort Benton, but the horse - perhaps in loyalty to his dead master - refused to cooperate.

The horse snapped and bit at his rider's legs until Pelkey had to kneel in the saddle to protect himself. Although Pelkey beat the horse mercilessly, it would only move in fits and starts; it took them all night long to travel about eighteen miles. Pelkey finally reached the Dearborn, trading the horse for a swifter mount. Authorities soon identified the horse as Tacke's, followed Pelkey's trail, and arrested him.

Once incarcerated in the Lewis and Clark County Jail in Helena, Father Lawrence B. Palladino, S.J., visited Pelkey and found him to be "seemingly stolid, stupid, and devoid of human feelings." Then Pelkey had a strange experience.

One night as he lay wide awake on his cot, he saw a sudden blinding light in the corner of his cell. The light struck terror into his heart. When it dissipated, Pelkey was transformed. The guards corroborated this story, noticing immediately that Pelkey no longer spoke in grunts but with "articulated intelligence."

Pelkey was sentenced to hang. Early on February 4, 1881, a crowd thronged about the jail yard in a congenial mood, packing so densely onto the surrounding shed rooftops that several roofs collapsed. At half-past eleven a blanket-wrapped coffin was placed under the scaffold. Jailers escorted Pelkey out of the jail at 11:45; the crowd fell silent as the death warrant was read. Pelkey bowed and nodded to several in the crowd.

Officials escorted the prisoner to the gallows, restraints were applied, the noose adjusted, and the signal given. The sheriff cut the cord, springing the iron trap and Pelkey fell through the trap. His heart beat for 14 minutes, and at 16 minutes doctors pronounced him dead, his neck broken by the fall.

Wild rumors about strange lights appearing on Tacke's deserted ranch soon began to spread. The lights hovered over the house and floated around the property, gliding along the fence rail, over the fields, moving inside the house and stable.

The newspapers reported the incidents in detail, and according to Father Palladino's account in "Indian and White in the Northwest," the "entire community became absorbed in the apparition." There were many theories proposed to explain the lights. One was that the lights were electric and had escaped from Thomas Edison's laboratory.

Others believed that the phenomenon was the ghost of Peter Pelkey, looking for the rest of Tacke's reported wealth. Still others believed it was the ghost of Tacke guarding his property.

Witnesses to the sightings all agreed that the lights visited the various corrals and pens, the house, and the fields. They were erratic, and periodically rose in the air as high as forty feet. One neighbor claimed he saw one to four lights of an evening, moving independently in different directions, sometimes settling on the fence corners.

Another said that they appeared as clear, bright lights moving around the Tacke property, rising in the air, and eventually moving over the valley until they were lost to sight.

The ghost lights persisted for several months. Hundreds drove out each evening to observe them to the consternation of Tacke's brother who feared some tourist would accidentally set fire to the place.

Father Palladino admitted that when he and his colleagues were asked their opinions about the lights, they would allude to the fact that someone who wanted to buy the ranch had simply made the story up to scare off other buyers. But years later Father Palladino concluded that "...we must candidly confess that the strange occurrence has ever been, and still is to this very day, an unsolved riddle in our mind."

Ellen Baumler, author of "Spirit Tailings: Ghost Tales of Virginia City," Butte and Helena from the Montana Historical Society Press, is the Society's interpretive historian.