You've Heard Travel Horror Stories, but What About Travel Ghost Stories?

Not to brag, but I have so many travel horror stories you'd think my life was written by Mike White. None have culminated in a resort-wide shoot-out like in "The White Lotus" Season 3, but they're still intense. There was the time my family got stuck in Dallas for three days because of a freak windstorm. Once, the plane made an emergency landing in Buffalo because our pilot had suffered a heart attack and died midair. Another time a man collapsed on a flight to San Diego and needed resuscitation from a group of nurses who happened to be on their way to a conference. And that's not even counting all the broken seatback screens and headphone jacks I've encountered in the air.

Though I may be rich with travel drama, what I never experienced were travel ghost stories — at least not until a recent trip to Montana. I was staying at the Ranch at Rock Creek, an all-inclusive luxury ranch in the western part of the state, about 30 minutes outside of a small town called Philipsburg. I'd come for a "soft adventure" tour with a handful of other travel journalists and had been spending my days blissfully skiing and snowshoeing around the mountains and forests that ring the 6,600-acre property.

For lodging, our group was split among two of the ranch's nine cottages. I was placed in Sara Jane, an elegant cabin easily big enough to fit two entire families, set against a slope of pine-dotted hills out back. I thought I'd heard someone from the staff mention that it was named after a relative of one of the old owners, but I didn't catch the full story.

My roommate took the bedroom upstairs with all the natural light, leaving me the basement. It was a little darker and only slightly creepier by nature of it technically being underground, but still a lovely king suite with its own big bathroom. Almost all the wall space was filled with old portraits of miners and homesteaders who settled in the region throughout the mid-19th century, seeking the wealth and land that the Homestead Act of 1862 had promised them, and whose sunken eyes betrayed the hardship of life on the frontier. I wondered if any of them had known Sara Jane.

One evening at dinner, my fellow travelers went around our wide, reclaimed wood table sharing the spine-tingling tales of their close encounters with ghosts. I sat there trying to appear unfazed as they recounted sightings — and, in one case, even physical altercations — with specters and phantoms in hotel rooms and BnB's around the world.

Now, I'm not exactly what you would call a "believer." Most of the time I try not to think about what happens after death, but if pressed, I would probably put my money on ghosts as myth. Still, that doesn't mean I'm not a total wimp with an overactive imagination. And if anyone's going to do some haunting, I thought at the time, it's probably out here, at this remote property, sitting in what was once silver mining country and is now only 30 minutes from the Granite Ghost Town State Park, one of Montana's over 100 real-life preserved ghost towns. No, I don't really believe in ghosts. But the dinner chitchat kicked my paranoia into overdrive.

It was February and the snow hadn't stopped coming down since we'd arrived 36 hours before. By day the lodges were cozy and downright luxe, and no smiling, rosy-cheeked staffer was ever far away. But after dark, a poisoned mind like mine could start to warp the long, empty hallways, crackling fire, and surrounding wilderness into a setup for a mining-themed sequel of "The Shining." (Just don't call it "The Mining.")

When I peeled off to bed that night, the knot in the pit of my stomach had me on high alert. I descended the stairs of my cabin into my basement room, nervously eyeing every doorway and closet, flinching at every creak and moan. I washed my face and brushed my teeth briskly, worried that if I looked in the mirror I'd see a floating be-bonneted head — no doubt Sara Jane's. I kept my eyes down.

I slipped into my king-size bed around 11 and considered turning off the lamp on the bedside table. My mind flooded with grisly images of Sara Jane floating in my doorway, a prospector with a bloody pickax and a tattered straw hat by her side. I imagined them emerging from one of the picture frames on the wall and hovering over my head while I slept. I decided the light would stay on.

For extra protection I opened Netflix on my laptop, in search of something soothing and mindless to lull me out of my panic. I chose the latest season of "Love Is Blind," an excellent ghost-repellent, and tried to calm down. (Ironically I learned later that the ranch once partnered with the Calm app to create a sleep story featuring a fictional narrator inspired by none other than Sara Jane.)

I was protected by the glow of my laptop until 3 a.m., when I finally found the courage to shut my eyes. I drifted in and out of consciousness, asking myself: What hardship did Sara Jane endure out there on the frontier? What unfinished business kept her around the ranch, haunting the basement of this luxury cabin? Did she have unsettled debts? Did the prospector steal all her silver and then pickax her to death right here in this bed!? What felt like a few minutes later, my morning alarm rang out.

The next night at dinner I mentioned sheepishly that I'd had a hard time sleeping. Ariel, the property's barn supervisor, joined us for the meal. She shot me a surprised look and laughed. As it turns out, my cottage was named after Sara Jane Bowles, the daughter of a well-known horse trainer who helped run the ranch in the 1940s with her mother Hazel. She wasn't a pioneer or homesteader at all, but a fabulous, savvy businesswoman. "If anything's haunted here it's not the Sara Jane cottage," she said. "It's the barn." Lucky for me I didn't have any horseback riding on my itinerary.

I still can't say if ghosts are real, but I know now that ghost stories hit even harder when you're miles away from home, surrounded by the unfamiliar (and a truly astounding amount of old mining paraphernalia).

Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.