APRIL 2025 Ghost Towns and History of Montana Newsletter From The Glasgow Courier, Mar. 26, 1915 , BELONGING: A TRUE FAMILY GHOST STORY Accessed via: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Luckily the ghost that lived in my childhood home was a relative. Otherwise, I might have grown up afraid of things that go shuffle and stroke in the night. I remember as a little girl, any time there was a bump upstairs or a creak in the other room, someone in the family would reassure me that it was just Aunt Jesse. I knew her as the explanation for any time my door opened of its own volition or every time I was awakened by a late night loving touch with nothing present to account for it except for the seat mark on my bed next to me. I knew her as the pen and ink portrait that watched over us from the drawing room wall of our old family house, the brick house. And I knew her as my great great aunt, a strong, willful woman, who loved the Donovan Ranch more than anyone else in the world, at least that is what she used to tell my grandfather when he was a little boy. Grandfather used that anecdote to explain how he could be certain that our ghost was in fact Jesse. According to him, she had chosen to stay behind until someone came to the ranch and loved it as much as she did. Only then would she finally rest. We aren’t completely certain how Jesse McNiven and her older sister Margaret made their way from Scotland, where they were born, all the way to a cattle ranch in Horse Prairie in Southwestern Montana. We know they emigrated from Scotland to Canada. We know they became Canadian citizens, but we don’t know how they came to Butte, Montana where they met and
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