Spring Ranch is "known" as the most haunted ghost town in Nebraska, though I'm not sure by which metric it achieved that knowing.

Spring Ranch Cemetery looks like any normal cemetery. There's a gateway, a lane down the middle and your typical array of stones on either side.

While I was there photographing, I felt no hauntings, no specters, spooks or haints. There are no ghosts in the ghost town of Spring Ranch, and the cemetery is filled with the town's history, parceled out for those who can read it in marble and granite.

I walked softly in Spring Ranch Cemetery. There is a hard history here that you can almost feel. It’s not so different from other pioneer cemeteries. It was hard everywhere in the late 1800s. The life they chose was backbreaking and mentally torturous.

This can be seen hiding under the soft veneer of county histories and family recollections. Spring Ranch probably wasn’t much harder than any of the thousands of other frontier towns. But I quickly uncovered two stories that describe and define just how Spring Ranch, and the frontier in general, could break you.

Though it contains somewhere around 100 stones, this is one of the larger cemeteries I’ve photographed. My preference lies in the small, abandoned cemeteries dotting the west. But Spring Ranch is almost sprawling in comparison. The main cemetery drive still exists down the center, but on the sides and in the corners are small gatherings of stones here and there.

Most are family plots, separated and set aside for no other reason than the cemetery never got the chance to fill itself out. One such assemblage caught me.

There was a row of five stones, neatly placed. On the left, the two farthest apart belong to Margaret and John Jones, husband and wife. John died first in 1882, not living long enough to bear witness to what came after. His wife, Margaret, lived to see it all, dying in 1894.

To the right are three additional stones, somewhat clustered together. Margaret and John had two children, Elizabeth and Thomas, born in 1848 and 1851, respectively.

The Jones Family came to America from Wales, arriving probably in the 1860s. They, like the others, came west across the Plains and settled in Spring Ranch. By the time they settled, Elizabeth and Thomas were likely near to adulthood.

The third stone, curiously lying between the children and their parents, is to James Taylor, Elizabeth’s husband, whom she married in 1869 at the age of 21. James was from Missouri and was two years younger than Elizabeth.

The preamble to this story is hard to piece together. It was only written about after the occurrence on the bridhauntingsge, when opinions had already been formed and transformed by these events.

Somehow or another, at the age of 33, Elizabeth’s husband, James, died. It was 1882, but over the years, his untimely death morphed into an “unexplained” death, and then to a “suspicious” death. Finally, it was assumed that Elizabeth poisoned him with potato bug poison. However it happened, James was dead.

Over the course of the next two years, the town turned upon Elizabeth and her brother Thomas, who the papers described as an “unmarried man, whose mother kept house for him.” They were suspected as leaders of a larger gang of cattle thieves and general no-goods.

Things came to a head when Edwin Roberts was murdered in January of 1885. According to the Nebraska Signal:

Last week, Edwin Roberts, tenant on the farm of Mrs. Taylor in the southwest precinct of Clay County, went down to the Blue [Little Blue River] to cut some bushes, and while at work, Mrs. Taylor, two sons aged twelve and fifteen, and a hired youth not much older by the name of Brewer, drove up near where Roberts was at work.

They had with them a loaded shot gun. The younger boy held the team while the others got out and walked up to within a few steps of Roberts and at once shot and killed him.

The Taylor Family is said to be very depraved. The parties have been arrested and although the people are much excited over the murder, will probably await the action of the court.

The people of Spring Ranch were indeed much excited, but they were not about to await the action of the court. While the governor of Nebraska issued a warrant for the arrest of David Brewer, the locals believed they knew better what happened to Edwin Roberts.

Elizabeth’s two sons might have pulled the trigger, but it was Elizabeth and maybe her brother Thomas who were responsible. While Thomas was liked well enough, or at least tolerated, according to the local papers, Elizabeth “had never had a good reputation in the neighborhood.”

The same paper went on to describe her as: “not a tall woman, but rather short and stout and has rather a coarse expression about her face that is seldom seen in a woman.”

The family, especially after the untimely and/or suspicious death of her husband, James, grew to include what the locals considered a gang.

Of this gang, the Lincoln Daily Nebraska State Journal reported:

It seems as though there was an organized gang of hard characters in the Jones and Taylor families and there have been more or less strangers stopping among them who would not stop at anything short of murder, if even at that, and it seems as though it was the intention of the community to get rid of the whole pack and parcel of them.

Of late there has been a number of fires in the neighborhood, stock has been killed and various other atrocities have been perpetrated. Such things cannot last always and when the gang is routed out, then they will cease and people can live in peace.

But there was to be no peace. Again, according to local reports on Elizabeth:

After the murder of Roberts and the imprisonment of her two sons, she would always remain overnight at the home of her brother, going back and forth to her own home which is about a mile distant, only during the day. She was always afraid to stay at her own home alone although she was always armed or had arms handy.

The home of her brother, Thomas, was a sod house with walls four-feet thick. It was only one story and sat maybe ten feet high. Its front held two small windows and a door. The roof was sod and heavy, requiring four sturdy pillars running through the center of the house to hold it up. The inside was set up more like a stable than a house, with low walls dividing the sleeping quarters from the living spaces.

The events that transpired on the night of March 15, 1885, two months after the murder of Roberts, are confused, lied about, and likely forgotten. Reading from contemporary newspapers can only retell so much, but it is all that remains.

According to the Hastings Gazette Journal:

The mob appeared at the house of Tom Jones wherein were seven persons, Mrs. Jones [Margaret, the mother], Mrs. Taylor [Elizabeth] and her daughter, Maggie, a bright looking girl of five years of age, Nelson Celley, John Foster, Texas Bill [an alias], and an older person by the name of Clark, and a boy whose name no-one knew. As soon as the mob reached the house, they demanded that Mrs. Taylor [Elizabeth] and Tom Jones should come out, but instead of complying with the request, the door of the house was barricaded and other means taken to prevent a forcible entrance.

Those inside were well provided with firearms and just why they were not used by them is a mystery as they had just been purchased for such an occasion. After parlaying for some time, the men in the mob were determined to have them out and threatened to throw a bomb of dynamite in the window.

At this juncture, Tom Jones asked Texas Bill if he thought it would be safe to go out and was answered that it would. Thereupon Tom Jones said that he would come out and was told by the mob to crawl out of the window, as he would not be allowed to go out of the door and he was also told to leave all firearms behind him and crawl out with his hands up. This he did and upon his appearance was immediately covered with revolvers and guns and was taken to one side and his hands tied with a piece of rope which was procured from some mule harness belonging to Mrs. Taylor.

Mrs. Taylor was then ordered to come out and she too came out of the window the same way and had her hands tied also. The men then took them into a little open spot near the house and leaving them under a guard drew off a little ways and held a consultation which ended in Mrs. Taylor and Tom Jones being taken one direction and the other four men who were in the house were taken in another.

There was one thing noticeable in the transaction, that while three of the men’s hands were tied, Clark, Celley and a person whose name was not known as he had only been there one or two days, Texas Bill was allowed to go free and he made himself scarce. It is supposed by some that he was in with the mob.

Be that as it is, the other three were taken to the house of a Mr. Reese and locked up where they remained until late Sunday morning. The men who had Mrs. Taylor and Tom Jones in charge, told them what they intended doing. The couple then began pleading for mercy, but the men were obdurate. They were given time to pray shortly after having been taken from the house and again when they arrived at the bridge.

They both improved the brief opportunity allowed them to pray and when they arrived at the bridge, the ropes which were taken from some halters were adjusted around their necks and they were shoved off into eternity.

[Another paper reported: “Tom Jones’ neck was broken, but his sister, Mrs. Taylor, died the terrible death of strangulation.”]

The men then went back to the house where they had left Mrs. Jones and Mrs.Taylo