The Red Ghost of Arizona

01

What Was the Red Ghost of Arizona?

The Red Ghost of Arizona is a nineteenth-century legend about a large red camel that wandered Arizona Territory with human remains tied to its back.

No one in the earliest newspaper account sees the whole Red Ghost.

Two gold washers glimpse something taller than two horses. At Eagle Creek, a woman sees a towering red shape with the devil on its back. A hunter named Si Hamlin spots a camel carrying a burden that might be a man. Two prospectors find a dried human head. A cowboy later sees rawhide—and what remains of a pack.

The newspaper gathers those scenes under one name. Read separately, they are fragments. Joined together, they become the Red Ghost.

Before we follow the creature any farther, we need to answer the question that once sounded ridiculous: How did camels reach the Southwest in the first place?

02

Before the Ghost: The U.S. Army Camel Experiment

Camels in Arizona sound like the detail that gives the whole story away.

Then I found the paperwork.

In 1855, Congress set aside $30,000 for what became known as the U.S. Army camel experiment. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had been pressing the idea. The Army needed a way to carry supplies across the dry, punishing routes of the Southwest. Horses and mules were struggling. Camels, Davis believed, might not.^[1]

Major Henry C. Wayne was sent overseas to buy them. The first shipment reached Indianola, Texas, in May 1856. A second voyage followed. By the time the buying was finished, the government had acquired roughly seventy camels and dromedaries.^[1]

The plan sounds ridiculous now because we already know it disappeared. On the trail, it made considerably more sense.

In 1857, Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale took twenty-five camels on a wagon-road survey from New Mexico toward California. They carried heavy loads. They ate desert plants that horses and mules refused. They crossed rivers and climbed difficult ground. When water and food ran short, the camels sometimes carried supplies for the other animals.^[2]

Beale became convinced they belonged in the Southwest.

Then I found a notice from 1859.

On April 14, The Weekly Arizonian reported that more than twenty government camels had strayed from Beale’s ranch on the Colorado. They had not been recovered. The paper feared they had fallen into the hands of the Mohave Indians.^[14]

This is the part that changed the file for me. Loose camels were not merely a later explanation for the legend. A territorial newspaper was reporting an unrecovered government herd thirty-four years before the Red Ghost story appeared.

That does not make one of those animals the Red Ghost. It does give wandering camels a contemporary paper trail.

So why aren’t camels wandering Arizona today?

The Civil War broke the experiment apart before the Army settled that question. The government’s herds in Texas and California were eventually sold. Some animals passed into private hands. Other camels had already reached the West through commercial owners, and reports of loose animals continued for years.

That gives us a route by which a camel could have reached Arizona. The trail becomes harder to follow after that.

I looked for a military brand, an auction record, an owner, or a handler who could connect the Red Ghost to Beale’s expedition. Nothing surfaced. The Army records bring camels into the West. They never introduce us to one called the Red Ghost.

If the military file ends there, where does the ghost story begin?

On page 15 of a San Francisco newspaper.

04

What the Earliest Red Ghost Account Actually Says

The first witnesses have no names.

The Examiner reaches back about ten years, to roughly 1883. Two Mexican gold washers are sleeping beside a creek that feeds the San Francisco River when their tent collapses on top of them.^[3]

They crawl out to the sound of galloping hooves and what the article calls “a terrible shriek.” In the darkness, they see something taller than two horses disappear into the brush.

The next morning, people from Oro search the creek. They find strange tracks in the mud and brush flattened by something large.

Then the trail disappears into the rocks.

The next scene has a body.

At a sheep ranch on Eagle Creek, two women are left with the children while the herders tend the flocks. One of the women walks to a spring for water. The other hears the ranch dogs and reaches the door in time to see something red tear through the fence.

She hears the woman at the spring cry out.

She stays inside with the children and barricades the door.

When the men return that night, they find the missing woman beside the spring, “trampled and crushed as though a troop of cavalry had run over her.”

A coroner arrives from Solomonville. The surviving witness can offer only a few details. The thing was red. It was very tall. A devil was riding on its back.

The jury returns a verdict of “death in some manner unknown.”

Then the article adds something I wasn’t expecting: the jurors reportedly wondered whether the surviving woman had committed the murder herself and invented the apparition.

Neither woman is named. Neither is the coroner. The ranch is not identified, and the article gives no date for the death.

I looked for an inquest, a death notice, or a local report that might pull one of those people out of the story and into the historical record.

I found nothing.

After Eagle Creek, the sightings become harder to trust.

One man claims he watched the Red Ghost gallop across half a mile of open air between two cliffs. The Examiner points out that this same man had previously reported a flying bear and a mountain made of solid gold.

Even the newspaper knew when the story had gone too far.

The first person to call the thing a camel was a hunter named Si Hamlin. From the top of a ridge, he reportedly saw something large moving through the chaparral. When it crossed a burned patch of ground, he recognized the shape.

There was something on its back.

Hamlin thought it looked like a man, although he could not be certain.

The camel appeared again on the Verde. Two prospectors crept within shooting distance and fired. It bolted into the hills. As it ran, something dropped from its back.

The men followed and found a human head, “dry and withered,” with flesh and hair still attached.

Not a bare skull.

A head.

Weeks later, a cowboy from the Anchor-J outfit found the camel inside an abandoned branding corral. He threw his rope out of habit. The camel charged, caught his horse by the throat, and escaped with sixty feet of rawhide trailing behind it.

The cowboy returned to camp convinced that the ruined pack on the camel’s back had once held a man.

He is never named.

The final encounter supposedly happened only a few months before the article appeared.

Mizoo Hastings, a rancher living above a mining camp on the San Francisco River, woke to find a large red camel eating turnips outside his cabin. He rested his rifle on the windowsill and fired.

When Hastings examined the body, the newspaper says he found its hide crossed with knotted rawhide. The straps had been there long enough to cut into the flesh. The camel was scarred all over.

Whatever it had carried was gone.

The Examiner offered three possible explanations. Someone had tied a man to the camel for revenge. The rider had arranged his own death. Or someone had possessed “a camel and a corpse for which he had no use.”

The article chose none of them.

One phrase remained in my notes. The paper claimed that Mexican residents called the creature “Fantasia Colorado.” That is not straightforward Spanish for “Red Ghost,” and I have not found the name in an independent Spanish-language source.

Maybe the writer heard it incorrectly. Maybe the printer changed it. Maybe nobody outside the newspaper ever called the creature that.

By the end of the earliest complete account, I had a camel, a dead woman, a human head, a length of rawhide, and several people who could not be identified.

I also had three explanations supplied by the newspaper.

What I did not have was an answer.

Once I knew exactly what the 1893 story said, I began noticing how often later writers changed it.

05

How the Red Ghost Story Changed

The first major changes did not take decades.

They took weeks.

By late April 1893, the Red Ghost had acquired a new headline: “Many Were Slain by the Terrible Ghost of the Deserts.”^[7]

The story beneath it still described only one alleged death in detail.

The new version also gave Oro an ancient Aztec past. It added buried ruins, frightened treasure hunters, and a connection to the Chicago World’s Fair. At the end, it suggested that Arizona’s camels might be remnants of some prehistoric animal.

None of that appeared in the February Examiner article.

The story had started changing before it was four months old.

Later alterations were smaller. They were also harder to notice.

The two prospectors became five.

The dried human head became a skull. In some retellings, the men carried it to Kingman. Modern illustrations went farther and left an entire skeleton strapped to the camel until the day it was shot.

The earliest account describes none of that. The head fell from the camel years before the final encounter. By the time Hastings supposedly killed it, the rider was gone.

Even the camel’s last meal changed.

In 1893, Hastings found it eating turnips. Later, the turnips became tomatoes.

Names began drifting too. Si Hamlin became Hamblin and eventually Cy Hamblin. Oro became Ore. The Anchor-J outfit grew into the more imposing Anchor-JOT Ranch.

I began treating those changes like fingerprints.

If two retellings used the same altered name, the same five prospectors, or the same tomato patch, there was a good chance they came through the same source. They might look like separate accounts. The shared mistake gave them away.

Many of the details people now associate with the Red Ghost settled into place in Robert Froman’s 1961 retelling.^[8]

Froman gave the first sighting a season: spring 1883. The sheep ranch acquired an adobe house. Geronimo’s raid moved closer to the action. The witness found red hairs. Si Hamlin became Cyrus Hamblin. Five prospectors found a skull and carried it to Kingman.

The Anchor-J became the Anchor-JOT.

The story now had a clearer calendar, fuller names, and more physical evidence than it had possessed in 1893.

That made it feel better documented.

It wasn’t.

In 1976, the Arizona Republic printed another detailed version of the Red Ghost story. I initially treated it as a new newspaper investigation.^[9]

Then I read the introduction.

The piece was an excerpt from a book by historian Odie B. Faulk, and the newspaper warned readers that the author had allowed himself some “creative reporting.” Faulk was retelling the legend. He was not reopening the case.

The same thing happened when I reached a 2015 article from Smithsonian Magazine. It was useful for understanding the camel experiment, but its Red Ghost section repeated the tomato patch and included a dramatic quotation attributed to the New York Sun.^[10]

I went looking for the original quotation.

I could not find an issue date, a page number, or a copy of the article that supposedly contained it.

The name Smithsonian made the quotation feel settled. Once I followed it backward, it disappeared.

That kept happening.

The longer my source list became, the more convincing the Red Ghost appeared. Then I traced the citations and watched the list collapse into a much smaller family of retellings.

The additions had done something important to the legend. Five prospectors sounded stronger than two. A skull sounded more durable than a decaying head. A named ranch felt easier to locate. A specific spring day in 1883 looked like history.

Each new detail closed a gap in the story.

None closed a gap in the evidence.

The newspaper trail had shown me how the Red Ghost grew. It had not yet answered the simplest question in the case.

Was there really a camel?

06

Was the Red Ghost a Real Camel?

Probably.

Camels had crossed Arizona before any newspaper called one a ghost.

Beale’s expedition brought them through the territory in 1857. Government auctions later scattered the herds, and private owners had imported camels of their own. By the 1880s, a loose camel in Arizona would have been unusual.^[1][2]

It would not have been impossible.

To someone who had never seen one, a camel could look badly assembled. Its neck was too long. Its legs bent strangely. It made unfamiliar sounds. Horses that knew how to face cattle could panic when they smelled one.

A red camel appearing at night might not need anything supernatural to frighten a ranch.

The problem is identifying this camel.

The Examiner says Si Hamlin recognized it. The same article says Mizoo Hastings later shot it in his turnip patch and found its hide scarred by rawhide.^[3]

That is the only ending I could find.

I tried to follow the body out of the garden.

There is no hide in a museum. No bones. No photograph. No surviving rawhide. I found no ranch record describing the shooting and no second named witness who examined the carcass.

Even the camel’s connection to the Army remains uncertain.

A military brand or auction record might have led back to Beale’s herd. None has surfaced. The camel could have descended from government stock. It could have escaped from a private owner. The newspaper does not tell us.

Calling it an “Army camel” gives the Red Ghost a wonderfully neat origin.

The historical record is not that neat.

So the most careful answer is that a loose camel could have wandered Arizona during the period described. The Examiner reported that one did. Whether that camel was the Red Ghost—and whether Mizoo Hastings really killed it—remains unconfirmed.

I could get a camel into Arizona.

I still could not put a man on its back.

07

Was a Dead Man Really Tied to Its Back?

The 1893 newspaper says there was.

The rest of the historical record says nothing.

The rider enters the story in pieces.

Si Hamlin sees a burden that looks like a man. Two prospectors find a dried human head after firing at the camel. The Anchor-J cowboy believes the remains of its pack had once been human. Finally, Mizoo Hastings supposedly finds knotted rawhide crossing the camel’s scarred body.^[3]

The newspaper joins those details together.

None of them comes from a witness we can question.

The rawhide is the hardest detail to dismiss. According to the Examiner, some of the straps had cut so deeply into the camel that they were embedded in its flesh. Something had been fastened there for a long time.^[3]

The article never proves what that something was.

Rawhide could secure a person. It could also secure cargo, a saddle, or an abandoned pack. The scars become evidence of a corpse only after we connect them to the head and Hamlin’s distant sighting.

That connection may be correct.

It may also be the work of the story.

I went looking for the rider next.

There is no name. No missing-person report has surfaced. The article mentions no clothing, jewelry, weapon, uniform, or personal object that might identify him. It does not tell us what happened to the head after the prospectors found it.

We do not even know who the prospectors were.

The Examiner offered three explanations for the body. The man had been tied to the camel as an act of revenge. He had arranged his own death. Or someone had played a grotesque joke with an unwanted camel and an unwanted corpse.

Those are not three competing theories supported by evidence.

They are three guesses printed in the same article.

Later writers supplied more. The rider became a dying prospector who strapped himself down so the camel could carry him to water. In other versions, he was a soldier tied there as punishment. Sometimes he was already dead when someone placed him on the camel.

I could not trace those explanations to the earliest account.

The complete skeleton seen in modern artwork is another later addition. In the 1893 version, the head falls from the camel years before Hastings shoots it. By the final scene, the body and most of the pack have disappeared.

Only the scars remain.

That leaves us with a very narrow answer.

Could a person have been tied to the Red Ghost? Yes.

Do we have evidence outside one newspaper story that it happened? No.

The camel is historically possible. The rider exists only in the tale.

To keep those two kinds of evidence from blending together, I had to sort the entire case.

09

Hi Jolly, Quartzsite, and Arizona’s Camel Memory

Hadji Ali is a real person in this case file.

His name appears in the history of the Army’s camel experiment. He was hired to help manage animals brought from the eastern Mediterranean, and he remained in the Southwest after the military project ended.^[11]

Americans found his name difficult to pronounce.

Hadji Ali became Hi Jolly.

He worked around Arizona for years and was eventually buried in Quartzsite. A pyramid-shaped monument now stands over his grave, topped by a metal camel.^[11]

It is one of the few places where the old camel experiment becomes something you can see and touch.

That is probably why Hi Jolly appears so often beside the Red Ghost.

When I began searching, I expected the legend’s trail to lead toward Quartzsite.

The map refused.

The 1893 story moves through the San Francisco River country, Eagle Creek, the Salt River region, the Verde, and an Anchor-J corral. Most of that trail lies in eastern and central Arizona.

Quartzsite is in western Arizona.

The original account never takes the Red Ghost there.

The connection between Hi Jolly and the Red Ghost is not a shared location. It is a shared animal.

Legends like having somewhere to stand. The Red Ghost has no known grave, no preserved hide, and no ranch we can identify with confidence.

Hi Jolly has a grave.

His monument gives Arizona’s camel history a physical address. Visitors see the metal camel, learn that the Army experiment really happened, and encounter stories of animals wandering the desert after it ended.

From there, the Red Ghost no longer sounds quite so impossible.

The monument documents Hadji Ali and the camel experiment. It does not document the Red Ghost.

Still, it helps explain why the legend remained at home in Arizona.

The state had real camels. It had a real cameleer. Eventually, it had a monument preserving both.

The Red Ghost could borrow credibility from all three.

And that may be the most important reason the story survived.

10

Why the Red Ghost Became an Urban Legend

Most monsters become less frightening once someone identifies them.

The Red Ghost became more believable.

Calling it a camel removed the supernatural explanation, but it did not make the story disappear. The Army records gave that camel a way into Arizona. Hi Jolly and the Quartzsite monument gave the state’s camel history a face and a place.

The explanation solved the wrong mystery.

It told us what the creature might have been.

It did not tell us who was on its back.

The 1893 article was built to keep readers balanced between belief and disbelief. It gave them tracks in the mud, a coroner’s verdict, a human head, rawhide scars, and a rancher with a name.

Then it reminded them that one witness also claimed to have seen a flying bear.

The newspaper never asked readers to choose between a report and a tall tale. It let the Red Ghost be both.

That uncertainty traveled well.

When the story appeared in more newspapers, each copy made it feel more widely confirmed. The illustrated versions gave readers scenes to remember: the creature breaking through a fence, a hunter seeing it at dawn, something human on its back.

Those drawings were not evidence.

They gave the story a visual history anyway.

Later writers made the legend easier to follow. They added a season, expanded the witness list, corrected names into new names, and turned a decaying head into a cleaner skull.

The story became more specific as its source trail became less visible.

That is part of what makes the Red Ghost an urban legend.

It is told as something that really happened. It is attached to recognizable places and fragments of genuine history. The details change as it passes from one source to another, while the disturbing center remains intact.

A camel crossed the desert.

Something human was tied to it.

Nobody knew why.

The oldest complete account understood what was happening. Before the feature ended, the writer said the Red Ghost had “degenerated into a story and then into a tradition.”^[3]

That sentence appeared in 1893.

The legend was not created a century later by websites or ghost hunters. It was already becoming folklore while the newspapers were still printing it as news.

The real camel history kept the story from floating away.

The missing rider kept it from ending.

That is why the Red Ghost survived.