The legendary Skull City Mine offers visitors a glimpse of the past, the chance to meet some ghosts, and the grim cost of striking it rich. Although Skull City was the largest producing gold mine in Arizona for a time, it never paid off for its investors or its discoverer, Garrison Ogburn.

The mine changed hands  a bunch of time due to the whim of the gold market, theft (we call it "high-grading"), the lack of a decent water supply. It shut down for good in 1944. When the mine closed people left believing they would return in six months. The mine never reopened. Almost overnight, a once thriving community became a ghost town.

Now, it is a popular tourist attraction, overseen by the Atwood family, luring visitors from nearby Unity, the town named for the church founded by the Stockton family.

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Skull City Mine’s self-guided tour begins at the old ticket shack, a wood-framed building chock full a mining memorabilia and ore samples from the mine and surrounding area. You can usually find Helen “Mama” Heinbecker holding court near the cash register. If you ask her kindly, she’ll tell ya about them ghosts.

Visitors pay their admission ($7.00 a head), and they are given a "treasure map" of the area.

The first stop on main street is the assay office and manager's headquarters, one of the most complete buildings town. The walls ar built from low-grade ore and contain five hundret thousand dollars in gold and silver.

Visitors can wander through the bullion storage room where gold and silver bars were stored in an underground vault.

Those brave souls who got the gumption to walk up the steep flight of wooden stairs will find them selves in a baedroom complete with an old rusty cot. Plenty a people report seeing ghosts up there, so don’t go up alone.

Although Ogburn held the original claim to the rich mine, he ended his life on the bank of the Vulture River with a bullet in his head and mere pennies in his pocket.

He claims he saw demons, that the whole damned place was a hell hole, but most figured it was the rot gut moonshine that did him in.

The tour continues to the Glory Hole, a pit that originated in 1919 when some miners chipping ore out of the rock walls cut into support pillars and brought down one hundred feet of rock on their heads. Surviving miners dubbed the resulting hole the "Glory Hole" because five of their companions and nine donkeys were "sent on to glory" in the tradegy.

Close to the Glory Hole, the tour trail loops around to the blacksmith shop, where you can find Jonah Lee Atwood, crafting all sorts of stuff from metal. The Atwood family been caretakers of Skull City since it was willed to by Mr. Ogburn. Took a while to find the will, though, and the townspeople of Unity fought for control of the mine for close to a decade before it was all settled. When Henry “Cobb” Atwood passed, Jonah’s dad, Lee took over. When he passed, during “the spoiling” of ’01, Jonah Lee took over ever since.

Near the blacksmith shop is the wooden Headframe or Gallows Frame (is the structural frame above an underground mine entrance for you tourists), which looms over the entrance to the mine shaft. The main mine shaft drops to a depth of three thousand two hundred feet at a perfect forty two percent incline. 

The opening is partially boarded up to protect visitors, but you can still peer into the “devil’s throat”

Over time, miners removed three hundred million dollars of gold from “the devil’s throat” as it was called. Perhaps the same amount disappeart into miner’s

dirty pockets.

South of the blacksmith shop, the dirt road leads you to the Power Station where steel balls crushed rubble for the cyanide leaching process used in the later years of the mine’s production. The power station sits at the far end of town overlooking the white-encrusted leaching pits. Now, if you need to see ghosts, the power station is the place to go. Place is crawling with ‘em.

From there, the trail loops back to the town square, near Garrison Ogburn’s original home (and place of death, depending on who you believe), and the infamous Hanging Tree, where eighteen townspeople ended their lives for the crimes of rape, murder and highgrading (stealing gold). Garrison Ogburn believe many of them to be demon spawn.

Another group of buildings served as bunkhouses. Visitors also can tour the old mess hall with its cast iron stove and wooden ice chest and the odd assortments of pans and dishes.

Although it’s off-limits to outsiders, the original schoolhouse, on the other side of town, is in pretty good shape, along with a second schoolhouse. The Atwood use these building for storage, so it’s best not to wander over there. Its off-limits, in otherwords.

Near the schoolhouse is a playground, complete with rundown see-saw, swings and slide, recall happier times.

In its prime, Skull City’s population was of one thousand, but it now mainly houses rattlesnakes, ghosts and the Atwoods.

Unlike lots of ghost towns today, Skull City, it has not been restored, renovated, or filled with gussied-up tourist- trappings.  It is the real thing, and squats south of the Skull Mountains. 

To reach the Skull City Mine, take Route 56 west two and one half miles out of Unity to Skull City Mine Road. Turn south on the road and travel twelve miles to the mine. You can’t miss the sign.

The mine is open sun up to sun down, 7 days a week. Admission is $7 for adults and $4 for children ages six through twelve.

The tour is not recommended for children under six, but hey, if you’re gonna bring ‘em, you might as well bring them.