Eerie Idaho: Sinister Dwarfs Living in the Owhyee Mountains Near Murphy

I think many of us have an "Idaho Bucket List" of places in the stat that we'd like to explore at some point.  I just scratched this one off the list after hearing a story that sounds like it's straight out of Stephen King's It.

The Ghost Town of Silver City

If you've lived in Idaho for a while, you may be familiar with the tales of ghost sightings in Silver City.  A popular mining town in the 1800s, the small Idaho town is now a ghost town surrounded by spooky stories. According to an old Boise Weekly article, the Idaho Hotel near Silver City is kind of like the Gem State's version of American Horror Story: Hotel's Hotel Cortez.  On the show, the hotel was still open for business but some of its "guests" were actually spirits of people who died at the hotel. The Idaho Hotel is still open for business Memorial Day weekend thru October and guests have reported seeing the ghosts of two men who died in the hotel following a shoot out on its front steps.. They've also claimed to have been touched on the leg in the middle of the night by the ghost of the hotel's former owner who took his own life in its south saloon. As eerie as those stories are, they're nothing compared to the tale of what's lurking in the nearby Owhyee Mountains.

Not Your Average Gnome

Living in the Treasure Valley, you might think Shoshone and Bannock are just street names on the Bench and Downtown Boise.  They're actually the names of Indian tribes that lived and hunted on the land near the Owhyee Mountains. When Silver City was a booming gold mining town, white settlers just couldn't seem to figure out why the tribes would avoid hunting and fishing on certain parts of the land...until they started hearing eerie things in the hillside themselves.

According to werewoofs.com and In Wanderlust, the sounds mimicked several things from singing to a crying baby but that's not what the sounds were coming from at all.  Indian legend holds that the sounds were actually coming from two foot tall, cannibalistic dwarfs living in the mountains.  They may be tiny, but these little guys were strong enough to carry elk on their backs and also had long tails that were more often than not wrapped up to hide their true identity.

These dwarfs didn't live off the wildlife roaming the hillside. Their prey was far more sinister.  They would use the crying and singing sounds to lure children away from their homes and into the woods where they were kidnapped and well...you know what the word "prey" means.  Basically these guys were tiny Pennywise the Dancing Clowns without the fluffy wig and big red nose.

There's never been any physical evidence of the dwarfs existence, but settlers were said to have found tiny footprints in mud and snow near mountain peaks which seemed consistent with the tribe legends about missing children.

How Real are the Legends?

According to comments on our Facebook page, you guys prefer REAL Idaho haunts to the man made haunted houses, so tell us - have you seen or felt anything weird in or around the Owhyee mountains?