Trent Tope wasn’t a big believer in the supernatural when he bought the 130-year-old Aladdin General Store.
“I had heard from a local kid, a teenager who had worked here over the years, and he told some stories among the community,” Tope said. “And they were good stories.”
But Tope figured that’s all they were.
Stories.
In one, the teenager turned around after opening the store one day and saw someone standing behind the counter, on the employee side.
“So he immediately says, ‘Ma’am, you can’t be back there. How can I help you?’” Tope said. “And then he realizes this woman has got huge poofy hair like a perm that is not in style anymore.”
The woman was wearing tight blue jeans with a Western shirt. Before the young man could say any more, she simply disappeared.
“So I’d heard those stories and I just thought, ‘Teenagers and their stories. Who knows?’” Tope said.
Phantom Perfume And Footfalls
After Tope purchased the building, he discovered it came with a bit of atmosphere.
“It’s an old building,” Tope said. “So there’s creaks. There’s groans.”
Tope had to do some foundation work after buying the building too, which meant more shifting, more creaking, and more groaning.
“When it gets cold or hot, the building makes noise,” Tope said. “But creaks are one thing …”
Footfalls and the phantom smells of cigar smoke and perfume were something entirely different. Something he could not explain.
And something that made him feel uneasy.
“Over the years, there have been multiple instances of footsteps and phantom smells,” he said. “Especially upstairs.”
When Tope researched the history of the general store, he learned there were bedrooms upstairs that might have been part of a brothel.
‘Help Me!’
Still, nothing concrete was yet changing his mind about the supernatural.
Not even after Jordan Yates, who owns the Aladdin store with Tope, saw someone standing where a customer shouldn’t, who then disappeared.
Tope could still explain those things away in a creaky, groany store that’s more than a century old.
Then one day all that changed.
“I was walking toward the coffee machine, and I may or may not have had a bottle of Bailey’s in my hand,” he said. “But I instantly heard in my left ear the most horrible screeching static sound. And it didn’t make much sense, but it scared me.”
Tope yelled out, “What the heck!? That’s not funny!”
He stomped out of the store and stayed away for at least 20 minutes.
“Then I decided, ‘OK, I’m just being stupid. I’ll go look at the cameras,’” Tope said. “So I pull the cameras up and it kind of looks like I’m crazy. I jump, I look up to the left and say, ‘What the heck?! That’s not funny!’ And I storm out.”
Tope had a bigger, more powerful camera outside, which he’d recalibrated to look at license plates.
“That apparently has a better microphone, because I 100% caught on camera a female voice speaking,’” Tope said. “And after I said ‘What the heck’ and stormed out of the store, you hear it again, even after I left the store, after about 30 seconds.”
Both times the female voice said “Help me,” Tope said. A little while later, the woman is heard saying, “No help.”
The words are soft and distant, Tope said, but he can longer dismiss them as imagination.
“Everybody I’ve had listen to the clip seems to hear the same thing,” Tope said. “And when you catch it on camera like that, it’s pretty irrefutable.”
Untimely End For First Owner
Tope has since started paying a little more attention to the history of the Aladdin General Store, trying to get a sense of whose voice might have been speaking to him from the past.
The store began as the Wyoming Mercantile, built in 1896 by Amos Robinson on land deeded to him two years earlier.
“He was murdered within six months,” Tope said. “He had put a bar in here and that upset the guy who had the Beulah bar. Not the current Beulah bar, but there was a bar over there.”
One night after a card game in Beulah, the rival bar owner shot Robinson in the back and killed him.
“He got sentenced to life in prison but only served a couple of years,” Tope said. “Because, back in the 1800s, money talked.”
Tope: It’s Something We Live With
Tope has smelled cigar smoke in the store, but has never heard a male voice, so doesn’t believe the voice is related to Robinson’s death.
His best guess is that the woman’s voice belonged to the mother of two little girls who played upstairs while their mom worked in the coal town’s company store.
The girls, who were around 12 years old, were killed in a fire sometime in the 1920s. Some reports say the fire was in the attic and the deaths were due to smoke inhalation. Others say the fire was at a different location.
“It’s very sad,” Tope said. “So on our T-shirts, actually, we have the little girls in the window of the building. It’s just something we live with.”
A Store Full Of Memories
Whatever the explanation for the voice, there’s no shortage of history within the store’s walls.
The store has retained its original architecture, going back to its early years as a company-owned store. Miners shopped there with company-issued currency that could only be spent there.
A nearby rail line allowed goods to be offloaded directly into the store’s warehouse space.
The general store carried everything the miners needed. There was a post office so they could send letters to their families back home in Europe or the East, and a grocery that sold bulk flour, salt pork, coffee and other staples.
They could buy rugged denim and wool clothing suited to a subterranean workplace at the haberdashery. And there was even a funeral parlor, which kept a stock of coffins in the attic.
Decades later, the attic still had “overflow” stock from the 1890s — high-button shoes, stiff celluloid collars, and some of those wooden coffins for the miners who died in Hay Creek shafts.
Walking In Their Footsteps
The store’s layout has changed little since it was built. That means customers follow the same path coal miners took in 1898 to buy pouches of tobacco, whiskey, or woolen clothes.
Aladdin’s coal boom, like so many other mining booms in Wyoming, was short-lived. By the 1920s, the mines were playing out and the Wyoming and Missouri River Railroad faced financial ruin.
Aladdin could have become a ghost town, but the timber industry and its location between Belle Fourche, South Dakota, and Hulett — the gateway to Devils Tower — helped give the town a second life.
The store survived The Great Depression and two world wars with little change, serving as a sanctuary for the ranching community and later as a destination for history buffs and Sturgis Motorcycle Rally bikers.
The latter particularly appreciate Aladdin’s tiny bar inside the store, where they squeeze in elbow to elbow for creative cocktails and shots, like the hurricane.
Not Always Supernatural
For Tope, the store’s past had become more than something to share with visitors. To help understand what he experienced, he tapped Black Hills Paranormal to investigate the store.
“They caught a few orbs and stuff but otherwise not much,” Tope said. “Since then, we’ve not had much activity because they did a cleansing.”
Quiet or not, the store’s ghost stories will get another telling at its Halloween party, which Tope said will include a costume contest and tours exploring the building’s history and its reported hauntings.
But not every disturbance at the Aladdin General Store has been so hard to explain.
One day, Tope arrived to find chips on the floor, clothing knocked over, and the phone hanging off its hook. In the pharmacy area, pills and other items were scattered everywhere.
It felt frighteningly helter-skelter, and Tope feared he had somehow upset the store’s ghosts.
“It literally made me very concerned, because I don’t want to deal with that,” he said.
Then he checked the security cameras and breathed a sigh of relief.
The culprit wasn’t an angry ghost at all.
It was a squirrel.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
