Haunted South Dakota

Deadwood — City of Ghosts

Deadwood was born in 1876, an illegal gold camp on land the U.S. government had promised to the Lakota, and it lived hard and died loud from the moment it opened. Within weeks of the camp filling up, Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back of the head holding his last hand of cards, two pair, aces and eights, the "Dead Man's Hand" that still carries his name. He was one of the first of many. Deadwood was a town of gunfights, gambling halls, brothels, and back-alley murders, and almost none of that violence ever got cleaned up properly. The whole historic district is preserved today, which means the saloons, hotels, and gambling houses where people bled out are still standing, still open, and still occupied, sometimes by more than the living.

Ghost Adventures — "Deadwood: City of Ghosts" (2015)

Zak Bagans brought the Ghost Adventures crew to Deadwood for the show's 2015 Halloween special, treating the entire town as a single haunted location rather than picking one building. The team investigated the Bullock Hotel, built by Seth Bullock, Deadwood's first sheriff, whose presence is still reported pacing the halls and rattling staff who don't keep the place to his standards. They worked the Adams House, the Fairmont Hotel, and the saloons connected to the town's gunfighter dead. Bagans documented the layered history of the camp, the murders, the brothel deaths, and the unsettled spirit of Hickok himself, who never wanted to be in Deadwood in the first place and reportedly told friends he felt he would die there. He was right. The special framed Deadwood not as one haunted house but as a haunted town, a place where the Old West never fully ended and the dead never fully checked out.

Hotel Alex Johnson

The Hotel Alex Johnson opened in 1928, the dream of a railroad executive who wanted to honor both the coming of the railroad and the heritage of the Lakota people, and who broke ground the same year work began on Mount Rushmore. The result is a strange and beautiful building, German Tudor on the outside, Lakota and Plains motifs woven through the interior, sitting at the very foot of the Black Hills. It has hosted six U.S. presidents. It has also, in the decades since, become known as one of the most haunted hotels in the Great Plains, and most of that reputation lives on the eighth floor.

The signature spirit is the Lady in White, most often described as a bride or young woman who fell, or jumped, from a window on the eighth floor. Guests in room 812 and along that floor report the television turning on and off by itself, faucets running on their own, the curtains moving with no draft, and the apparition of a woman in a white gown standing at the window or drifting through the hall before vanishing. Other reported spirits include Alex Johnson himself, the hotel's namesake, and the sounds of children playing in empty corridors. Staff have learned to talk to the building. The eighth floor is the one they warn guests about.

Ghost Hunters — "Hotel Haunts Unleashed" (2011)

The TAPS team from Ghost Hunters investigated the Hotel Alex Johnson for the Syfy series, focusing on the eighth-floor activity and the long history of guest reports tied to the Lady in White. The crew documented environmental anomalies and personal experiences across the upper floors, treating the hotel's century of accumulated tragedy and the stories of the falling bride as the core of the case. The episode cemented the Alex Johnson as South Dakota's flagship haunted hotel, the one building in the state that people drive hours to stay in specifically hoping not to sleep.

Black Hills Bigfoot Range & Taku-He

The Black Hills rise out of the prairie like an island, 1.2 million acres of dense ponderosa pine, granite spires, and canyons that go dark early and stay that way. The Lakota call them Paha Sapa, the heart of everything that is, and they were sacred long before gold or Mount Rushmore. They are also, by reputation, deeply unsettled ground, and the being most often reported here is not a ghost. It is the Tall Man, the hair-covered giant described across generations of Lakota tradition, and his stranger cousin, Taku-He.

Taku-He is one of the most genuinely bizarre figures in American cryptid lore. Reported across South Dakota since at least the 1970s, he is described as a Bigfoot-like creature, seven to eight feet tall, foul-smelling, and, in the most striking accounts, wearing a top hat and a long cloak or cape. The "top-hat Bigfoot" sightings clustered around the reservations and the hills, with reports of cattle mutilations and a smell of sulfur tied to his appearances, which has led some to file Taku-He somewhere between a flesh-and-blood animal and something far harder to classify. Whatever he is, the Black Hills produce a steady stream of tracks, wood knocks, and sighting reports to this day. There is enough room out here for something very large to stay very well hidden, and clearly it has.

Pine Ridge & the Badlands Bigfoot

South of the Black Hills, the land breaks apart into the Badlands, a maze of eroded buttes, dry washes, and sharp canyons that the Lakota called Mako Sica, "land bad." It borders the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, one of the largest reservations in the country and a place with deep, long-running traditions of the Tall Man, a hair-covered being who is treated less as a monster to be hunted and more as a presence to be respected. On Pine Ridge, sightings of the Tall Man are not a novelty. They are part of the fabric of the place, and they have been for as long as anyone can remember.

Finding Bigfoot — "Badlands Bigfoot" (2013)

The Finding Bigfoot team, Matt Moneymaker, Cliff Barackman, James "Bobo" Fay, and Ranae Holland, traveled to South Dakota to investigate the Tall Man reports coming out of the Pine Ridge area and the Badlands. The episode leaned heavily on Lakota witnesses and tradition, treating the Tall Man with respect rather than spectacle, and the team ran their usual night investigations across the broken terrain, conducting call-and-response howls and wood knocks and reviewing witness encounters. The Badlands and the surrounding grasslands are exactly the kind of low-population, hard-to-search country where a large, intelligent animal could move unseen for generations, and the Pine Ridge accounts gave the crew some of the most culturally grounded testimony the show ever collected.

Rapid City UFO Corridor

Rapid City sits at the eastern edge of the Black Hills, right next to Ellsworth Air Force Base, and that combination, wide-open dark sky and a major military installation, has made it a UFO hotspot for over seventy years. The reports here are not just campfire stories. The most famous is the Black Hills / Rapid City case of August 1953, when objects were tracked simultaneously on ground radar at the Rapid City Air Filter Center and visually by ground observers and Air Force interceptor pilots scrambled to chase them. The lights moved, stopped, and outran the jets sent after them. The case was logged into Project Blue Book, the Air Force's official UFO investigation, and remains one of the more difficult-to-dismiss radar-visual events in the program's history precisely because the military's own equipment and pilots were the witnesses.

Decades of reports have followed, a steady stream of nighttime lights, formations, and fast-moving objects over the hills and the base. The proximity to Ellsworth means the area sees plenty of legitimate military aircraft, which accounts for many sightings, but not all of them, and the 1953 case in particular has never been comfortably explained away. Out here the sky is enormous and very dark, and people have been looking up at it nervously for a long time.