BISBEE — The stories of ghosts here, some locals suspect, are bogus — just tall tales that attract tourists to the artists' enclave in Southeast Arizona.
They lure people to the town that used to be one of the largest in the West, and is now, well, the kind of town that feels compelled to remind you of that fact.
Here, you find a different kind of attraction nestled into the Mule Mountains.
The ghosts go by the names John McGraw, Billy Martin, Tris Speaker and Jim Thorpe.
Built in 1909, Warren Ballpark is believed to be America's oldest stadium still used for its original purpose.
It is now used by the Bisbee High School baseball and football teams, and for graduation. It houses the semi-pro Copper Kings, who played in the Pacific Southwest Baseball League season that ended last week.
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The ballpark sits in Warren, a mile or so south of Old Bisbee, through a traffic circle with options that include Douglas, Sierra Vista and Benson.
Owned by the Bisbee school district, the 3,000-capacity stadium has no permanent gift shop. The gates are locked. Barbed wire lines the forest-green wooden fence down the first and third base lines.
The grandstand is made of poured concrete, the hallways and clubhouses carved out beneath. Rotted-out wood on the overhang was replaced in the 1930s.
An old conveyor belt — mine surplus — serves as the bottom part of the backstop. The plumbing is old. Wood splinters away from the wall.
Tom Mosier, the co-owner of the Copper Kings, grew up here and now runs Jeep tours throughout the area.
He finds the stadium beautiful.
"Sacred ground," he said.
Squint your eyes, and you agree. Like many things here, you have to look through the lens of history.
Old Bisbee was too hilly for a field, so the field was built in Warren by a subsidiary of the Calumet and Arizona Mining Co. It was plotted at the end of the trolley line the company owned.
On June 27, 1909, the Bisbee Beautiful team — part of the national movement that sought to cure social ills by cleaning up towns — played the park's first game.
A few ballparks, including Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., also claim to be the oldest ballparks in America. Rickwood Field was built a year after Warren Ballpark.
Warren Ballpark is three years older than the major leagues' oldest stadium, Boston's Fenway Park. And 18 years older than all five National League West parks combined.
David Skinner, a Bisbee resident, writer and member of the Arizona chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research, spent three years researching the stadium's claim.
"I never found any one older," he said.
After years of recreational teams, the stadium became home to the Bisbee Miners of the "outlaw" Copper League in 1926-27.
The Bisbee Bees played in the Class D Arizona State League from 1928 to 1930, and in the Class D Arizona-Texas League in 1931, 1932 and from 1937 to 1939.
Class C incarnations included the Bees (1940-41), Yanks (1947), Miners (1948) and Copper Kings (1949-55), the final two franchises shared with Douglas.
Billy Martin's career-long feud with Clint Courtney — then a Copper Kings catcher — started here after a collision at second base. Earl Wilson, who won 22 games for the 1967 Detroit Tigers, started here more than a decade earlier as a catcher.
The soon-to-be famous and infamous — Hal Chase after being banned for fixing games, and two members of the 1919 "Black Sox" — trolled the stadium's visiting dugout.
After 1955, pro baseball — and many mining jobs — went away.
The park has a tremendous footnote that makes it historic, not simply old.
In the summer of 1917, just months after the United States had declared war, the Industrial Workers of the World declared a labor strike against Bisbee's mining companies. Anti-union groups and residents formed a posse and rounded up more than 1,000 men at the park for what now is termed the Bisbee Deportation.
Most of the men were loaded into train boxcars and abandoned in Hermanas, N.M. — only to be rescued by the Army. Months later, workers were allowed to return to Bisbee to reclaim their belongings.
The Bisbee/Douglas Copper Kings returned in 2003 to play in the Arizona-Mexico League, owned by Skinner and two Phoenix investors. The league folded after 16 games when other teams went broke.
Skinner calls that team "one of the great regrets of my life." Mosier still refers to the out-of-town owners as "Harold Hill from 'The Music Man.' "
The semi-pro team returned in 2006, and was purchased by Mosier and co-owner Frank Barco in 2007. College players stock the team, as do Southeast Arizona natives.
Fans have renewed faith the team will return next year, and the year after that.
Mosier and Barco would love to see the stadium cleaned up in time for its centennial anniversary tournament, which will likely take place July 4.
Mosier and Barco are considering forming a stadium commission — working with the city, school board or a private company — to try to raise money for improvements. There's even talk of ESPN coming out.
Maybe then the stadium will be appreciated for what it is, and was.
Because that's the thing about ghosts — when people come to see them, the place no longer seems empty.
It has life.
