Red Ghost

The Red Ghost is one of the Southwest’s strangest frontier legends: a large reddish camel with the bleached skeleton of a man lashed to its back, said to have wandered Arizona in the 1880s and early 1890s. Unlike most cryptids, its basic ingredients are real. In the 1850s the U.S. Army, under War Secretary Jefferson Davis, bought dozens of camels from the Mediterranean world to test them as pack animals in arid country. The experiment, known as the Camel Corps, was ended around the time of the Civil War, and surplus animals were sold or turned loose.

According to the story, the trouble began around 1883 at a ranch near Eagle Creek in eastern Arizona. A rancher’s wife reportedly saw a huge, reddish beast carrying a devilish-looking rider after her dogs began barking, and another woman was later found trampled to death. Searchers found tracks and tufts of red hair. Prospectors then told of something tearing through their camp, and retellings added wrecked wagons, a lassoed rider knocked flat, and even a fight with a grizzly bear.

The legend ends in 1893, when a farmer named Mizoo Hastings is said to have shot the animal as it ate in his yard. Examination supposedly showed a camel with leather straps cutting into its flanks and the remains of a skeleton, its skull missing, still tied on. Why a body was tied to the animal has never been settled; popular guesses include a dying prospector who bound himself to a camel hoping it would find water.

Much of the tale rests on later newspaper-style retellings, and writers who have looked into it say some records are missing or cannot be confirmed. Even so, camels from the Army experiment did live on in the desert for years, and the Red Ghost became a favorite way to connect that forgotten chapter with Arizona campfire storytelling.

A large red or reddish camel with a bleached human skeleton tied to its back. Retellings exaggerate it to enormous size, but the earliest versions describe a frightening, fast animal that trampled people and livestock.

Open desert, creek bottoms and ranch country of eastern and central Arizona, near the New Mexico line in the earliest accounts.

The Red Ghost is remembered alongside the Camel Corps and its Syrian-born driver Hi Jolly (Hadji Ali), who is buried at Quartzsite, Arizona, where a camel-topped pyramid monument marks the grave. The legend appears in Old West magazines and Arizona folklore collections.