By Lotus Porte-Moyel
LOTUS PORTE-MOYEL: Let me tell you who I was in high school. I spent a lot of my time at the community theater in Helena, Montana, where I grew up. I played DnD until 4 a.m. and attended elaborately themed dinner costume parties with my friends. When I was a junior, we had to do this final project that we presented at the end of the school year. I did it on this local woman who I was mildly obsessed with: Ellen Baumler – who I thought of as the ghost lady. This is part of an interview I did with her for that project when I was 17.
ELLEN BAUMLER: I’ve written a lot of books on lots of different Montana subjects, all kinds of different subjects. But ghosts probably are the thing that I’m best known for. So, that’s a little bit about me. I mean, now I am an independent historian, still writing, and in fact today just sent in my thirteenth book manuscript.
LOTUS: Oh, cool!
ELLEN: Thirteen is a lucky number, and it’s on cemeteries. So anyway, I’m feeling pretty good today, and that’s a little bit about me.
LOTUS: That book she talked about – “The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State” – was the last book she’d write before she died of cancer a few years ago. Five of Ellen’s 13 books are about haunted Montana. Those were the ones I loved most. About a year after interviewing her for my project, I found out Ellen lived a block from my house. I would see her and her fluffy marshmallow of a dog, Grendel, named after the monster in “Beowulf.” They’d walk to Hawthorn Park and back a few times a week. She wore her hair in a shiny, elegant bob. We’d wave and say hi, and I always thought, “The ghost lady is my neighbor!”
ELLEN, READING: As she was getting dressed, however, she glanced at the mirror over her dresser. There in a corner, clear as could be, she saw a small smudgy handprint.
LOTUS: That’s Ellen Baumler reading from “Beyond Spirit Tailings: Montana’s Mysteries, Ghosts and Haunted Places” for her audiobook. She’s telling the story of this ghostly child seen by the caretaker at the Grant-Kohrs ranch – what’s now a national historic site. This sighting happened in 1954. Ellen’s book describes how the caretaker assumed this handprint was made by her young son, Jack.
ELLEN, READING: ‘She called Jack into the room, boosted him up, and had him place his hand over the print. It did not match. Her blood ran cold. Some other child, not her own, had been in her room that night.’
LOTUS: I would stay up past my bedtime in elementary and middle school, reading Ellen’s ghost books. My friends would sleep over and sit around the bed making up terrifying stories. I’d chime in with an Ellen story because I felt they were actually real, and that was the scariest part. And I didn’t leave my fascination with her in high school – I have a book of hers in my college apartment – “Ghosts of the Last Best Place.” My grandpa gave it to me for my 18th birthday. A couple of days after Ellen died, a friend from home sent me her obituary. I was shocked. I felt like I’d just gotten to know her. Then, I got the chance to do for Ellen what she’d done for so many. I got to dig in and tell *her* story, to find out the facts of her life… to see if she left behind any spirit tailings of her own. But let me be clear about who Ellen was. She wasn’t *just* the ghost lady. She was a hardcore historian and applied academic rigor to all her projects – whether or not they involved spirit tailings, as she might say. It seemed just like she was meant to be a scholar. She got her PhD in English and medieval history, and she nominated more than 1,600 Montana sites for the National Register of Historic Places. She knew everything about the history of Helena.
JON AXLINE: Ellen was by far THE Helena historian.
LOTUS: Jon Axline is also a historian and co-authored a couple of books with her.
JON: There’s no question about it. She knew more about this town than anybody I’ve ever known. And, uh, including people who claim to be Helena historians.
LOTUS: Jon and Ellen became close friends. Jon’s daughters called her “Aunt Ellen.”
JON: She officiated my daughter Kate’s wedding at Reader’s Alley on October 30th. She wrote up, you know, the ceremony, and it was all geared directly at hauntings at Halloween, and my daughter, and her husband, because my daughter was kind of a goth.
LOTUS: Ellen could relate. Halloween was a big deal for her. She used to lead these haunted trolley tours when I was growing up, and if you got a spot on one, that was a good ticket. I was curious about Ellen’s life before she became this historian. So I called up her brother, Craig Boddington.
CRAIG BODDINGTON: Ellen was always fascinated by the occult.
LOTUS: He says that when Ellen was growing up, she was into spooking people.
CRAIG: She used to just scare the hell out of me when I was little telling me ghost stories. Of course she was enough older that torturing her little brother was part of the fun. So they’d build a fun house down in the basement, she and her girlfriends, and they would get a huge kick out of scaring the hell out of me, which they did with great success. She was wonderful at telling those stories, even when she was in school.
LOTUS: Ellen was Craig’s only sibling. They grew up in Kansas City. He says that when she was a teenager, Ellen was a firecracker, accidentally running their mom’s prized ‘66 Mustang through a garage door, for example.
LOTUS: And he told me something that really surprised me. He says she didn’t always know what she wanted to do. Ellen actually dropped out of college. This was after a year of studying theater at the University of Kansas – where she eventually got her doctorate.
CRAIG: I don’t think any of us thought she would ever go back to school. That didn’t seem like it was in the cards, but obviously, when she went back to school, she went back to school with a passion.
LOTUS: She was about to start her PhD when she met Mark Baumler. They spotted each other in a summer class, “French for Reading Knowledge.”
MARK BAUMLER: Ellen was in that class and, uh, we started doing our homework together and she claimed she did most of my homework for me.
LOTUS: They started dating, and Mark told her he was moving to Arizona for his grad degree. Ellen decided she could make the move with him as long as she could get assignments from her professors whenever they came back to Kansas. But in their first year in Arizona, Mark’s lung collapsed, and Ellen dropped everything to help him recover.
MARK: I just realized then that I wasn’t going to find anybody more caring, and it just came out. So…
LOTUS: So…. he proposed to Ellen right there.
MARK: No there wasn’t a lot of planning.
LOTUS: And they were married in Ellen’s parents’ living room.
MARK: Well, we didn’t push cake in each other’s face. I remember her saying, “Don’t do that! That’s disgusting and crass.” So we didn’t have that kind of wedding.
LOTUS: In 1988, Mark got a job in Montana – as the state archeologist for the Montana Historical Society. They moved with their three-year-old daughter Katie into their Helena house soon after. For the first few years in Helena, Ellen mainly restored their house and raised Katie.
This house was pretty important in terms of what became her work. Her first experience of Haunted Montana was in that house. It began with radio static the night the Baumlers moved in. Their clock radio was off, but a low hum of music and staticky voices filled their bedroom. It continued for three nights until she and Mark confessed it was keeping both of them awake. They couldn’t find any reasonable explanation for the sounds, so Ellen decided to look at the house’s history. She contacted the grandchildren of its original owners, who grew up there. Ellen invited them to visit.
MARK: Turned out that a previous owner of this house had one of the first ham radios in Helena and that’s the kind of radio sound that we both heard. I couldn’t explain it.
LOTUS: Mark wasn’t as into ghosts as his wife, but this occurrence at the house – it made him a little bit less of a ghost skeptic.
LOTUS: So you were like, “Okay, maybe.”
MARK: Maybe. Maybe. Her idea of ghosts has always been a little bit different than what ghost hunters do. Hers is about researching the history and looking to see if there’s any reason for a strange phenomena.
LOTUS: Ellen researched and wrote ghost stories on her own time – she did it around the more traditional work of a historian. For her, paranormal activity opened a door to understanding a place and how the people who crossed its path shaped that place. She thought it was another way to make history interesting.
MARK BAUMLER: She thinks of the paranormal more in terms of residual energies that are left behind in places in particular. And that’s why she called it ‘spirit tailings.’ It’s kind of the residue left after someone has gone.
LOTUS: After I found out Ellen was my neighbor, I always wanted to go inside her house. It’s this big, beautiful two-story Victorian with a wrap-around porch, black iron fence, lace curtains, and this big lilac bush that would explode with blooms every spring. Ellen wrote the historical plaque posted in their yard. Here’s Mark reading it:
MARK: ‘ The Seiler children, Bernice and Arthur, Jr. grew up here. They found a playmate in neighbor and future film legend Gary Cooper, whose birthplace is directly across 11th Avenue. During one escapade, Bernice recalled that Cooper was seriously injured in a fall from the Seiler’s wrought iron fence, which still stands.’
LOTUS: I finally got to go inside the house to meet up with Mark. As he shows me in, along with Grendel the dog, I’m struck by the polished, wooden staircase leading up to the second floor off the coat room. What I think would have originally been the drawing room still looks just like that, including ship models made by Mark and framed needle-points stitched by Ellen.
LOTUS: Did she make all those little… guys?
MARK: Uh, that’s me.
LOTUS: So fun.
MARK: I’m a modeler. And then Ellen’s more, uh, decorating and, uh, and, you know, a lot this stuff is hers as well. Uh, she’d buy them for me and I’d make ‘em.
LOTUS: Hmm.
LOTUS: Their house could be a museum – the kind where all the rooms would be closed off with velvet rope, except Mark still lives here. Mark leads me into the mud room and hands me a bo wl of marbles with this knowing look on his face.
MARK: You want an Ellen Marble? You know the story of marbles? Pick a marble.
LOTUS: Wow!
MARK: You gotta pick your own because it probably has something to do with you. Whether, whether it’s…
LOTUS: Okay.
MARK: … your choice or the marble’s choice. But you know her story about marbles. She thinks that those are tailings left by paranormal encounters.
LOTUS: This marble business is a whole thing. In one of her books, Ellen wrote about a repairman finding a marble in the elevator gears of Montana’s first private men’s club. The original club burned down, and it was arson – in a fire set by …. its elevator operator.
After that, she’d discover marbles randomly around her house. One Saturday, after Ellen’s death, her old friend and collaborator Jon Axline saw a marble.
JON: I got up when I was sitting on the bench at the foot of the bed getting dressed and looked down on the floor. In our bedroom there was a marble. And I knew that wasn’t there, because I sat there every day to get dressed, and that marble wasn’t there.
LOTUS: Jon says he would have heard his cats playing with it, but it was just sitting there.
JON: I think Ellen was telling me, “Don’t worry about it. Just do your best.” Yeah, it’s just that. It’s like I know she’s here. And I miss her. I mean, I just don’t know how else to put it. I mean, I miss my friend.
LOTUS: Ellen was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer a year and a half before she died. It had metastasized throughout her body, but she kept writing, speaking at events, and feeding the squirrels outside her office until the end. Her celebration of life was held in Reeder’s Alley, Helena’s oldest neighborhood. Ellen gave tours of the Pioneer Cabin there. When she retired from the Historical Society in 2018, she moved into an office in the alley. The sign that swung outside her office read, “History Takes Time.” The first time I met Ellen was in that office. I had emailed her asking if she would take a research intern, not knowing she was retired and working pro bono. She invited me to chat with her anyway. We talked about her career and ways I could start doing my own research. As I was leaving, she gave me a book she and Jon Axline co-wrote called “Hidden History of Helena, Montana.” On the title page, she wrote, “To Lotus – With warmest wishes and good luck choosing your pathway! Ellen Baumler.”
ELLEN: You know, the best advice I can give anyone is just to, to follow what you love to do. And your life will be so much better if you do.
LOTUS: Thank you. Yay! I’m gonna pause the recording.
LOTUS: I called Mark Baumler after we met up at his house. I wanted to know if he had sensed Ellen since she passed. He said he’s still mostly a skeptic of the paranormal, but he has felt the presence of another person in their bedroom – it’s like a feeling of the air moving or something taking up space. He says we’ll probably never know what happens after we go. He was at Ellen’s bedside in the ICU when she died. She couldn’t communicate in her last few days.
MARK: Only at the very end, when I think, I’d have to say she was probably already passed, she reached out and said, “Mark.” So I, I, I know she saw me at the end and I feel good for that.
LOTUS: Yeah, that’s really hard. How, how, yeah. How did you feel when, when she did that, reached out?
MARK: I felt really good because, because I was afraid she didn’t even know I existed anymore or that I was there, and that kind of made me feel like, well, at some level she did hear me, or see me, or know that I was there. It helped me a lot. I don’t know. I hope it helped her knowing that, you know, knowing I was there at the end. We don’t know what that end feels like.
LOTUS: Mark says he doesn’t think Ellen felt she got any closer to understanding the end through her research and exploration of Montana’s dead. But she did feel there was something beyond human understanding and research – even her own…
MARK: Hello Lotus, it’s Mark Baumler again. Last night I heard our radio again. I guess I didn’t freak out because I’d heard it before. And I usually don’t try to see what time it is, but, uh, this time I did, and it was 3:08 AM. March 8th was Ellen’s birthday. I don’t know if it’s a strange circumstance or something, something else. I guess I’ll let you know if I start finding any marbles too. Bye.