Pasatiempo investigated two reportedly haunted Cuchillo properties owned by Josh Bond. Photographer Luis Sánchez-Saturno and I sat in the darkened bar — which remained very warm, despite the cool night, and despite the fact that the other rooms in the structure were cold — for a couple of hours. Right before we got our video camera set up, the lights in the bar inexplicably went out. Warned by Bond that batteries tend to go dead in the bar, we shouldn't have been surprised when the batteries in the digital audio recorder did just that. But beyond that, there was very little that suggested the supernatural, and the only shadow we caught was that of a stray cat, which had made its way into the adjoining storeroom. We left a pack of cards on the bar and invited our gambler ghost to deal a hand after we left — but he hadn't taken us up on our offer by the time we returned in the morning.

We spent the rest of the night in the house for sale on Ebay, and aside from a surprising, startling "bang" from the bathroom area (caught on an audio recording) that occurred shortly after we turned the lights off, we both felt pretty comfortable and slept soundly. However, I did clown around a bit too much before we turned off those lights, perhaps showing disrespect to any resident spirits, and I suddenly felt a cold wave and a painful tightness in my chest. That led me to apologize in Spanish for the chistes (jokes) and to ask for permission to sleep there, so maybe we got a free pass after that. Skeptic Sánchez-Saturno calls himself "a ghost scarecrow — I scare ghosts away." Maybe I should bring him along every time I get assigned these kinds of stories.

For what it's worth, Bond's neighbor, artist K. Allyson Hayes, told Pasatiempo that she has felt the presence of an unseen entity in her house too. She heard its footsteps the night before we arrived, and her cat chased it all over the house. She's not afraid. "Being so isolated, I feel it's nice to have the company."

Incidentally, some old-timers in Cuchillo still recall stories of mysterious "fireballs" coming over the nearby hilltops and darting around the valley near the creek. José Romero, now a spry 80-year-old, owned the Cuchillo bar for about 20 years. He tells the tale of a couple of Depression-era cowboys who jumped on their horses and chased those fireballs over hill and dale until the balls just zoomed away. Maybe Cuchillo's residents should call in some UFO experts.

— Robert Nott