By Stan Stelter
Dunn Center, ND – There's a butte in western North Dakota that some say is more than just dirt and grass and rocks. It has a history -- old-timers say -- of being haunted.
A haunted butte? Yes, hard to believe, but the story persists. The butte -- known as Ziner's (zy-ner) Butte -- is on the ranch of Marvin Synnes in Dunn County. Synnes was a teenager when he first saw something spooky on that butte -- just a little west of the ranch house. "And we were at our neighbors to the east here, and I suppose it was about 10 o'clock at night, and we left, and we saw a light up on the butte. And we had wheat, we stored wheat up there. We had some kind of bins we put together, and my dad thought somebody is up there robbing us because we saw a light up there, and we drove up there, and there was nothing, nothing to see. So guess that was my only encounter with that, but there is other people that have seen it, too."
Some say the explanation is simple. It's just headlights shining off the butte from cars passing on a nearby road. Or it could be the moon shining off the rocks.
But others have a more chilling tale. They say the light is a lantern carried by the ghost of Ole Ziner -- who was shot and killed near the butte by another man over a property dispute. An argument that led to murder more than 100 years ago. And, as the story goes, the ghost of Ole Ziner has been out on the butte with a lantern, searching for his head -- which was blown away in the shooting. "You know he was going across the top of the butte from north to south, I guess, with that lantern. That was the way the story went that they had told, and it is kind of spooky."
Synnes says the light hasn't been seen for years. "Well, I tell you, it hasn't happened in the last few years, and most of the old-timers that did know about it are gone."
But some in Dunn County still remember -- and wonder if the light on Ziner's butte really is a ghostly lantern.