"Sex, Murder, and the Myth of the Wild West: How a Soiled Dove Earned a Heart of Gold" - a gratuitous advertisement for the /r/AskHistorians conference, which begins tomorrow. I am presenting a paper with this title - dealing with a sex worker and Western folklore - in a session titled "Sinners, Saints and Spies: Historical Women and Propaganda" at 2:00 PM EDT, 16 September 2020. You - and others - might find it of interest!

All cultures have folklore, so it should come as no surprise that this existed in the West as well. It is also true that people bring their cultural baggage with them wherever they go, and since the "Old West" was really new - filled with people who had only recently arrived, they brought diverse traditions and beliefs with them. Immigrant folklore does not usually survive past the immigrant - or diffuse - except when it does!

A great example of immigrant folklore diffusing occurs with the Cornish knockers - the elfin-like entities in the mines. This belief was able to jump the Atlantic, manifest as tommyknockers, and spread beyond the Cornish - which is extraordinarily rare. The tommyknockers were less elf like than the Old World knockers - in the Western Hemisphere, they leaned more toward being ghosts. That's typical of what occurs in North America: whatever "it" was, it tends to become more like a ghost over time. This topic dominates the final two chapters of my recent book The Folklore of Cornwall (2018). Those chapters are based on this article published over a quarter century ago. This description of my book on Cornish folklore includes a discussion of the tommyknocker.

You may also find this quick overview of mining folklore of interest. There is also this quick treatment of Lost Mines in Western folklore.

So, ... we encounter lots of ghosts in the "Old West". The cryptid thing tends to be later - twentieth century, and the more recent the better. One of the things I find fascinating is how quickly the diverse people who came together in the Old West were able to establish their own folklore. Ghosts - which are typically though of as inhabiting old places - quickly populated the West. I did a study of a legend that popped up dealing with the 1859 trip of Horace Greeley to the West: within months, the story that ridiculed Greeley as an Eastern Greenhorn was extremely popular in much of the West. See This article as well as this summary.

I've been cataloging expressions of folklore in primary sources from the "Old West" for over four decades, so I could go on. In fact I could write a book - something that lingers in a haunting way on my bucket list. At this point, I'll leave it to you to ask questions.

I hope this helps.