By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The most bizarre and memorable noon hour at my law office in downtown Salt Lake City started with no hint whatsoever of the remarkable events about to unfold.
As usual, I’d settled in alone in front of my antique oak roll top, its many secret compartments and abundant index card drawers the relics of a bygone era of recording business matters. The half-eaten ham sandwich and nearly empty bag of potato chips on the desktop by my phone no longer commanded my attention. Instead, my eyes were riveted to a laptop computer as I scrolled through the latest digital edition of the Salt Lake Tribune online.
I’d worked downtown for four decades—almost my entire adult life. In the early days, noon and lunch time meant recess, respite, and freedom…a chance to meet friends for lunch, take walks with colleagues, or listen to brown bag bluegrass concerts. As I aged, however, I started to shun such midday frivolity.
I was not anti-social, mind you. With so few hours in each day and so many demands on my time, however, a quick take-out lunch devoured in my office became de rigueur. Skipping visits with colleagues became my default. The exciting sights and sounds of a vibrant and interesting downtown Salt Lake City were a distraction to avoid instead of an opportunity for pleasure and edification. Over time, as I turned down invitation after invitation to dine out, people stopped asking me to lunch altogether and my devolution into a professional hermit was complete.
In the middle of one of these reclusive solo lunches, I heard a knock. I walked over to my closed office door—slightly perturbed at the egregious trespass upon my solitude—and opened it. Joseph Rawlins and William Dickson walked in. This would not be unusual, but for the uncontroverted fact that both men had been dead for close to a century.
The mustachioed Rawlins wore a morning suit coat, button-down vest, and bow tie. Dickson was attired in a dark overcoat and sported a long goatee beard that reached well below his high and starched white collar. Both men were legendary lawyers of the old American West, and the founders of the only two Utah law firms where I have worked.
In 1892, just a few years before Butch Cassidy and his “Wild Bunch” gang started robbing banks and trains, Rawlins served as Utah’s territorial delegate to Congress. He introduced the Enabling Act that provided for Utah’s admission into the Union. After statehood in 1896, the Utah Legislature elected Rawlins to the United States Senate. He later taught some of the very first law classes at the fledgling University of Utah College of Law.
In 1882, shortly after the shootout at Tombstone’s OK Corral and just as Annie Oakley made her first appearance at a Wild West sharpshooting show, Dickson moved his law practice from Nevada to Salt Lake City. President Chester A. Arthur appointed him United States Attorney for Utah in 1884, where he prosecuted criminal polygamy cases against members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also served for many years as chief legal counsel for Thomas Kearns’ Silver King Coalition Mine in Park City, and helped start the Bingham Canyon copper mine.
Dickson and Rawlins knew each other well. In life, they handled cases together, faced off in court, jointly owned interests in a mine, and likely were friends. In death, they apparently had found a common purpose and delight in haunting one of their legal scions. And now, their apparitions stood in my office.
“Well, gentlemen,” I said with a slight tremor in my voice, “this is an unexpected surprise.” As I opened my mouth to continue my tentative greeting, Rawlins held up his hand to command silence. He said, “We have been watching you, Michael Patrick O’Brien, and we are dismayed indeed.” I was flabbergasted and even hurt to hear even such mild words of reproach from my professional progenitors. I asked “Why? I work hard, give great client service, and contribute to firm profitability. Why are you dismayed?”
Dickson spoke next, “Michael…Joseph Rawlins and I, and many others, spent lifetimes creating a history for you, right outside the doors of this rock and glass tower in which you hide. Now you seem to shun that legacy. You ignore it. As a result, you dishonor not just us, but those who infuse that legacy with life today. You are in downtown but not of downtown. We have come to implore you—cease and desist in this transgression.”
“I think I am quite fine, and now I really must get back to work…” I started to say when Rawlins raised his hand once again to hush me. He spoke, “Work? Being alive is your work!” I paused and said, “That’s a lovely phrase but it sounds somewhat familiar to me. Did either of you ever read Charles Dickens while you were alive?” Ignoring my clever literary observation, Dickson explained, “It is required of every downtown denizen to experience, understand, and walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before him in this venue. If you do not appreciate your own unique history in life, you are condemned to do so over and again after death.”
“Again, respectfully,” I said, “You both sound a lot like Dickens. What’s your point?” Rawlins proclaimed, “As our professional heir and descendant, we have secured a priceless boon for you. You will be visited by a series of historical spirits. I urge you…hear their stories. Heed their lessons, lest you succumb to the fate towards which you now traverse with such recklessness and haste…historic ignorance.”
“Guys, this is really nice of you, I mean it, but I really don’t have time for all this strange paranormal stuff,” I said as politely as possible. “I have a Teams meeting soon, and obligations to clients and family members, and there’s all this community service that I do, so I while do appreciate your interest in my historic well-being, I think I’d prefer just to finish my ham sandwich, read the rest of the news, and get back to practicing law.”
The ghostly essences of the two men turned cloudy and gray. Suddenly, my ham sandwich flew up off the desk, rose several feet into the air, spun and wrapped itself back up into its original biodegradable packaging, and landed with a loud thud in my trash can. With no intervention whatsoever from me, my computer screen began its shut down protocol, much like it did each night when I departed. My office lights flicked off and the wooden door, which I had closed, creaked open slowly.
In the blink of an eye, I found myself positioned between Dickson and Rawlins—somehow mystically supported but restrained by their surprisingly strong spectral arms—and moving at a rapid pace towards the 16th floor elevator banks. With the steel doors looming closer and closer, I reached out to try to touch the call button, thinking my long-deceased escorts were unfamiliar with such modern contraptions, but could not reach it. The three of us hurtled towards, into, and then somehow through the closed steel elevator doors. We then dived and flew down the shaft at a breakneck speed.
In between my banshee shrieks of unholy terror, I marveled at how quickly and deftly two dead old men could maneuver. As our wild plunge approached the lobby level of the twenty-four-floor modern skyscraper building, we shifted direction and careened towards the elevator shaft inside doors. I closed my eyes again, and braced myself for the impact. Instead of a collision, however, I felt a warm and gentle breeze. I opened my eyes and saw that I was standing outside, with Dickson and Rawlins, at the corner of Second South and Main Streets in downtown Salt Lake City.
The old ghosts released me from their grasp, pushed me forward—north up Main Street—and said, “Your journey begins here and now.”
(Next week…my downtown encounter with venerable old bankers and Pony Express riders.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
