The Lamp That Lit a Cover-Up: Dead Town, Secret Lock

The Lamp That Lit a Cover-Up: Dead Town, Secret Lock

A single lamp was burning at dawn in a building with no power, in a Nevada ghost town abandoned seven years earlier - and that lamp was the least mysterious thing inside. A mine safety log bears Philip Griffin’s signature on an “all-clear” entry dated the day two men were hurt, and a disposable-camera photo shows one injured man and Kenneth Aase, the shift supervisor - so who kept the office lit and why were those files preserved? What secret links a dying witness’s letter, a forged log entry, and a lamp still plugged into a disconnected circuit?

In this episode, we follow the chain of documents, a photograph mailed by Douglas Prine, and Philip Griffin’s midnight return to an empty engineering office to read preserved files and photograph them - all to answer whether the official record of an October 2003 pocket collapse was falsified, and who kept working in a dead town.

Person: Philip Griffin Person: Douglas Prine Person: Kenneth Aase Date: June 3, 2011 Location: Coldrake, Nevada

- At 6:42 AM on June 3, 2011 Marcia Bishop found a lamp burning on the second floor of an abandoned mine office. - The Coldrake mine closed in March 2004 and the town had been dead since 2004; the building was abandoned seven years. - Douglas Prine sent a letter in January 2011 describing an October 2003 pocket collapse on level four, lower east corridor. - Security logs from October 2003 show the first seven lines in one hand, the final three lines in a different hand, and Philip Griffin’s signature at the bottom. - Philip Griffin called his sister Noreen at 11:15 PM on the night he returned to the office, photographed documents, and emailed the images before leaving around 2:00 AM.

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