Older children and men and women, when they died, went to the ghosts’ village. This was a big town of earth lodges, where the dead lived very much as they had lived on earth. Older Indians of my tribe still believe in the ghosts’ village.
There were men in my tribe who had died, as we believed, and gone to the ghosts’ village, and come back to life again. From these men we learned what the ghosts’ village was like.
My mother’s grandfather came back thus, from the ghosts’ village; his name was It-si-di-shi-di-it-a-ka, or Old Yellow Elk.
Old Yellow Elk had an otter skin for his medicine, or sacred object. He died in the small-pox year; and his family laid his body out on a hill with the otter skin under his head for a pillow. Logs were piled about the body, to keep off wolves. Men were dying so fast that there was no time to make burial scaffolds.
That night a voice was heard calling from the hill, “A-ha-he! A-ha-he! Come for me, I want to get up!”
The villagers ran to the grave and took away the logs, and Old Yellow Elk arose and came home.
“The ghosts’ village is a fine town,“ he told his family. “I saw many people there, they gave me a spotted pony. My god, the otter, brought me back. He led me up the bed of the Missouri, under the water. I brought my pony with me and tied him to a log on my grave!”
His family went out to the grave the next morning and looked for the pony’s tracks, but found none!
All these things I firmly believed, when I was a boy.