How Castle Gate Found Me (and Why It Wouldn’t Let Go)

A member-exclusive post for The Remembering

I didn’t go looking for Castle Gate.
It came looking for me.

But before I get into how that happened — let me tell you what it is.

Castle Gate is the name of a coal mining town in Utah, the site of one of the deadliest mine explosions in American history.

In 1924, 171 men were killed in an instant — fathers, brothers, sons, citizens, immigrants. Some families lost multiple generations in a single breath. The disaster made national headlines for a moment... and then, like so many stories of working-class pain, it was buried.

Nearly forgotten.

Almost.

The Spark of Remembering

I didn’t know anything about the Castle Gate explosion when I stumbled across it while doing genealogy research. I was examining another family line entirely. But this story — this place — kept rising up like a ghost with unfinished business.

It wasn’t just historical curiosity. It was a pull.
I could feel the silence around it. The grief. The injustice.
And I could feel the souls. Not just metaphorically — viscerally. They were trying to be remembered.

And somehow, they remembered me first.