Unsolved Undead: The Mystery of the Devils Tower Zombies, Part I

By Bulletin Staff

Topping out nearly a mile above sea level, the iconic Devils Tower rises up out of the prairie to loom over the Belle Fourche River in northeastern Wyoming. The 1,200-foot tower has inspired wonder and awe for generations of visitors to the area, and it is considered sacred by local Native American communities.

The Tower is also the site of one of the great unsolved mysteries of zombie science: The origin and disappearance of the Devils Tower Zombies, a herd of undead that appeared suddenly at the base of the tower in 1972, and then just as suddenly disappeared less than 24 hours later.

In their wake, the herd left lingering questions that zombie science has yet to answer to this day.

One Morning in June 1972

Now 77, in 1972 Roger Collins was a young biologist fresh out of college when he arrived at Devils Tower National Monument. “I’d come out West after graduating from Boston College. My plan was to study the wildlife around the Tower for a summer and then head back East for grad school, but I wound up staying there for more than 40 years,” says Collins, who retired from the National Park Service in 2017 and now lives near the park.

Collins clearly remembers the morning of June 17, 1972, at Devils Tower. He planned to hike up toward the Tower to continue his observations of Peregrine falcons and their nesting areas. The falcon population had been in decline in the 1960s and continuing into the 1970s due to the widespread use of insecticides containing DDT. Collins was part of a team working to stop the slide in the falcons’ numbers and restore the population.

“The trail ran through a large open meadow before turning left to head up to the Tower. I reached the meadow around daybreak, so the sun was in my eyes as I broke out of the trees and started to cross the field. The sun was blinding, so I almost didn’t see them before they would have seen me,” Collins recalls.

“Them” was a large herd of perhaps 450 of the undead, walking as a group and cutting a large circle in the meadow, seemingly oblivious to Collins and various animals paying an early morning visit to the open field.

Collins was stunned. And then terrified.

“As a biologist, I’d seen zombies in the lab before, but always onesies or twosies, never a whole herd, and never in the wild like this,” he says now. “Honestly, it scared the ever-loving bejesus out of me.”

Collins remembers freezing in his steps, hoping that none of the undead had noticed him. He slowly dropped to the ground, then carefully crawled back into the safety of the treeline, never once taking his eyes off the swirling wheel of living dead slowly spinning around the meadow.

Once he was certain that the undead couldn’t see him, Collins hastily retreated back along the path to the trailhead where he’d parked his Park Service-issued green pickup. With a cloud of dust spinning behind him, the still-stunned biologist bounced along the rough dirt road back to the park’s administrative building.

“You Got a Herd of Zombies Down There”

Although it was a Saturday, by chance Collins’ supervisor, Paul Finn, a longtime veteran of the park, was in his office catching up on paperwork. As Collins related the scene of whirling undead he’d witnessed at the meadow, his boss was … skeptical, at least at first.

“‘Finny’ had been at the Tower since he came back from World War II, and he was sure that he’d seen all the surprises that the park could throw at him. So when I came to him with this wild yarn about a spinning wheel of zombies, he thought I was high on dope and ready to fire me on the spot,” Collins says.

He continues: “Not that I blame him. After all, I was a longhaired hippy biologist from back East, and I’d only been at the park for a few weeks, but everyone already knew I had a stash of Mary Jane and wasn’t averse to a smoke now and then. There was a reason the park staff all called me ‘Smokey’!”

Nevertheless, “Smokey” Collins was able to convince Finn to raise the alarm and keep the monument closed to tourists until the zombie story could be checked out. Finn contacted a local rancher friend who was a private pilot and convinced him to do an aerial survey of the meadow.

Collins recalls listening as the report from the pilot came in over the radio: “You got a herd of zombies down there, Finny.”

Now it was Finn’s turn to be stunned. And worried. The staff at the monument and its park rangers had handled their share of stray black bears, unruly campers and even the odd group of rowdy motorcyclists spilling over from the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally held nearby. But they’d never had to handle more than one or two zombies at a time. Despite its name, Devils Tower seemed to hold little interest for the unholy dead.

Finn ordered the park staff to begin evacuating the vacationers who were currently in the monument’s campgrounds under the pretext that a rabid bear was on the loose in the area. Staff were under strict orders to keep mum about the zombie threat to avoid creating panic.

Finn also sent a small group of armed rangers back to the meadow with orders to keep their distance and -carefully and quietly – report back by radio on the herd’s movements. In the meantime, Finn would try to raise the alarm and bring in the cavalry.

Bringing in the Cavalry

Trouble was, the cavalry was nowhere nearby. The nearest city of any size was Rapid City, South Dakota – which was hours away by road. Caspar, Wyoming, was twice as far away. However, Finn also had a connection at Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City – he had served in Europe with the base commander, Lt. Col. Mike Fitz, during the war, and the two had kept in touch.

As Collins remembers the call to Ellsworth, Fitz at first laughed off Finn’s plea for assistance to deal with the undead. Collins recounts: “Fitz thought Finny must be drunk, even though it was barely 8 in the morning, and he told Finn to go sleep it off. But Fitz finally agreed to send a reconnaissance flight over the Tower to see what was going on. Once the recon crew reported back to Fitz that there really was a herd in the meadow, that’s when the gears really got set in motion.”

By this time, the rangers had radioed back that the herd was still circling the meadow, steadily trampling down a path through the grassy field. Finn ordered the rangers to hold tight but to be prepared to hightail it away from the herd in the event the military sent in an airstrike to obliterate the zombie horde.

And that is exactly what the military had in mind.

Next in Part II: A distracted president, the longest night of Roger Collins’ life, and the mystery begins.

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