Visitors flock to the bright lights of Route 66, but much of Flagstaff's darker record sits just across the tracks. Long before the breweries and cafes, the Southside was Flagstaff's red-light district, a rough neighborhood of boarding houses and saloons the city fathers preferred not to discuss. The crimes that happened there were not headlines from somewhere else. They were local, and some were never solved.
Who was Dutch May Prescott?
Dutch May Prescott was a wealthy Flagstaff madam, a woman of business in a world that was not kind to her kind, and she was found dead in what looks for all the world like a staged suicide. The case was never solved, and rumors have long pointed toward a highly placed town figure. On the sidewalks of the Southside we stand where the early boarding houses stood and tell what the record supports. The rest of that story gets told on the tour. Her death gets a deeper dive in our post on the mysterious death of Dutch May Prescott.
Hick's Boarding House and the working man
Flagstaff was built on the backs of the lumber and railroad industries, and the men who worked those dangerous jobs lived in places like Hick's Boarding House. These were transitional spaces where men lived, fought, and sometimes met a premature end. The Southside ran on high stakes and low visibility, and down here true crime was not a headline. It was a daily reality.
The rail yard's toll
The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad brought prosperity, and it brought tragedy. The tracks that divide north from south collected their share of accidents over the decades. Railroad men still tell of Leo Bart, a brakeman whose flickering lantern is said to move along the rails on the right kind of night, and locals claim to feel something near the yard when the midnight train whistles through.
What are Flagstaff's most notorious true crimes?
Three cases come up on nearly every walk. In the summer of 1937, Marie Walkup took the lives of her four children and then her own, a case that so gripped co-founder Susan Johnson that she wrote a whole book about it, The Walkup Family Murders from The History Press; the full account is in our post on the Walkup family tragedy. At Emerson School, a janitor murdered his family and then hanged himself in the basement. And in 1987, the murder of Sarah Saganitso led to the George Abney trial and a Navajo skinwalker defense that divided the community. None of these are easy stories, and we tell them carefully.
A note for groups: our Southside-focused true crime walks run as private bookings only, arranged through our contact page.
Hear it where it happened
The darkest chapters of Flagstaff's record belong to the adults-only walk. Mountain Town of Madness is the 18+ version of our ghost tour, $39, Fridays and Saturdays at 9 PM, and it goes where the family tour does not. Bring a friend who does not scare easily.
