Consolidated Gold Mine¶
The Consolidated Gold Mine is a tourist gold mine in Dahlonega, Georgia, where the German boy Frederick vanished and below which the party found a hidden modern tunnel.
| Type | Location, tourist attraction and mine |
| Aliases | American gold tunnels (the name used for the scene of Frederick's disappearance) |
| Region | Dahlonega, Georgia |
| Owner | The bearded tour guide, whose family owns the land around the mine |
| First appearance | Appalachia 03 |
Description¶
The surface is an old wooden building with pickaxes by the door and kitschy decor, with an animatronic prospector on a truck outside. A big staircase leads down, tourist maps sit at the front desk, and the lobby has a payphone and phone book. The tunnels are safe for about 150 feet. Beyond that lie unreinforced branches, cave-ins and mine gas, part of tens of miles of connected workings (Appalachia 03). See The Dahlonega Gold Mines.
Notable places within¶
- The tour tunnels, where a tour guide shows gold glints in the rock and says that all the town's mines connect to each other and to natural caves. In the cold open he warns that sealed shafts are deadly ("we've lost a couple people").
- The Hidden Modern Tunnel: a newer, electric-era passage below, with work lights, tools, motor-vehicle tracks and both ends caved in. Its features include a freshly dug 10-to-15-foot shaft yielding a gold nugget, a pit bridged by two-by-fours, and an old elevator shaft with coiled cables.
History of events there¶
Appalachia 03. Frederick, a young German boy in overalls with a gray Game Boy, wandered off the tour after hearing giggling, leaving his game behind. The team arrived at the mine as the sheriff was mobilising a search. After Kurt Larson claimed spelunking experience, the tour guide made the party responsible for the searchers' safety. The team marked the walls with glow-stick arrows and called for Frederick in German. In the lower tunnel they found the cave-ins and vehicle tracks and squeezed through into the hidden tunnel, where a small red light blinked ahead.
A pale, furry, fast creature with arms charged out of the dark, slammed Kurt into Andrew Howard and the wall and tore a long cut up his back, then fled screaming along a streaky red blood trail to the elevator shaft. At the bottom lay a single German-looking child's tennis shoe, a different one from the shoe found earlier in a field; see Child's Tennis Shoe. As the Biz climbed out last, the tunnel collapsed behind them, so Kurt estimated its position by pace-counting. Back at the surface Kurt cross-checked his pace-count against the tourist map, which showed only a few branches, and concluded with some doubt that no known tunnel matched where the shaft would lead (Appalachia 03).
The team handed over the shoe and said Frederick was probably dead. They told the searchers about the illegal mining but held back the creature. Frederick's mother, a German woman from the tour group, screamed in tears. Rescuers would need days to dig out the cave-in. At the debrief the tour guide, who owns the mine, doubted anyone could keep secret mining hidden ("like building the Batcave"); Andrew suggested a cult and the sheriff's face darkened.
Appalachia 04. Frederick's mother, who spoke only German, told an FBI translator over the station speakerphone that her son was playing his video game in the "American gold tunnels," that she heard a clatter and no scream, and that he was gone with the game left behind. She asked why the search had stopped, and Kurt cited the shoe pointing toward an exit, the partial cave-in being excavated, and signs of recent activity and vehicles (Appalachia 04).
The hidden tunnel was later understood as part of the ape-men's workings; see Jan's Conspiracy.
Inhabitants¶
The bearded tour guide and owner, who wears suspenders and has a long white beard. The cave creature the party met was not identified in these two sessions; see Ape-Men.