Laura Wright 
Mirrors have occupied a peculiar place in superstition for centuries.
They have been used for divination, regarded as portals to other worlds, blamed for trapping souls, and surrounded by elaborate customs concerning death and misfortune. Some legends even describe mirrors capable of bringing physical harm to those unfortunate enough to possess them.
One such object supposedly appeared in the rough cattle country of northeastern Montana.
It became known as the Glasgow Mirror.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mirror passed through the hands of several men associated with the violent frontier surrounding Glasgow and Valley County. Its owners were shot, killed in gunfights, or lost in accidents.
Eventually, people began calling it the “wicked glass.”
And after its final known owner died, nobody wanted it.
Mirrors, Magic, and Superstition
Long before the Glasgow Mirror acquired its sinister reputation, reflective surfaces were associated with the supernatural.
One of the oldest practices involving them is scrying, a form of divination in which a person gazes into a reflective or translucent surface in an attempt to receive visions or hidden knowledge.
Mirrors were particularly well suited to such beliefs.
A mirror appears to contain an entire duplicate world behind its surface. It shows places and people that aren’t actually inside the glass, and for much of history, the process by which mirrors produced such clear reflections was itself mysterious to the average person.
Legends inevitably followed.
Mirrors became gateways.
They trapped spirits.
They predicted death.
Some were even said to kill.
The Legend of the Poisoned Mirror
European folklore contains stories of poisoned mirrors, supposedly used to murder wealthy or powerful people.
The stories varied considerably. In some versions, poison was placed on or around the mirror so that the victim absorbed or inhaled it while using the glass. Other tales transformed the idea into something almost supernatural, with the mirror itself becoming deadly.
Whether such devices existed in the forms described by legend is another matter.
But stories like these helped establish the mirror as something more than an innocent household object.
A beautiful looking glass could conceal something dangerous.
And in Montana, one particular mirror supposedly did exactly that.
The Glasgow Mirror Comes to Montana
The Glasgow Mirror became associated with Valley County, Montana, during a period when the region could still be a dangerous place.
Cattle theft, robbery, disputes over property, and personal feuds sometimes ended violently. Outlaws moved through the area, and ranching communities could be isolated from established law enforcement.
Against that background, a succession of violent deaths might not have been especially remarkable.
Except the same mirror supposedly kept appearing in the story.
Fred Dunn and the Wicked Glass
The first known owner associated with the Glasgow Mirror was Fred Dunn.
Dunn reportedly purchased the mirror shortly after discovering it.
He didn’t possess it for very long.
Soon afterward, Dunn became involved in a gunfight with an angry Texan.
Dunn was killed.
He was subsequently remembered as a man who had died “with his boots on.”
At this point, the death could easily have been dismissed as an ordinary consequence of a violent life.
Then another outlaw acquired the mirror.
His name was Long Henry Thompson.
Long Henry Thompson
Long Henry Thompson was an employee of the N Bar N Ranch and developed a formidable reputation.
His real name was Henry Pell.
Pell lived at various times in Missouri, Montana, and Texas, but it was as Long Henry Thompson that he entered the folklore of the American West.
Violence followed him.
Thompson was known to have shot George Dunman, although the killing was ruled self-defense and he was acquitted.
He later shot Ed Starr.
Again, Thompson claimed self-defense.
Again, he was acquitted.
There was one troubling detail.
Starr reportedly had multiple bullets in his back.
Other killings were attributed to Thompson as well, although the historical record surrounding some of them is less clear.
His reputation eventually became formidable enough that stories compared him with better remembered western outlaws such as Kid Curry.
And somewhere during his career, Thompson acquired the Glasgow Mirror.
Long Henry Escapes the Curse
By then, the mirror had supposedly begun acquiring a reputation as a “hoodooed” object.
But nothing happened to Thompson.
Years passed.
He survived.
Eventually, Thompson left his outlaw life behind. He settled down, started a family, and apparently decided that whatever curse had been attributed to the mirror had been broken.
There was one important detail.
The mirror had remained stored away.
Thompson hadn’t been using it.
In 1902, confident that its sinister reputation amounted to nothing, he finally brought the mirror out of storage.
He hung it on the wall.
Then his life changed again.
The Outlaw Returns
Thompson had apparently succeeded in leaving his violent past behind.
But after hanging the mirror, the old life returned.
Whether that was coincidence, personal choice, or something later storytellers attributed to the mirror, Thompson once again became involved in violence.
Then he heard that someone was coming after him.
Shortly before leaving to confront the threat, Thompson reportedly stood before the Glasgow Mirror with his gun.
He posed with the weapon reflected in the glass.
It was the last time he would do so.
Later that evening, Long Henry Thompson was killed.
His opponent shot him five times in the back.
The man who had survived numerous violent encounters had finally met someone faster, luckier, or more determined than he was.
And the mirror had claimed another owner.
Bury Him So He Stays There
Thompson was buried in Grandview Cemetery outside Saco, Montana.
But according to one particularly strange rumor, simply putting Long Henry in the ground wasn’t considered sufficient.
Lead weights were supposedly tied to his feet before burial.
The reason was wonderfully grim.
If Long Henry decided to come back, the weights would keep him in his grave.
Whether the story is historical fact or frontier folklore, it says something about the reputation Thompson left behind.
Apparently, some people weren’t entirely convinced that death would be enough to stop him.
The Glasgow Mirror, meanwhile, passed to another owner.
William A. Humphrey
The next important owner was William A. Humphrey.
It was during Humphrey’s possession that stories about the mirror began attracting wider attention.
Unfortunately for Humphrey, his ownership also ended violently.
In 1905, Humphrey became involved in an altercation at a saloon.
He attempted to shoot H. R. Stephens.
Instead, Humphrey was the one who was shot.
Once again, the owner of the Glasgow Mirror had met with violence.
By now, coincidence was beginning to look like a pattern.
Marshal Robert Conater
The mirror next came into the possession of Robert Conater, the town marshal of Glasgow.
Unlike Thompson, Conater didn’t have years to test the supposed curse.
He owned the mirror for approximately one week.
Then he went on a hunting expedition.
Conater drowned in the Missouri River.
The mirror had now been associated with gunfights, murder, and an accidental death.
People had had enough.
Nobody Wanted the Mirror
After Conater’s death, the Glasgow Mirror had a serious practical problem.
Nobody wanted to own it.
His estate attempted to dispose of the object.
They tried selling it.
They attempted to auction it.
Eventually, according to the story, they were willing simply to give the mirror away.
Nobody wanted it.
The succession of dead owners had transformed an ordinary household furnishing into something people were genuinely afraid to possess.
Eventually, an unnamed person took possession of the mirror.
But this owner apparently had no intention of testing the curse.
The Final Owner
The unidentified owner refused to hang the Glasgow Mirror.
He also refused to destroy it.
Instead, he put it away.
That decision is interesting.
If the mirror was merely nonsense, there was no reason not to use it.
If it was genuinely dangerous, destroying it might seem like the obvious solution.
But folklore surrounding cursed objects frequently creates precisely this dilemma.
Perhaps destroying the object will break the curse.
Or perhaps destroying it will make things worse.
The safest solution is often simply to hide it.
So the Glasgow Mirror disappeared into storage.
And from there, its trail apparently ends.
Was the Glasgow Mirror Really Cursed?
There is an obvious problem with the curse.
Several of its owners were already living dangerous lives.
Fred Dunn died in a gunfight.
Long Henry Thompson was an outlaw with a history of shootings.
William Humphrey was shot while apparently attempting to shoot someone else.
In the American West of that period, none of those deaths required supernatural intervention.
Robert Conater’s drowning is somewhat different, but accidental drownings were hardly unknown.
The mirror may therefore have acquired its reputation simply because it happened to pass through the hands of men already unusually likely to meet violent deaths.
Once the first few owners died, every subsequent tragedy would have strengthened the story.
The Problem With Cursed Objects
This is one of the difficulties in evaluating any supposed cursed object.
Imagine an ordinary mirror passes through twenty owners.
Nineteen live perfectly ordinary lives.
One dies violently.
Nobody calls the mirror cursed.
But suppose three successive owners die unexpectedly.
Now there is a pattern.
Once people notice that pattern, they begin looking backward for other incidents involving the object.
Then they start watching what happens to the next owner.
Every accident becomes evidence.
Every illness becomes suspicious.
Every death becomes another victim of the curse.
Coincidence begins constructing a mythology.
But Why the Mirror?
The object itself undoubtedly helped the legend survive.
A cursed chair isn’t particularly frightening.
A cursed table isn’t much better.
But a mirror?
Mirrors already possessed centuries of supernatural associations.
They were used for divination.
They appeared in beliefs surrounding death and the soul.
Breaking one supposedly brought years of bad luck.
They were sometimes covered after a death.
And folklore repeatedly treated them as boundaries between the ordinary world and somewhere else.
When several men associated with one particular mirror died violently, the object was almost destined to become supernatural.
The “Wicked Glass”
By the time the Glasgow Mirror became known as the “wicked glass,” its history and its legend had become difficult to separate.
Perhaps Fred Dunn simply lost a gunfight.
Perhaps Long Henry Thompson returned to violence because violence had always been part of his life.
Perhaps William Humphrey picked a fight with the wrong man.
Perhaps Robert Conater simply drowned.
Four unrelated tragedies.
One mirror.
But the people who heard the stories didn’t see four unrelated tragedies.
They saw a succession.
Dunn owned the mirror.
Dunn died.
Thompson owned it.
Thompson died.
Humphrey acquired it.
Humphrey died.
Conater took possession.
Within a week, Conater was dead.
Eventually, nobody wanted to discover who would be next.
What Happened to the Glasgow Mirror?
That may be the most intriguing part of the entire story.
The final known possessor supposedly stored the mirror away and refused to use it.
After that, its whereabouts became unknown.
Perhaps it was eventually destroyed.
Perhaps it was discarded after the people who knew its history died.
Perhaps someone inherited it without knowing what it was.
It could even have been sold as an ordinary antique.
If so, the Glasgow Mirror might still exist.
The ornate old glass hanging in an antique shop or private home would probably look completely harmless.
And unless someone recognized it, there would be nothing to distinguish it from thousands of other mirrors from the same period.
Perhaps that’s the perfect ending for a supposedly cursed object.
Nobody knows where it is.
And nobody knows who might be looking into it now.
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