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| - Thanks to Shaggy Rogers's bad navigation (as he was holding the map upside down), the gang get lost and wind up in an old west ghost town, Gold City, on a stormy night. They check into a guest ranch whose owner, Big Ben, is delighted to see them; it seems that he's had no guests for quite a spell. When the gang wonder about this, Ben's assistant, Hank, explains that it's on account of the "Miner 49er", the ghost of an old prospector who haunts the local mine searching for the last vein of gold. He's been scaring all the guests away—and Hank himself intends to light out soon. With nothing else to do, the gang head into Gold City to look around. Initially, they don't find anything—though in the saloon Shaggy is startled by a player piano and a tree branch—until they regroup at the hotel. The
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| abstract
| - Thanks to Shaggy Rogers's bad navigation (as he was holding the map upside down), the gang get lost and wind up in an old west ghost town, Gold City, on a stormy night. They check into a guest ranch whose owner, Big Ben, is delighted to see them; it seems that he's had no guests for quite a spell. When the gang wonder about this, Ben's assistant, Hank, explains that it's on account of the "Miner 49er", the ghost of an old prospector who haunts the local mine searching for the last vein of gold. He's been scaring all the guests away—and Hank himself intends to light out soon. With nothing else to do, the gang head into Gold City to look around. Initially, they don't find anything—though in the saloon Shaggy is startled by a player piano and a tree branch—until they regroup at the hotel. There, Scooby-Doo is panicked by the appearance of the Miner in a two-way mirror and knocks over a cigar-store Indian, dislodging a map of Gold City with what appears to be a safe combination scribbled in the corner. Opening the hotel safe, they find a secret elevator which takes them down into the mine itself. After Shaggy causes a dynamite mishap (he has mistaken them for candles), they explore, and the Miner appears and disappears behind some doors and chases Scooby and Shaggy in a rail car. Fred Jones also manages to accidentally scare Shaggy and Scooby, thanks to him falling into a room full of baking flour. But the pieces start to fall together when the gang follows a wire that leads them to a room containing a tape recorder, a microphone/loudspeaker set up, and jars of crude oil. With these, they lay a trap for the Miner. While Shaggy imitates diesel train noises over the loudspeaker, Scooby pilots a rail car with a loudspeaker and flashlight attached, mimicking a freight train barreling through the tunnel. He chases the Miner into and through a shack (destroying the old shack in the process), and the Miner's boots fall off to reveal stilts, and is thus unmasked as Hank. He had discovered that the mine, though exhausted of gold, is sitting on oil reserves; he had decided to try to scare off everyone so he could cheaply buy and exploit the land. Scooby uses the stilts, used by Hank when impersonating the miner, to nab some apples from a tree.
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