WALLACE, ID and ASHLAND, OR - Halloween is a chance to forget all your troubles and get spooked out. But some people have chill-inducing jobs year-round. We sent our correspondents out to find some of the spookiest jobs in the Northwest. Today we learn about two jobs that might send you howling, but not to the workers. We begin with hard rock miners in North Idaho.

I'm Doug Nadvornick at the Galena Mine in Wallace, Idaho. We're going where few people get to go deep underground with foreman John Weinkauf.

John Weinkauf: "That bucket right there's called a sinking bucket. Weâre going to ride down in one of those buckets."

SOUND: [Clanking of a lift and going underground]

The open-air bucket is tiny. Four-feet-by-four-feet. We can feel the chill as it drops us more than three thousand feet underground. We are wearing hard hats with bright little lamps to see in the dark passages. Once we're underground, the closer we get to the earth's core, it warms up. In some places, it's downright hot; the miners who drill for silver sweat.

SOUND: [Miners running machinery]

It's dark. It's loud. And Weinkauf says it's cramped.

John Weinkauf: "We have some areas that are very narrow, very small. I mean, head height and three feet wide. And a lot of people are claustrophobic about that."

Weinkauf says they don't last long as miners.

John Weinkauf: "Most people, when they come underground, you know within the first week or so if they're going to make it underground or not. I mean, we've had people that don't. They just they come down and they're scared of it. They're scared of the environment."

Perhaps some of the fear comes from stories about terrible mining accidents. Many in north Idaho still remember that 91 men died in a fire underground at the nearby Sunshine Mine in 1972.

But Weinkauf says spooky doesn't necessarily translate into danger, unlike back then.

John Weinkauf: "Everybody had one safety guy. You might see him. You might not. Now, I mean, our safety is underground every day."

I'm Doug Nadvornick, three thousand feet under Wallace, Idaho.

I'm Jessica Robinson at the National Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Oregon. We're in an evidence room, where lab director Ken Goddard is sorting through a refrigerator full of oddly shaped plastic bags.

Goddard: "Piece of meat and tissue. Blood sample from freezer. More fecal matter."

Think of the labs on CSI, only here, the victims are animals, and the bad guys poach, smuggle, and make high-end hand-bags out of endangered species. It's the only crime lab in the world dedicated exclusively to handling evidence from national and international crimes against wildlife. It has bullet proof glass, door locks that read fingerprints, and an isolation ward that could contain Ebola.

It also has a room of flesh-eating beetles called Dermestids -- for those times when you need to clean the meat off a bone.

Ken Goddard: "So, we could sit there and scrape for hours, but you got Dermestids who will do it for free, happily. You wanna see what it smells like in there?"

And so into the bug room we go.

Ken Goddard: "It's really not that bad. Looks like a tiger or a lion's skull."

Sound: [Reporter gags, Goddard laughs]

Ken Goddard: "And our reporter is turning a little bit red and she's got her sweater over her nose, and she's hanging on pretty tough here. Hahahaha!"

And, out of the bug room we go.

For Goddard, dead things are just part of a day's work.

Ken Goddard: "I guess we don't see those as being macabre so much as normal life. You get used to dead things in forensic science."

Goddard says it's the people who commit wildlife crimes that he finds creepiest.

Copyright 2009 Spokane Public Radio

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