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Aldo Sartori was born in 1931 at S. Leonardo in Passiria. His father had come to Passeier in 1929 from the Ticino canton in Switzerland to work on road construction (he was killed near Rabenstein by an avalanche in 1937). On July 1 1948, Aldo began work at Schneeberg as a builder, but he also looked after the elevators of the transport system, helped in the kitchen and, in the mine galleries, emplaced rails and supports as advance proceeded.
In 1952, Aldo left Schneeberg and worked as a self-employed builder. In 1972, he reconstructed a simple refuge in the clerks’ lodgings of the isolated mining village of St.Martin, which he managed until 1990. He tells the following story, about which he has no doubts, in his usual vivacious way:
‘In the winter of 1951, one Saturday I had to work the shift from 2 p.m. to 10 at night. I went to have something to eat. Other workers from Passeier, immediately after the shift, walked down to the valley, and we agreed that I would follow them on skis. When I reached the group near the fence above the Öß pasture, they asked me if I too had seen anything at Seemoos. They said they had seen the light from a carbide lamp and had called out, but had not received any reply. When they approached it, the light travelled up the slope as if carried by a spirit. But I hadn’t seen anything. At that very moment, some of the other miners saw a huddled figure, like a man asleep, in one of the side shafts of the Martin gallery. The figure was wearing a jacket and a cap with a visor, and they recognized it as being Giuseppe M. They shouted to wake him, but when they tried to climb up to him, they were repelled as if by a magnetic force. So they were frightened and called the foreman. When he arrived, the spirit had disappeared and no trace could be seen on the ground. That same night, Luis Mitterpiller ran out of the St. Peter gallery, where he had been working, terrified. He had seen the devil, he said, and refused to go back into the mine. Luis was born in 1900 and was thought to be a serious-minded, honest person. The following morning, we heard by telephone at Schneeberg that the poor miner Giuseppe M., who was a drunkard and ill with syphilis, had hanged himself in a small hayloft at Gasteig, coming back from the hospital at Sterzing.’