Mike, those are some good photos. I like the structures -- I'm sure if you viewed the site today, you could hardly be persuaded they stood there. The Ely, Elizabeth, and Pike Hill mines are all on the Superfund list for their tailings piles, but the cleanups don't appear particularly well funded just now, and it's not clear that they'd involve sealing adits, which are probably negligible contributors compared with the weathering sulfide dumps.
I'm sure there were many more ghost stories in the days when these mines were active. In the flickering light of miners' candles, with death and injury always near at hand, the supernatural must have seemed very close indeed. Georgius Agricola, writing in the 16th century, describes "gnomes of kindly intent" called "kobelt" or "guteli," which imitate busy mining activity and yet never do work. ("Kobelt", Agricols says, comes from the Greek "cobalos", "mime", and seems to have been applied to malicious spirits as well, from whence it was transferred to the metal cobalt.) This matches exactly the description of the "knockers," once widely believed in in Cornwall and other parts of England. Was the belief carried over by the German miners imported to open new tin mines in the days of Elizabeth? The Cornish miners certainly carried their belief in "Tommyknockers" across the sea, when they went to work in the western Pennsylvania coalfields and later in the California Gold Rush.
On the subject of mining legends, there seem to be numerous local legends in the East about Spaniards working a hidden mine, often of silver, somewhere back in the hills, which is thereafter searched for in vain. The same book ("Mysterious New England") which has the story of the copper mine I mentioned tells of the "Lost Silver Mine" of Bristol Notch, Vermont, where dozens of people spent years futilely digging and blasting in search of such a vein. Closer to home, there's a similar story in Harriman State Park. The Spanish were certainly prospecting in the southeastern US until the mid-18th century, but the idea they came to the northeast seems rather incredible. In the 1820s, the Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, was engaged for his reputed second sight in an attempt to locate such a mine beneath Ouaquaga Mountain, in New York along the Susquehanna River. Sometimes, ancient mines in the East have been associated with the Mound Builders, or other vanished pre-Columbian tribes. In keeping with the ghost stories theme, Manly Wade Wellman wrote
Shiver in the Pines about a group of treasure hunters who find more than they bargained for in one of these ancient diggings.