Mine Your Own Business

Mine Your Own Business is the fourth episode of the first season of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!.

Premise
When the gang get lost in the desert, and end up in Gold City, a spooky ghost town, they check into a deserted inn. The owner explains that everybody has been scared off by the Miner Forty-Niner. They wind up in another mystery involving an abandoned gold mine and a ghostly, moaning miner.

Synopsis
Thanks to Shaggy'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 Forty-Niner", 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 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 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 (which Shaggy mistakenly thought was chocolate syrup). With these, they lay a trap for the Miner.

While Shaggy imitates train noises over the microphone, Scooby pilots a rail car with a loudspeaker and flashlight attached, mimicking a train dashing through the mine tunnel. He chases the Miner into and through a shack (while destroying the old shack in the process). The Miner's boots fall off to reveal stilts, and he 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.