Haunted Heartland Read online

  Haunted Heartland

  Second Edition

  Michael Norman

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

  3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden

  London WC2E 8LU, United Kingdom

  eurospanbookstore.com

  Haunted Heartland was first published in 1985 in a hardcover edition by Stanton and Lee, and then in a 1986 mass-market paperback edition by Warner Books. Barnes and Noble Books reprinted the book in hardcover in 1992.

  Second edition copyright © 2017 by Michael Norman

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book may be available in a digital edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Norman, Michael, 1947 June 29- author.

  Title: Haunted heartland / Michael Norman.

  Description: Second edition. | Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2017] | Original edition published in 1985 by Beth Scott and Michael Norman. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017010433 | ISBN 9780299315146 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ghosts—Middle West. | Parapsychology—Middle West.

  Classification: LCC BF1472.U6 S36 2017 | DDC 133.10977—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010433

  Some stories in this book were previously published, in different form, in Haunted America, Historic Haunted America, Haunted Heritage, Haunted Homeland, and The Nearly Departed: Minnesota Ghost Stories and Legends.

  In some stories, names and locations were changed to protect the identities of those involved. Some scenes have been added for continuity or dramatic interest. These are ghost stories, after all. And ghosts are notorious for not leaving behind traces of their comings and goings.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-299-31518-4 (electronic)

  To the memory of

  Beth Scott,

  my coauthor for the first edition.

  Contents

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Illinois

  The Girl on Sheridan Road (Lake Forest)

  Resurrection Mary (Chicago)

  Devil Baby (Chicago)

  The Telltale Hand (Chicago)

  Red Rose (Chicago)

  The Attic (Equality)

  Cave Dwellers (Burton)

  To Do Good (Kingston)

  The Devil’s Bake Oven (Grand Tower)

  Old Man Lakey (McLeansboro)

  The Reincarnation of Mary Roff (Watseka)

  Lincoln and the Supernatural (Springfield)

  Indiana

  Diana of the Dunes (Indiana Dunes State Park)

  The Haunting of Hannah House (Indianapolis)

  The Vigil (Terre Haute)

  One of the Family (Evansville)

  Tippecanoe and Tecumseh, Too (Warren County)

  Moody’s Light (Rensselaer)

  The Stump (Bloomington)

  Iowa

  Gone Too Soon (Southeast Iowa)

  The Guttenberg Poltergeist (Guttenberg)

  Mildred Hedges (Indianola)

  The Man in the Doorway (Oskaloosa)

  Ham House (Dubuque)

  Naughty George (Des Moines)

  Desperado (Winterset)

  Kansas

  Old Deg (Emporia)

  Ghost of the Purple Masque (Manhattan)

  Ménage à Trois (Wichita)

  Legend of White Woman Creek (Greeley County)

  Phantom Riders of the Pony Express (Hanover)

  A Dog’s Tale (Dodge City)

  The Cursed Knife (Topeka)

  Elizabeth Polly (Fort Hays)

  Michigan

  The Soul of Stephen Strand (Battle Creek)

  The Schooner Erie Board of Trade (Saginaw)

  Man on the Beach (Deer Park)

  Redemption (Detroit)

  The Lynching (Menominee)

  The Lake Odessa Mystery (Lake Odessa)

  The Spurned Suitor (Gross Isle)

  Minnesota

  The Ghost Wore Plaid (St. Paul)

  Now You See Them (Rochester and Becker County)

  The Luminescent Attic (Eveleth)

  The Specter Priest (Winona)

  Mrs. Moriarity Comes Calling (St. Paul)

  The Invisible Homesteader (Monticello)

  The Phantom Miner (Crosby)

  A House on Summit Avenue (St. Paul)

  The Levitation of Archie Collins (Minneapolis)

  Missouri

  The Hornet Spook Light (Joplin)

  Sentries in the Night (St. Louis)

  The Midnight Rider (Sand Springs)

  The Ghost of Paris (Paris)

  The Corporal’s Lady (Columbia)

  Mark Twain, Psychic (St. Louis)

  Forever Mine (Kirksville)

  The Curious Visitors (Ste. Genevieve)

  Nebraska

  Miss Anna (Hastings)

  Terror of Omaha Heights (Omaha)

  Beware the Soddy (Phelps County)

  The Bates House (Dakota City)

  A Strange Interlude (Lincoln)

  Ohio

  Girl of the Lilacs (Bucyrus)

  H. P. and Son (Cleveland)

  An Invitation (Willis)

  Franklin Castle (Cleveland)

  The Ethereal Innkeepers (Granville)

  The Pirate’s Mistress (Scioto River Valley)

  Old Raridan (Jackson and Pike Counties)

  Wisconsin

  Our Three Ghosts (Pierce County)

  Everlasting (Shorewood)

  Spirit of Rosslynne Manse (Delafield)

  Mrs. Pickman Goes Too Far (Milwaukee)

  Mr. Sherman Pays a Visit (Plover)

  The Nodolf Incident (Platteville)

  Return of the Hanged Man (Mineral Point)

  A Mother’s Plea (Southwestern Wisconsin)

  The Psychic Detective (Milwaukee)

  Selected Bibliography

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Incomprehensible? But because you cannot understand a thing, it does not cease to exist.

  Blaise Pascal (1670)

  The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed that the return of the dead, unseen forces, and secret injurious powers were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them. We have surmounted those modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation.

  Sigmund Freud

  With those quotations from a seventeenth-century scientist/philosopher, a notable author of fantasy and science fiction, and a pioneering psychiatrist, my late coauthor Beth Scott and I began the preface to the original 1985 edition of Haunted Heartland. Now, more than thirty years later, I find myself revisiting those ideas and more as I prepare this second, revised edition. (Note: My friend and colleague Beth Scott passed away in 1994.)

  Haunted Heartland was a follow-up of sorts to our Haunted Wisconsin, the first book devoted solely to ghost stori
es from that state. After its publication, we expanded our research into ghost stories and legends in the rest of the Midwest. Haunted Heartland brought together stories from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin. It, too, was a first-time collection of regionally based stories of the supernatural that had arisen not from an author’s imagination but rather from purportedly “true” events involving ghosts and hauntings, possessions and exorcisms, bobbing mystery lights, and more. Some of the stories fit within the parameters of folklore while others involved experiences from contemporary individuals who said they had seen a ghost or had another kind of paranormal encounter. But whether called folklore, “psychic experiences,” or something else, we wanted to find out just how prevalent ghost stories might be. Over five years of research and writing went into the original Haunted Heartland.

  Many of the people and episodes within these pages appear out of step with the world around them, with what we believe to be reality. From a haunted mansion in Ohio to a college office in Nebraska lost in time, and from a peculiar incident at a highway intersection in Minnesota to ancient specters that wander the Ozark hills, incidents of the supernatural in the Midwest might occur anywhere—urban or rural, based on what I have found over the years. This book explores a world unknown to most of us, yet quite obvious to others. Those were the people willing to share their contemporary experiences. Sometimes the ghost or haunted place has become at least locally famous, embedded in local lore. The ghost of Resurrection Mary roaming Archer Avenue in southwest suburban Chicago is an example of that, a fleeting figure in a white party dress who is so well known she has had a song written about her.

  The line between legend and reality in these stories is imprecise at times. Many are more clearly rooted in the storytelling traditions of a particular community or locale. In the Ozarks, for example, many “true” ghost stories have been told and retold so many times—each recitation adding its own twists and turns—that it is hard to know for certain where, when, or how each story originated. Other stories in this book fit within the sometimes controversial study of parapsychology, dealing as they do with people who say they have experienced perplexing encounters that are supernatural in origin.

  Are these stories “true” then in the strictest sense of the word? How does one prove the existence of ghosts? I do not think it can be done so that skeptic and believer alike are satisfied. And besides, that is not the ultimate intention of Haunted Heartland. This is neither an academic text nor a how-to manual for ghost hunting. What matters most is that these ghost stories are told as true. Even if they occur within a region’s folklore traditions, they seem to have originated with some sort of supportable event: a death, for instance, that leads to the sighting of a ghost believed to be the deceased, as in “The Girl on Sheridan Road” from Illinois. Most often for a contemporary story to be included in this collection there was an individual (or individuals) who either personally experienced the event or learned of the facts through some other direct means. Sometimes material developed by other writers and researchers has been incorporated into the narratives. The bibliography and acknowledgments cite those sources.

  The stories in this book include most of the original material from the first edition. I have included new or updated information where it was available and relevant. Be aware, however, that circumstances involving a particular site or story may have changed after this book’s publication date. Nearly all of the stories have been revised, and there are stories new to this edition. All come from remote and diverse sources. Many leads originated in archival and on-site research for the original edition, while other, primarily contemporary accounts were collected through interviews with the subjects involved, witnesses, or other knowledgeable people, along with written archival documentation that bear on the particular story.

  However, in compiling the original edition of Haunted Heartland—and in my revisions for this 2017 edition—we (or I in this edition) did not include every potential ghost story. There were several reasons for this.

  First is the sheer number of Midwest/Heartland ghost stories out there. I do not know of any methodology for counting ghosts (a census might be awkward) or for declaring this state or that is the most haunted, but I can verify that the Midwest as a region seems filled with spectral beings of one type or another, if one is to believe even a fraction of the tales and experiences that served as source material. I have found hundreds of stories, tales, or instances of ghosts all around the Midwest, enough to fill stacks of archival boxes. I found that amazing, given the region’s tranquil reputation. One does not need to visit an abandoned Southern plantation or decrepit inn along Maine’s foggy coast to find ghosts and ghost stories. One need only look around communities from one end of the Midwest to another. It is the rare newspaper indeed that does not dig into a community’s haunted history for a Halloween feature. Internet sites are devoted to ghostly sightings and haunted places, thousands of them, in every state of the Union. There are even smartphone apps that provide interactive directions to haunted locations.

  Yet at the same time, it seems to me, good old-fashioned ghost storytelling, the kind found around a summertime campfire late at night, seems to be dying out. What we have instead are film and television programs and websites with lots of spooky effects but varying degrees of authenticity. Resurrection Mary herself might have a lonely stroll indeed with all her potential prey safely tucked away inside their homes watching as her story unfolds in high definition.

  A story might not have been included for other reasons: not enough could be found about the original event or it was too thinly vetted to use or suspect in some other way, perhaps even an outright fabrication, though that was unusual.

  Finally, I wanted to avoid too much duplication, to include only those tales that were unique in some way, that did not replicate another story. For instance, there are mysterious female phantoms in black or white dresses that roam American roadways of towns large and small long after dark only to suddenly appear in a driver’s headlight beam or accost an innocent pedestrian. Many continued their rounds into the twenty-first century; others seem confined to decades past. One Missouri tale arises from shortly after the Civil War. Their behavior is oddly repetitious despite their broad geographical distribution. I have included just a few of the most interesting ones here.

  These were not hard and fast rules but generally guided how material was selected for inclusion in both the first and second editions.

  Haunted Heartland is not an encyclopedia of Midwestern ghost lore—that would take a lifetime to complete—but rather represents a selection of what I think are intriguing stories that fairly typify the ghost stories found in the ten states represented here. I included stories from other Midwest states in my books Haunted America, Historic Haunted America, and others.

  Finally, let me be clear: I do not profess to be a parapsychologist or a ghost hunter (I hunt ghost stories); nor, as I wrote earlier, does this purport to be a how-to manual on finding a ghost in your own home, or purging it from, say, your attic. All these stories are told from a distance. I am an author dealing with what I believe to be an interesting subject. I hope you find the topic interesting as well. These “true tales of the supernatural” imaginatively told are offered for what they are, a bit of entertainment, a slight detour, if you will, as you speed your way through the “real” world.

  Both editions of Haunted Heartland could not have been written without the assistance and contributions of many people. Foremost I want to express my limitless gratitude to my colleague Mark Lefebvre, who shepherded the original Haunted Heartland into print three decades ago and has continued to be my professional mentor, advisor, and treasured friend. Without him I would not be here. Also, my deep gratitude to Elizabeth Lefebvre, a computer and design genius, who unlocked the secrets of all the software I had to use to prepare this new edition. I am deeply appreciative to Raphael Kadushin, executive editor of the University of
Wisconsin Press, for his priceless support and to the press staff as the second edition moved, sometimes haltingly, from idea to publication. Every staff member at the UW Press has been kind and helpful, but I am especially grateful to the support and helpfulness of senior editor Sheila McMahon and my exceptional copy-editor Michelle Wing. Also thanks to our original Stanton & Lee editors Doug Bradley, Meg Saart, and Betty Durbin.

  In addition to the bibliographic citations you will find at the end of the book, I want to express my gratitude to the following individuals and institutions that provided support and information or who answered my many questions: Firehouse Magazine; the late Mary Margaret Fuller, Fate Magazine; Laurel G. Bowen, Illinois State Historical Society, Springfield; Fiora Fuhrmann, Lake Zurich, Illinois; the Chicago Historical Society; the late Edith T. Piercy, Rockford Register Star, Rockford, Illinois; E. G. Brady Jr., Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee; Cathy Hess, Indianapolis Star News; Patricia A. Harris, Michigan City Historical Society, Indiana; the Old Lighthouse Museum, Michigan City, Indiana; Dorothy Rowley and staff, LaPorte County Historical Society, Indiana; Tina Bucuvalas, formerly with the Folklore Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, and staff; Eric Pumroy, Director of Library Collections, Bryn Mawr College, formerly Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis; Robert K. O’Neill, Boston College; Ronald L. Baker, Indiana State University, Terre Haute; Deborah Griesinger, Mathias Ham House Historic Site, Dubuque County Historical Society, Dubuque, Iowa; the late Lowell R. Wilbur, Iowa Department of History and Archives, Des Moines; Jane Norman, Washington, DC; the late William E. Koch, Kansas State University, Manhattan; Jane Abernathy, Topeka, Kansas; the late Kay Tice, Greeley County Library, Tribune, Kansas; the late John Cumming, Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant; Philip LaRonge, Wayne State University, Detroit; the late Paul Sporn, Wayne State University; Janet L. Langlois, the Folklore Archive, Wayne State University; the late Elizabeth Bright, Iron Range Research Center, Chisholm, Minnesota; Dorothy M. Murke, Minneapolis History Collection, Minneapolis Public Library and Information Center; Hazel H. Wahlberg, Roseau County Historical Society and Museum, Minnesota; Sandra Peddie, formerly of the St. Paul Pioneer Press; Nancy Bagshaw-Reasoner, St. Paul; Stan Sauder, Pine Island, Minnesota; Jude Martin, Tom Campbell, Richard Rewey, and staff, the Fitzgerald Theater, St. Paul; the late Jack LaZebnik, Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri; Mrs. Ellis (Hester) Jackson, Webster County Historical Society, Marshfield, Missouri; Dr. Thomas P. Sweeney, Springfield, Missouri; the late Si Colborn, Monroe County Appeal, Paris, Missouri; Janet C. Lu, Roger Cognard, and the late David Mickey and Karen Cook, all of Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln; Anne P. Diffendal, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln; Robert B. Smith, Ohio Magazine, Columbus; Jannette K. Hemsworth, Alumni Office, Denison University, Granville, Ohio; James L. Murphy, the Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; the family of David K. Webb; the late Nancy Steen, Bowling Green State University, Ohio; Great Lakes Historical Society, Vermillion, Ohio; Cleveland Public Library; Richard W. Heiden, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Michael Kluever, Wausau, Wisconsin; Sue Kurth, former reporter, Beloit Daily News, Wisconsin; staff, Big Foot Beach State Park, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; the late Tom Hollatz, Lakeland Times, Minocqua, Wisconsin; Tim Ericson, retired professor and archivist, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; the late Mary Abdoo, Mineral Point, Wisconsin; and Linda Sterling.