School Spirit

BISHOP PATRICK R. HEFFRON knelt at the altar. He knew vanity was a sin, but the hardworking man couldn’t help feeling proud of his school, Saint Mary’s College. He had founded it in Winona three years earlier, and by August 27, 1915, the college had become quite successful. Every aspect of Saint Mary’s was running smoothly—at least, everything but the bishop’s relationship with Father Louis Lesches.

Heffron recalled his recent communications with the 56-year-old priest. Lesches had demanded a parish of his own, an idea Heffron found almost unimaginable. In truth, the bishop held his colleague in low regard. He wondered about the man’s mental stability, and he questioned both his competence and his devotion. The bishop believed Lesches would be more appropriately employed as a farmer, and he’d told him so—a comment that had sent Lesches storming away, mumbling curses under his breath.

“Enough of this,” Heffron whispered. He pushed all thoughts of the priest from his mind, reprimanding himself for dwelling on the negative. He focused instead on his prayers.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

The bishop’s concentration was again broken, this time by running footsteps behind him. Heffron stood. He turned to see Father Lesches charging toward him, a frenzied look in his eyes.

“Louis, what are you—” Heffron began to ask. Then he noticed the pistol in Lesches’ hand.

Boom! Boom!

The thunderous claps of gunfire echoed through the chapel. Bishop Heffron felt two piercing stabs: the first in his thigh, the second in his chest.

As Lesches hurried away, Heffron found the strength to give chase—but his injuries overcame him. Had Father Thomas Normoyle not discovered the wounded bishop moments later, Heffron may have died.

Instead, by some miracle, the bishop survived to testify against his would-be murderer. He reflected upon the man he had known for more than a decade, describing him as hostile, self-absorbed and friendless. Also noted were the countless arguments between Lesches and another of his colleagues, Father Edward Lynch. In the most heated of moments, Lesches took to screaming a condensed version of the Bible verse, First Thessalonians 4:16. “And the Lord shall come again, to the sound of trumpets!”

The case against Lesches was a slam dunk—it almost certainly would’ve been even without Heffron’s testimony. Police had arrested Lesches mere minutes after the shooting, the gun hidden in the deranged priest’s travel bag. However, the murderous man was not put in prison. Instead, he was declared mentally unfit and sent 140 miles west to the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane in Saint Peter.

One might imagine that after Bishop Heffron lost his battle with cancer in 1927, and with Lesches still hospitalized, this bizarre saga would finally reach its conclusion. But the strange tale of Louis Lesches and Saint Mary’s College had only just begun.

A Mysterious Death

By January of 1931, Lesches had proven himself to be a model patient. He was declared mentally stable and reportedly would have been freed, if not for a rather significant technicality: Lesches was still under the guardianship of the Diocese of Winona, so the new bishop, Francis Kelley, needed to sign off on Lesches’ release. Kelley refused, sending Lesches into a rage.

Perhaps it was coincidence and perhaps not, but on May 15 of that same year, inside Saint Mary’s Hall (the building in which Heffron had been shot), nuns discovered one of the most ghastly and puzzling scenes in Minnesota history. Father Lynch, the man whom Lesches had clashed with on so many occasions, was found dead in his third-floor room. His body—or rather his charred remains—lay upon the bed.

Strangely, there was almost no evidence of fire. Lynch’s Bible was the only other item burned. Nothing else, not even the bed on which the priest’s body rested, was so much as singed.

Even more strangely, while the Good Book lay in ruin, burned almost beyond recognition, a single passage within it was said to have remained untouched, as if the mysterious flames had burned around it. That passage was First Thessalonians 4:16.

Father Lynch’s official cause of death was listed as an electrical accident, but many believed that the only viable explanation was a supernatural one. According to legend, Lesches’ spirit had claimed its first victim, even though Lesches himself was still among the living, a patient at the state hospital.

The Ghost of Heffron Hall

It wasn’t until twelve years later, on January 10, 1943, that the former priest met his end. Lesches passed away from a heart attack at the age of 84, still a resident of the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane.

Almost from the moment of Lesches’ death, Saint Mary’s Heffron Hall—named after the bishop whom Lesches had tried to kill—reportedly became a hotbed of paranormal activity.

The phenomena began with phantom footsteps heard roaming the third floor, accompanied by the sound of a tapping cane. Several witnesses claimed that the papers on the community bulletin board waved as if caught in a gentle breeze, but there was no source of wind. An invisible presence sometimes kept students from entering the third floor, pushing them back into the stairwell with each effort to cross the threshold. The stories went on and on.

One of the most terrifying encounters on record occurred late one night in 1945. The third-floor hallway’s stillness was shattered by the appearance of a shadowy, cloaked figure. The mysterious visitor stood before one of the doors and knocked.

Inside the room, Mike O’Malley and his roommate were awakened by the noise. O’Malley leapt out of bed and flung open the door, surprised to see the figure standing there.

Believing it to be one of the school’s priests and trying to comprehend why he’d be at their door at that hour, O’Malley asked, “What do you want, Father?”

The stranger’s frightening response was almost a hiss. “I want you!”

The figure moved toward O’Malley, but the student did not back down. He swung his fist hard into the cloaked figure’s jaw. Bones snapped, but the visitor was unhurt. Instead, O’Malley suffered substantial injury to his hand, as if he’d hit a brick wall.

With O’Malley writhing in pain, his roommate jumped to his aid. He reached the door and glimpsed the stranger’s face just before it vanished. His description of the visitor matched that of Louis Lesches.

The Investigation

Following that frightful encounter, the phenomena in Heffron Hall reportedly grew more intense. Blood flowed from sinks and urinals in the bathroom. Students were chased by an invisible presence, the sound of running feet echoing behind them. And then there were the cold spots...

By 1967, tales of the ghost had run so rampant that members of the college’s student newspaper, The Nexus, organized their own formal investigation. They hoped to debunk the perceived myth, but their results shocked even them.

Setting up in Heffron Hall’s third floor hallway, the investigators’ evening began rather uneventfully. But at 1:45 a.m.—the time of night Lesches had died 24 years earlier—their equipment detected some bizarre readings: The air temperature dropped significantly at one of their thermometers, and the cold spot began to spread in just one direction, east to west, at a rate of 100 feet in 30 seconds. It was as if an invisible presence were stalking the hallway, leaving a trail of frigid air in its wake. Furthermore, photos and videos taken by the team were mysteriously blurred and distorted—enough evidence to convince many of the investigators that they had shared a brush with the paranormal.

Most Haunted

The school’s eerie phenomena continued throughout the years and decades that followed, and in 1989, USA Today declared Saint Mary’s College—now Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota—the state’s “most legendary haunted place.”

It is a reputation that holds firm, even today, as many believe the ghost of Louis Lesches still roams the floors of Heffron Hall, haunting the building named after a man whom he hated enough to shoot.