When it comes to haunting, there seems to be no statute of limitations. A crime may have occurred a hundred years ago in a particular place, but the environment seems to cling to the bad energy as if it were yesterday.
Maybe a detective believed he was “hot on the heels” of a criminal a century ago, only to become discouraged as the trail went cold. With the case unsolved for decades, the detective and even the criminal eventually die, leaving only a cold file stashed in a forgotten filing cabinet.
And, finally, all who remembered the crime are gone, and the case has turned to ice. These ice files might freeze right into obscurity if not for the phenomena connected with them.
Hauntings prompt ghost detectives to crack through the veneer of the past, to dig up archives to help us understand. Again and again, we find that extremely haunted places tend to be the sites of past violence. And the most active sites are often the scenes of unsolved homicides. It is as if the dead victims are waiting for justice.
It does not seem to matter how much time has passed. The murdered don’t seem to know or care that they’ve been relegated to the ice files.
Here are a few stories of spirits who move in the cold realm of cases unsolved.
It is March 1956 in Avard, Oklahoma. The high school gymnasium resonates with the sights, sounds, and scents typical of school gyms across America. Gangly teenage boys with crew cuts zip across the basketball court, their shouts punctuating the rhythmic bounce of the ball. The sharp scent of rubber and sweat permeate the air.
Flash ahead half a century to 2006 and the scene changes. The gymnasium is all that is left of the school, long ago razed when the tiny town no longer had the youth to warrant it. The old walls now hold Vina Rae’s Grill ‘n’ Graze, an unpretentious café where owners Nan Wheatley and Debra Campbell serve up chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, and wedges of hot apple pie.
The long-legged boys have been usurped by hungry families; the thump of the basketball by friendly conversation and the soft clink of silverware; and the smell of rubber and sweat by brewing coffee, grilling hamburger, and burning hair.
Burning hair?
Yes, sometimes the terrible inexplicable odor overwhelms visitors. “The first time I smelled it, it made me sick,” confided Nan Wheatley, explaining that when the scent materializes, it is always confined to a very small area. “If you step away from the spot, you can’t smell it.”
It is just one of the many calling cards of the ghost. She was born Mildred Ann Newlin on Christmas Day in 1933. She grew up and got married in 1955. Nine months later, on a crisp March afternoon, small-town innocence was lost forever to Avard, Oklahoma.
Mildred was sweet and lovely with a shy smile and very petite at just five feet two inches and one hundred pounds. She was a twenty-two-year-old senior at Northwestern Oklahoma State University at Alva and happily married to twenty-six-year-old Avard High School teacher and basketball coach Richard D. Reynolds. “They were exceptional people,” said Nan, adding that everyone called Richard “Dee” and that Mildred went by “Ann.” “Dee was very close to some of my family members.”
Their future should have been bright. Ann looked forward to graduating and becoming a schoolteacher, and she and Dee dreamed of having four children. They would raise them in the land they loved. But fate had a heartless plan for them.
It was Tuesday, March 13, just after noon when Ann finished her morning classes at Alva, climbed into her 1949 Chevrolet Tudor, and began her half-hour journey toward Avard High School to meet her husband.
She never made it.
We will never know what thoughts were in her head as she drove the long dirt road toward Avard. The last thing she saw was the familiar northwestern Oklahoma prairie with its miles of flat wheat fields, and then her killer or killers.
It was a little after one p.m. when farmer Loren Goucher was riding his tractor and noticed clouds of black smoke billowing in the distance. When he investigated, he was shocked to find a car on fire on the Alva-Avard Road. The blazing automobile straddled a shallow ditch, its rear wheels embedded in the sand. The front door hung open.
Loren smelled burning flesh as he moved through the intense heat. He crept close enough to see a charred body on the front seat. He rushed to the Alva police station.
Coach Dee Reynolds soon learned the horrific news. While he was at school, his poor bride had suffered a terrible death. At first investigators thought it had been an accident. Somehow Ann had lost control of her car and hit a blackjack tree. When she tried to drive away, the car had burst into flames. Cans of brake fluid and gasoline in the trunk had accelerated the fire.
Family members confirmed that Ann did indeed have dizzy spells and could have been overtaken by one while driving. Yet there were so many odd elements to the puzzle.
Her right shoe, splattered with blood, had been found 256 feet in front of the car beside a patch of tall grass that had been mashed flat as if someone had lain there, possibly during an attack. Ann’s charred coat was discovered ten feet behind the car. A button, perhaps ripped from her blouse or an assailant’s shirt, was also found outside the car.
The Chevy had burned bumper to bumper, as if it had been doused with an accelerant. The tires had burned, and the engine compartment was scorched. The temperature had reached 1,700 degrees, hot enough to shatter the auto’s windows. It did not make sense that a spontaneous fire starting in the trunk could do so much damage. All of these facts were brought before a jury to determine whether the case warranted further investigation.
Dr. Max Shideler, who had performed the autopsy, told the jury that Ann had suffered skull fractures that could have resulted from blows to the head—or from the intense heat in the blazing car.
There had been possible sightings of another vehicle near the scene, and a second set of tire tracks suggested she may have been run off the road. Then there was the question of bullet casings found nearby.
In the end, the jury decided that a homicide had taken place.
It was difficult for Ann’s family to imagine that anyone had deliberately hurt her. Mr. Reynolds said that his pretty wife had no enemies.
It looked as if Ann was killed for the same sad reason that so many others are. She was a vulnerable female in the wrong place at the wrong time when a monster who could not control his rage happened upon her. Someone had battered Ann and then tried to incinerate all clues. All of the newlyweds’ dreams had gone up in smoke.
Detectives spent five days on campus interviewing dozens of Ann’s classmates, but no one admitted to knowing a thing about her death. Despite a long investigation, her murder has yet to be solved.
Today Nan Wheatley shakes her head as she ponders the icy cold case. “I wish that they had had the forensic technology that they do today,” she said.
When Nan and Debra opened Vina Rae’s Grill ‘n’ Graze a decade ago, the last thing they expected was to share the place with ghosts. In fact, ghosts were something they gave little thought to—until an unexpected visitor appeared.
Shortly after Vina Rae’s opened for business, Debra was surprised to see a customer seated at a table. Why didn’t I hear her come in, she wondered as she glanced at the pretty young woman in green. Normally the cowbell clanged loudly whenever someone stepped through the door.
The woman was intent on adjusting her skirt and made no eye contact with Debra. “I turned away to get my order pad and then turned back to take her order,” Debra explained. But when she turned back, she was in for a shock. Debra stared, her pen poised and her mouth agape, at the empty table. The lady in green had vanished as quickly as she had appeared.
A chill crept down her neck. “I asked Nan what Ann Reynolds looked like,” she said. The description matched, right down to the short auburn hair. And when Nan and Debra learned that Ann had been wearing green the day she was murdered, they were sure that it was she who had visited.
Fifty years ago Ann had been headed to the man she loved when evil intervened. Was she still trying to find him? Her destination on March 13, 1956, had been the high school. Had her spirit continued on, even as her body lay burning? Had she entered the school on her death day only to find that Dee could not feel her arms around him? That she was unable to wipe the tears of grief from his eyes?
The spirit of Mildred Ann Reynolds may be stuck in the old gymnasium, the place where she surely once sat in the bleachers and cheered on her husband’s team. Does she understand that it is no longer a basketball court? Is she aware that her widowed husband eventually remarried and years later died of a heart attack?
Perhaps Ann does know that time has passed, and that things have changed. Perhaps she simply wants her case solved. Perhaps she is seeking justice.
Locals claim that most folks in town know who the killer is. In fact, rumor has it that two men were involved. With dangerous killers at large, it is understandable that they are reluctant to speak of it. Does that fact frustrate Ann’s spirit?
Was it Ann who threw the sponge at Nan? “I was alone in the kitchen,” said Nan, recalling the day that a sponge sailed through the air at her. She has gotten used to the sudden knocks on the wall, the inexplicable jingle of silverware, and the shadowy figures who move through her peripheral vision. “But there was a time,” admitted Nan, “when I did not like to be alone in the building.”
She and her mother, Ramona Wheatley, were both shaken up when a spooky apparition made an appearance. Nan’s mom, now deceased, was a levelheaded woman, so when she told her daughter what she had seen, Nan believed her.
“She hollered at me and said a headless woman came through a wall and floated into the kitchen,” remembered Nan.
Even more frightening was the night that Nan was locking the back door when unseen hands grabbed her roughly by the shoulders and threw her down the hall. She picked herself up off the floor, unhurt but stunned. “I didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time,” admitted Nan, who feared people would think she was losing her mind.
Sometimes the sound of footsteps would echo in the empty hallway, and the freezer would be mysteriously rearranged.
Later, while seeking answers to the strange goings on, Nan invited paranormal researchers and psychics to investigate. When a psychic described an angry man named Isaac who stalked the premises, Nan was stunned. The description matched the entity that she had picked up on—a gloomy aggressive old man.
“The psychic did a cleansing of the building,” said Nan. “Ann’s ghost stayed, but Isaac moved out to the vacant house across the street.”
A woman named Mary was visiting Avard for the first time and was a passenger in a car when she glanced at the dilapidated house and noticed a man sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair on the porch. “He didn’t look like he’d be too tall, maybe average height,” she said, adding that he was either bald or gray and that his face was contorted into an angry expression. “It was not evil, but hateful,” she said. “He looked like he was in his late fifties or early sixties. He wore dark pants and a light button-up shirt.”
This researcher has discovered two Isaacs did live and die in Arvard long ago. I’ve yet to learn details about their lives.
Back in the Isaacs’ time, Avard had a heftier population, but over the years it has dwindled, and today Avard is a ghost town. “We have only about twenty people living here,” said Nan.
Twenty live people—the dead ones are too many to count. “We’ve had psychics tell us we have wall-to-wall ghosts in the café,” said Nan. “They say that the café is a portal to the other side where ghosts pass through.”
Though it is an interesting idea, it cannot, of course, be confirmed. While psychics can sometimes be dead-on, they rarely have all of the answers. One that Nan consulted also tuned in to Ann Reynolds, and asked her why she had not moved on. “Ann told her she was still here because she wanted to know ‘why they have done this to me,’” said Nan.
They.
The use of a plural supports the rumor that two attackers are guilty.
The killers are old men by now. Do they still roam freely through the area? Do they feel even a twinge of remorse when they drive past the spot on the lonely road where they savagely attacked an innocent person?
Mildred Ann Reynolds was charred beyond recognition, her right leg burned off to the knee. The woman who loved children never got to teach and nurture the countless students who would surely have loved her back. Is it too much for her to ask for some kind of justice?
Chances are she will continue to appear at Vina Rae’s Grill ‘n’ Graze, toss sponges, jiggle the silverware, and rap on the walls until the case is solved.
We are rooting for you, Ann.
A gentle snow fell upon Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It looked as if Ronald Tammen had stepped out of his dorm for only a moment. Despite the cold night, the 19-year-old business major had not taken his coat. He’d also left his wallet and car keys behind and the radio playing. His psychology book lay open on the desk, as if he’d been interrupted in the middle of studying. If students passing by Fisher Hall had glanced up at the window, they would have seen that the lights were burning in room 225 of the old ivy-covered building.
Ron’s roommate was not alarmed when he returned to find him gone. Other than Ron’s absence, nothing in the room was unusual. Surely he would be back in a moment. But that moment has stretched into decades. For when Ron Tammen left that room, it was April 19, 1953. He vanished like a snowflake in a flame, never to be seen again.
A handsome, muscular young man, Ron was a varsity wrestler and the residence hall adviser. The evening of his disappearance he’d played the string bass with his dance band, the Campus Owls, and had returned to his dorm about 8:30 p.m. His 1938 Chevrolet sat outside for the rest of the evening.
Who can begin to imagine the heartbreak for Ron’s family? His younger brother was also a student at Miami and must have been beside himself. His parents were frantic as they agonized over his fate, wondering if there was any truth to the speculation that he was an amnesia victim. And they surely felt a spark of hope when a woman from a nearby town came forward to say that a man who matched Ron’s description had knocked on her door in the early morning of April 20. The young man, she said, had a streak of dirt across his face and appeared dazed as he asked her for directions to the bus stop.
A tragedy for his friends and family, the disappearance became a celebrated legend for future students at Miami University who dubbed him “the Phantom of Oxford.”
While many argue that Ron probably lost his memory and is still alive today, others think he died and remains on campus as a spirit.
Fisher Hall was a creepy old place that already had a reputation for being haunted when Ron resided there. The enormous structure had been dedicated on September 3, 1856, as the Oxford Female College. Heralded as the finest college building in the West, the features included a dining room and a chapel, which seated eight hundred. There was room for two hundred students to live, and they were excited to have the luxury of hot and cold running water.
The building had many incarnations, including time as the Oxford Hotel and later as a mental asylum. When the university purchased the building in 1925, it came with a few forgotten artifacts that students stumbled upon over the years. They shuddered when they found the old straitjackets and imagined the troubled souls once confined within the brick walls.
Ron’s vanishing added to the mysterious ambience. When the leaves turned golden and began to drift from the elm trees, students were both thrilled and frightened to learn that a ghost had been seen in the formal gardens behind Fisher Hall.
When they heard the apparition singing, witnesses felt cold to the bone. Perhaps it was only another student playing a joke, but when skeptics gave chase, it eluded them, melting into the night as easily as it had appeared.
Some insisted that the figure had to be Ron’s ghost. He was, after all, a musician who expressed himself through song. Others smirked and said it was a prank.
Pranks were not unusual among the students. In fact, on the very evening that Ron vanished, he’d found his bed filled with dead fish. He was last seen when he fetched clean sheets before returning to his room. As he gathered the clean bedding, he’d mentioned that he was tired and was going to bed early.
What could have changed his plans?
Was there another practical joke the night Ron disappeared—a prank that went horribly wrong, with the popular sophomore ending up injured or worse? If a joke did indeed get out of hand, the perpetrators weren’t talking.
A few years after Ron went missing, the upper floors of Fisher Hall were deserted after they became so rundown that they were deemed unsafe, and the first floor became home to the university’s theater. The theater students insisted there was a ghost in their midst. Some were simply annoyed when items inexplicably vanished—a common occurrence in haunted places. Others were afraid to be in the building alone. Shadows darted past the windows, they said, and they were troubled by the sounds of muffled voices. No one could quite make out what was being said. Was it the Phantom of Oxford trying to tell them something?
Fisher Hall eventually fell into complete disrepair, and the once-grand building was used for storage. Those who walked by often felt eyes upon them and quickened their pace as they glanced up nervously at the black windows. Braver students sometimes broke into the haunted building, half hoping to encounter a specter. The story of the missing boy’s ghost became a favorite Halloween topic for the local media.
Ronald’s parents died without learning the fate of their beloved son.
Fisher Hall was demolished in 1979, the fine, pink dust from the bricks floating away on the breeze with old secrets. Today, the Marcum Conference Center occupies the spot.
Ronald Henry Tammen Jr. is still missing.
For more information on Ronald Tammen and other missing people, visit the Doe Network at www.doenetwork.org.
With its forested landscape and silver streams, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is known as one of the loveliest college campuses in America. Lovely and spooky. Many of the grand old buildings are shrouded in mysteries and crawling with ghosts. Some say that the restless spirits originate from a century-old tragedy in Brice Hall. The girls were in tears, and the boys shook their heads in disbelief when a favorite teacher, Professor Henry Snyder, was found dead in his Brice Hall chemistry laboratory.
Students and teachers whispered about the “suicide.” What had driven Professor Snyder to ingest a fatal dose of potassium cyanide? The September 14, 1898, death raised suspicions, however. Some wondered if his flamboyant wife, Minnie, had murdered him.
The couple was a study in contrasts. He was the typical professor, while Minnie was a sexy siren who loved to dress like a gypsy and sing on stage. That, of course, is not enough to suggest someone is a killer, but the stain of suspicion darkened when she married her husband’s lab assistant, William Pugh.
Had the seductive Mrs. Snyder lured William into the murder plot? Had he administered the poison? Twenty years later, William mysteriously vanished and was reportedly never seen again.
Did William’s ghost, realizing that he too was the victim of a black widow, return to the campus to commiserate with poor Professor Snyder’s ghost?
While she was not a killer or a victim, Helen Peabody’s ghost frightens some students the most. An outspoken critic of coeducation and the principal of the neighboring school, the Western Female Seminary, Helen was strict and formidable.
The boys who slipped onto her campus to meet girls knew they had to sneak past the stern woman who sent many of them racing back to their dorms. In Helen’s time, proper young ladies did not spend unescorted time with men. And she certainly did not want her female students attending classes with males. She surely would have been appalled when the two schools merged.
Seminary Hall, built in 1855, was once part of Helen Peabody’s campus and was renamed for her in 1905. Students insist that her ghost haunts Peabody Hall. An inexplicable low guttural sound is sometimes heard, and the shower is known to turn itself on.
Two boys living in the hall were literally shaken up when their entire room experienced an earthquake not felt anywhere else. They stared, wide-eyed, as their furniture shook and items spilled from their desktops.
Students often hurry past the big portrait of Helen in the building’s foyer. Her eyes, they say, follow them. And legend has it that when someone has done something of which Helen would have disapproved, the portrait’s eyes blink as the guilty party goes by.
Students say the ghost of Helen Peabody, once principal of Western Female Seminary, seems to be watching them. This antique postcard shows the magnificent building where the stern opponent of co-education lives on as a ghost. (author’s collection)
Some say that Reid Hall is also haunted. Students report phantom footsteps in empty rooms and a pair of bloody handprints on a door. The prints, they insist, will not wash away and were made decades ago by a student shot and killed when he tried to break up a fight.
A May 9, 1959, article in the Vidette Messenger verified the murder when it reported the death of twenty-year-old Roger T. Sayles from Gary, Indiana. Roger was entertaining his mother, who was visiting for Mother’s Day, when he heard a commotion in the hallway.
He left his room to find two men arguing over a girl they were both dating. Eighteen-year-old Henry Lucas from Springfield, Ohio, opened fire, wounding his rival and killing Roger with two bullets.
Police searched the campus, but the killer was not found until seven hours after the shooting when a student in Ogden Hall went to make a call and found Henry slumped over in a phone booth. He’d shot himself in the head. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition and later died.
Is it Henry or Roger who stalks Reid Hall?
Perhaps it is both of them, still trying to figure out what went wrong on that tragic Mother’s Day.
The students in the Technological Institute huddled over their books, trying to ignore the odd noises that emanated from the walls. They did not have time to entertain the idea of ghosts or to discuss silly legends. They were, after all, serious pupils of one of the most selective colleges in the country, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago.
Sarah Bailey, however, managed to pry a student or two away from their books long enough to get the scoop for the school newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, in October 2004. Late-night studiers, she wrote, sometimes heard the sound of flasks and glasses clinking against each other. The noise was followed by a rattle and then an indefinable whisper.
The haunted Northwestern University is crawling with ghosts. (1921 yearbook)
More than one student reporter has speculated about the identities of the ghosts who inhabit the old college on the shore of Lake Michigan, entertaining various legends, such as the one that says the Tech Building ghost is a 1950s chemistry student who drank a tube of cyanide after his doctoral dissertation was rejected. Others believe that two female students committed suicide in the late 1800s after their fiancées deserted them. Witnesses swear they’ve heard the disembodied voices of the spirits weeping and commiserating with each other.
Another specter is said to be that of a heartbroken student who hung himself in the University Hall’s bell tower. And some say that Annie May Swift, an 1880s student who succumbed to an illness, still roams the campus and has a special attachment to the building named after her.
This writer, however, made one of her frequent forages into forgotten archives to finger an entirely different restless spirit. The sad story was buried so deeply that few on campus are aware of it. I found it by accident. I was researching another haunted location when a shocking news story surfaced. It chronicled the sort of death that often results in earthbound spirits. My investigation into the ghosts of Northwestern University was backward. First I found the death, and then I looked for ghosts where the tragedy had occurred.
The Annie May Swift Hall at Northwestern University, depicted in this antique image, is home to the ghost of young Annie who succumbed to illness while attending college here. (author’s collection)
My sixth sense told me that while many spirits may inhabit the campus, a 1921 student was surely among them. Those familiar with my books know that I am only slightly shy about admitting that my intuition sometimes guides me as I track ghosts. And in this instance, that sixth sense felt as sharp as the one the victim himself felt when he made a gloomy prediction.
Northwestern University as it appeared when one student mysteriously vanished. (1922 yearbook)
Freshman Leighton Mount had a special affection for an older woman, twenty-four-year-old Doris Fuchs, who did not return his feelings. “You made me love you,” he wrote in a last note to her in September 1921.
“We were what you might call pals,” Doris said in 1923.
Was Leighton simply trying to get her attention when he spoke to her about ways he could end his life? He dismissed the idea of drowning, because his body would resurface, she remembered. She was so used to his ramblings that at first she did not take him that seriously when he told her that he would “disappear during rush.” Doris heard the statement as a half-hearted suicide threat. Was it a threat, or was it a premonition?
Leighton must have had reservations about the wild week of hazing, because his mother advised him that he had better participate, or he would “look like a sissy.”
The barbaric “fight week” pitted freshmen and sophomore males against each other in tortuous “pranks.” Did Leighton and his roommate, Roscoe Fitch, really have a choice? The rowdy, testosterone-driven event rushed over the campus like a tidal wave, picking up everything in its path and leaving the hapless wounded in its wake.
Some of the students were terrorized in the lake. Student Arthur Persinger, for instance, “was tied to a plank which was placed parallel with the water, and so low over it that the waves would splash over his face,” according to one witness.
Young men kidnapped and tied each other up, sometimes abandoning angry and embarrassed students naked and far from campus. Almost everyone seemed to get through the September 1921 rush OK—everyone except for Leighton Mount.
Just as he had told Doris he would, Leighton disappeared.
At first, none of the other students would admit to having any idea of what had happened to him. But then Northwestern student and star athlete Charles Palmer, who worked at a bakery, told a coworker that he knew where Leighton was. When she pressed Palmer for details, he clammed up.
As Leighton’s parents hired a private investigator, rumors circulated. Students told the university authorities that Leighton had been kidnapped by a newspaper reporter who was keeping him hidden. The reporter, they said, would eventually release him and get a great scoop for his newspaper.
Fifteen months went by with no word from Leighton, and then, at Christmastime, his parents received a telegram, signed “Leighton.”
Was he alive? Or was someone trying to throw them off the trail?
In April 1923 another fight week turned tragic when Louis Aubere was killed in a car wreck. The cars were loaded with students involved in the rush, and some witnesses said that the crash was deliberate.
As students were grieving, a grisly discovery was made. A twelve-year-old boy went down to the lakeshore to play by the Lake Street Pier, south of the college campus. Puzzled by the odd bones he found beneath the pier, he took one home to show his mother. She called the police.
Leighton Mount had been found.
The bone the kid retrieved was one of Leighton’s shin bones. Leighton’s mother identified bits of clothing and a belt buckle, stamped with the initials L.M. Leighton’s dentist made a positive identification.
While students said the death was a suicide, there was no discounting the rotted bits of rope found with the skeleton. It was the same type of rope that the boys used when they bound each other during rush.
Prosecutor Robert Crowe argued that Leighton had been kidnapped at midnight on Wednesday, September 21, 1921. The hazers had tied him beneath the pier and, when they returned the next day, found him dead. They had then made a pact to keep the death a secret. Now, twenty months later, dozens of people were subpoenaed as authorities demanded the truth in court.
The truth, however, was difficult to pinpoint. Some of the students changed their stories—including Leighton’s roommate, Roscoe Fitch. Newspapers reported that after four trying hours and eight versions of his account, Roscoe burst into tears and cried, “I’ll lose my credits! I’ll be kicked out of school if I tell! I dare not talk for I have been warned by men at the top to keep quiet, and I must do so!”
All-American boy Chuck Palmer may have had guilty knowledge of a cruel death. (1922 yearbook)
The school president himself, Walter Dill Scott, had his character called into question when it was implied that he had known more about Leighton’s disappearance than he’d admitted. His detractors questioned why fifteen students had allegedly been mysteriously expelled immediately after the young man vanished.
In the end, a grand jury concluded that Leighton had indeed died by the hands of others.
News of a promising lead appeared in the July 17, 1923, issue of the Indianapolis Daily Star when a witness claimed that he had watched a group of men lower Leighton beneath the pier. The case, the paper said, may soon reopen. An archive search produced no more accounts of the case, and Leighton Mount’s name dropped from the news.
The ivy on the old buildings grew thicker, the trees towered higher, alumni lived out their lives, and Leighton Mount was forgotten. The guilty walked free.
Some of the guilty must have felt remorse as they lived out their lives, the secret a prickly bur in their sides as they tried to forget. If still alive, the culprits would be near one hundred years old. Perhaps one with guilty knowledge told someone. And maybe that someone was a son or daughter who will now come forward with the information—especially when they learn that Leighton may still be in pain.
Most of those who loved Leighton are dead. Does he know that? Or is he stuck in the nightmare of a September morning in 1921? Is he still trying to escape his terrifying, watery grave where he was so callously abandoned until his last breath was replaced by cold lake water, and the skin floated from his bones?
Imagine, the terrorized spirit, trying to make his way back to campus. Imagine it, and you will very likely come up with an image that is much like the apparition seen near campus.
They call him “Seaweed Charlie.”
Chicago ghost researcher Richard Crowe is well aware of the specter seen near the Evanston campus. Despite his grasp of Chicago history and the fact that he is related to the prosecutor who handled the fatal hazing case, the murder of Leighton Mount was buried so deeply that even Crowe hadn’t heard of it. Yet he had known about “Seaweed Charlie” for years.
The tortured spirit is seen both crawling and walking from the water by Sheridan Road, near the Lake Street Pier where Leighton met his fate. Witnessed by many over the decades, the description does not vary, said Richard Crowe. One encounter occurred on a summer night in 1993, he told me. “Two girls, Lisa Becker and Jenny Trisko, were driving south along Sheridan Road around midnight,” he said. “Suddenly they noticed the car in front of them swerving, as if to avoid something in the road.”
Students enjoy playing in the lake, ignoring the dark secrets beneath the surface. (1922 yearbook)
There in the middle of the street was a man wearing a heavy trench coat. He had come from the direction of the lake.
“It was too nice [outside] to be wearing a coat,” Lisa told Richard. Jenny said that the man was tall and thin and glowing. The ethereal being emanated an eerie light as he lumbered across the road. The girls had never heard of the Sheridan Road ghost, and when they excitedly described their encounter to friends, they learned that the mother of Jenny’s boyfriend had seen the specter at the same spot ten years earlier.
When Richard Crowe speculated on the identity of the ghost, he had several ideas, including the theory that the ghost belonged to an instructor from the Glenview Naval Air Station who crashed his plane in the lake in May 1951.
My research confirmed the plane crash, along with details about two rescuers who drowned while trying to retrieve the pilot’s body. They were on the lake just off campus when their boat capsized.
According to Richard, some who have seen the Sheridan Road ghost say that he is dripping with seaweed.
The Evanston, Illinois, campus, shown here in a vintage postcard, is lovely but filled with ghosts who carry dark secrets. (author’s collection)
Are any of these men “Seaweed Charlie?”
Maybe. But what about the fact that the ghost is encountered around midnight, the same time that Leighton suffered his fate? Weigh the terror that was surely suffered by each lake victim, and Leighton wins the dismal contest.
Bound for hours beneath the pier in icy darkness, he was alone with his own tormented thoughts. What did he think of in his last moments? Did he think of Doris and how he would never again see her lovely smile? Did he imagine the grief his parents would feel if he let the lake take him?
Discovered dead and blue, he was further insulted by the cover-up. If there was ever a candidate for a spirit to remain earthbound, Leighton is it.
If you should travel along Sheridan Road, say a prayer for Leighton Mount as you pass the Lake Street Pier. If you should see the wet and glowing ghost, do not be afraid. It is probably just Leighton, a naïve young man in love with a girl named Doris.
Are the ghosts of murdered people really more prone to stay earthbound?
Yes, according to Richard Crowe, Chicago’s original ghost hunter. Leading ghost tours for three decades, the author of Chicago’s Street Guide to the Supernatural frequently makes the connection between murder and ghosts.
He points to the case of Bobby Franks, the thirteen-year-old victim in a 1924 “thrill kill.”
The murder made headlines not just because of the viciousness of the killing, but because both the victim and the killers were the sons of Chicago millionaires.
Nathan Leopold, eighteen, and his partner in crime, Richard Loeb, seventeen, had been planning to kill someone for months before accosting Bobby as he walked home from Harvard School on the southwest side of Chicago, explained Richard Crowe.
Bobby was Richard Loeb’s second cousin, so the boy probably was not alarmed to see the familiar face peering from the car as it pulled up beside him. Relative or not, the sociopaths did not care. They thirsted for blood and took the opportunity to make their twisted fantasy a reality.
They brutally killed Bobby and dumped him in a culvert, where he was found so quickly that the ransom note was just being delivered to his parents’ home.
A tip from a chauffeur led police to the rich boys. When a pair of tortoise-shell eyeglasses were found near the culvert, their prescription was matched to the pair worn by Leopold. Though he claimed that he’d lost them while in the area bird-watching, evidence against the teens mounted. Each blamed the other for the murder. In the end they were both convicted but escaped execution due to the expert defense by famous attorney Clarence Darrow.
While Darrow was fighting for the lives of the teenage killers, State’s Attorney Robert E. Crowe was in Bobby’s corner.
Robert and Richard Crowe are branches from the same family tree. Their roots are in Tipperary, Ireland, and it seems they have a karmic connection, each ending up in Chicago as a voice for murder victims. While Robert worked to put killers behind bars, Richard tells the stories of the restless spirits of the slain.
Was the spirit of Bobby Franks aware of this link when Richard Crowe visited his crypt in Rosehill Cemetery? Did he recognize the younger Crowe as the relative of the man who fought so vehemently to avenge his death?
It was 1988 when Richard Crowe, along with a cemetery caretaker, visited Bobby’s grave. Richard told me he walked up to the door of the crypt and tried the handle, even though he did not expect it to be unlocked.
The caretaker gasped as the normally locked door creaked open. “Maybe the ghost of Bobby wants you to go in!” he exclaimed.
Richard entered and said a prayer for the soul of Bobby.
Afterward, as he stared solemnly at the cold, gray crypt, the caretaker shared some fascinating history. Years earlier, cemetery workers had frequently seen a boy wandering near the crypt. As they approached, the youngster would vanish. Everyone said it was the ghost of Bobby Franks. Interestingly, the ghost did not settle down until his killers met their own deaths.
Despite the fact they were incarcerated, the two enjoyed special privileges. “They had the run of the prison,” said Richard. “They had special meals and private dining in the officers’ lounge.”
Richard Loeb died from razor cuts after a fight in the shower in 1936. Nathan Leopold, paroled in 1958, succumbed to heart failure in 1971. It was only then that the ghost sightings of Bobby Franks stopped.
Another Chicago area ghost, however, is not at rest.
“The murder of Emily Keseg is one of the area’s most baffling mysteries,” said Richard Crowe. An eighteen-year-old freshman in the fall of 1969, Emily attended classes at Morton College in Cicero, Illinois. At that time, Richard explained, the new college had not been built, so sessions were held at Morton East High School.
Emily was a quiet girl and a good student, embroiled in the drama of the typical teenager. She had quarreled with her boyfriend on Friday, October 17, but did not sit home crying that night. She joined her friends for pizza, advising her parents not to expect her home till midnight.
At some point that evening, she decided to visit her boyfriend and asked a friend to drop her off near his home. He and his parents, however, reported that she never arrived.
A witness spotted a young girl matching Emily’s description walking on a deserted street in the early morning hours of Saturday. Someone else in the area heard moaning in the alley behind their house and later discovered a bloody dollar bill and a wig. Though police suspected that the moaning was connected to Emily, the clues made little sense.
Emily was found strangled in a field on Saturday afternoon.
“The case has many loose ends,” said Richard. “It was never solved.”
Poor Emily still wanders in the field where her body was found. Today, Richard Crowe explained, it is the site of the new Morton College, built in the 1970s.
“The new college was not yet finished when her ghost was spotted,” he said.
A man was working on the roof when he was startled to see a teenager in white walking along the edge. He called to her, and she stepped out into the air and vanished. “When he ran to the edge and looked down, there was no one there,” said Richard.
Since that day, the troubled spirit occasionally appears on the roof. She is also known to play with the elevator, slam doors, and toss stones.
If Emily had not been murdered, she would be fifty-five years old and probably a grandmother by now. But the breath was cruelly snatched from her lungs by a monster. Maybe her killer is still alive and feels no guilt, and that is why the spirit of Emily cannot rest.
“Perhaps the solution to her murder will free her,” said Richard.
We don’t know if the detectives harvested and saved DNA from the homicide. If they did, recent scientific breakthroughs could soon put detectives on the heels of the killer. His days may be numbered, and Emily could finally graduate to a peaceful plane.
Monster in Our Midst
THE SITE OF A HORRIFIC unsolved murder in Keddie, California, is believed to be haunted, according to a June 10, 2001, article in the San Francisco Gate.
Keddie Resort, founded in 1910, was once a placid vacation spot where visitors could rent one of thirty-three rustic cabins or a room in the lodge, reported writer Kevin Fagan. People drove hundreds of miles to the northern Sierra Mountains resort to explore the pristine wooded trails and dine at the Keddie Lodge Restaurant, which was packed nightly as customers lined up to eat wild game and sip fine wine.
Everything changed on April 11, 1981, when four people were brutally tortured and murdered in Cabin 28. Thirty-six-year-old Glenna Sharp; her son, fifteen-year-old John Sharp; and his friend seventeen-year-old Dana Wingate were bound and killed.
Sheila Sharp, fourteen, had spent the night at a friend’s, and the poor girl discovered her loved ones in the carnage. Her two younger brothers and their friend who was spending the night were unharmed, but her thirteen-year-old sister, Tina, was missing. Tina’s skull was discovered three years later by a bottle digger.
With the public too frightened to visit, the resort “rotted into a refuge for squatters and hobos,” wrote Kevin Fagan. He also reported that the campground was being restored and would soon reopen. The “Murder House,” however, was a dark reminder.
Its windows covered with plywood, and its doors nailed shut, it was a site so filled with evil that even seasoned detectives did not like to step inside. The many curious neighborhood kids and homeless people seeking shelter who have broken into Cabin 28 have all ended up fleeing in terror.
While some locals were skeptical of the idea that the place is haunted, others told Fagan that they had seen eerie floating figures; had heard footsteps, doors slamming, and moans in the empty house; and had witnessed objects that inexplicably materialized there.
Frustrated detectives continue to work the very sad cold case that left so many mourning and so few clues.
