Missouri

The Hornet Spook Light

Joplin

Twelve miles southwest of Joplin, near the Missouri–Oklahoma state line, a gravel road arrows through a canyon of blackjack oak. This obscure east-west track, not quite four miles in length, lies in Oklahoma, just beyond the former border village of Hornet, Missouri. Known as Spook Light Road, or, as it is called locally, the Devil’s Promenade, it is similar to other roadways in the Ozark foothills. Except at night. When darkness falls, a mysterious light appears, bobbing along from west to east. It has been seen frequently from dusk to dawn for over a century. Early pioneers called it the Indian Light, but it is now more commonly known as the Hornet Spook Light.

The ball of fire, varying from baseball-sized to larger than a bushel basket, spins down the center of the road at great speed, rises to treetop level and hovers, then retreats. At other times, it sways from side to side and up and down like a lantern being carried. But no one is ever there to carry it.

Observers say the light is silver, red, or yellow. Sometimes blue or green. It is usually seen as a single glow, but one woman said she saw it “burst like a bubble, scattering sparks in all directions.” If chased, the light seems to go out, only to reappear later. One man drove his car directly at the light until it vanished.

Although the mystery light has never been known to harm anyone, some observers claim to have had close personal encounters with it. Early one morning, Gregory Briones was driving nearby when he turned around and saw the Spook Light sitting on the lid of his trunk.

“It throwed off a good bit of light, like an electric bulb close up to you,” he told a news reporter. “I took off in one big hurry.”

A man walking along the Devil’s Promenade said the light swung past him close enough so he could feel its searing heat.

Other people reported seeing the light bob through open windows of automobiles; one car caught fire. On at least two occasions, the light was observed six miles beyond the western end of the Devil’s Promenade, near Quapaw, Oklahoma.

Chester McMinn, who farmed near Quapaw, was working his fields late one summer night when the Spook Light appeared overhead, illuminating his acreage with silvered brilliance.

Louise Graham was riding home in a school bus from a carnival at Quapaw when the light appeared outside the rear window of the bus. The brilliant yellow fireball badly frightened her and her schoolmates and forced the driver to pull over. Only then did the light drift away.

Generations of local people believe that the Hornet Spook Light is a ghost, or “ha’nt,” in local parlance. There are many legends to account for the queer glow.

One version of the legend involves the Quapaw Native Americans who once called the region their home. It is said that a woman and man of the tribe fell in love, but the girl’s greedy father demanded a larger dowry than the young man could afford. Unable to marry with the tribe’s blessing and unwilling to separate, the lovers eloped. Their absence was soon discovered and a party of warriors sent in pursuit. Overtaken on a bluff above the Spring River, the couple joined hands and leaped to their deaths.

Shortly afterward, in 1886, the light first appeared; it was thought to be the spirits of the young lovers. It created such a panic in the village of Hornet that many people abandoned their farms and moved away. The light was a hoodoo, they claimed, that brought death.

Another legend claims the Spook Light is the ghost of an Osage chief who was decapitated on the Devil’s Promenade. The Spook Light is the torch held high in the chief’s hand as he returns to search for his lost head.

A third legend places the origin of the light in the Prohibition era (1920–33). Although the law forbade alcoholic beverages, illegal whiskey sites known as stills pervaded the Ozark hills. With some regularity, federal agents raided the operations, flushing out these so-called moonshiners.

Eventually they caught old Uncle Dick Hunt, purveyor of the finest “corn likker” in the area. It was so fine, in fact, that Uncle Dick refused to pour it into bottles that had contained any other blends. He used bottles of only the best brands or the buyer’s own stone jug. But after the Feds raided him and broke up his still several times, Uncle Dick got smart. He mounted the still on the rear of an old spring wagon. Whenever the agents were around, Uncle Dick moved the still to the safety of a nearby cave. The Spook Light is Uncle Dick Hunt’s still, jouncing around on the back of the wagon eternally heading for cover.

Over the years, the light has been studied, photographed, and even shot at with high-powered rifles in efforts to identify and explain it.

So what is it in reality?

Marsh gas? Probably not. Winds fail to disperse the fireball as they do conventional marsh gas.

A will-o’-the-wisp? The light is far more intense than the luminescence created by rotting organic matter.

Glowing minerals from the numerous piles of mine tailings in the area? Maybe.

A pocket of natural gas ignited by lightning and once worshipped as a fire god by Indians of the area? Not likely. Natural gas flames and, in time, burns out.

Anomalous lights, such as the Hornet Spook Light, have been reported all over the world for thousands of years. Some experts believe that these lights are electrical atmospheric charges generated by the shifting and grinding of rocks deep below the earth’s crust. Although such lights are frequently associated with earthquakes, their presence does not necessarily predict quakes. The distorted electrical field that results from these charges can make the light appear to act in an “intelligent” way, changing direction and altitude and giving chase. And physical encounters with the electrical field can make a person fearful and apprehensive. Sleep difficulties, skin burns, nausea, and temporary blindness may follow.

Joplin, Missouri, just north of the Spook Light area, lies on a great fault line running from east of New Madrid, Missouri, westward into Oklahoma. Four earthquakes during the eighteenth century were followed by a devastating series of quakes that convulsed this area in 1811–12. Strange lights may have accompanied these quakes, but it was not until 1886 that the Hornet Spook Light was first reported. Although the appearance of the light has not been accompanied by any major quake in this century as far as is known, seismologists consider this region of Missouri one of the most unstable areas in the country, and the generation of an electrical atmospheric charge may possibly explain the Spook Light.

Over the past quarter century, a dramatic increase in earthquakes has occurred in an eight-state region, including Missouri, Oklahoma, and southern Kansas. Geologists speculate this escalation in seismic activity is due to a rise in hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, in the area.

Other teams of investigators who have studied the lights conclude that they are those of automobiles driving east on an old, iconic portion of U.S. Highway 66. This highway is about five miles away in a direct line with the Devil’s Promenade but at a slightly lower elevation. A high ridge lies between the two roads. The density and rarity of atmosphere as it rises over the ridge causes the light to bend, creating the eerie effects.

In 2014 a professor from the University of Central Oklahoma conducted an experiment and explained the Spook Light as car headlights from the junction of Highway 137 and E 50 Road outside of Quapaw, Oklahoma.

Old-timers smile and shake their heads. They know the mystery light was seen in the same spot in these woods long before the automobile was invented and the highway built—back in horse and buggy days, they would say.

Whatever the Hornet Spook Light may be—and the debate will no doubt go on—thousands of visitors will continue to visit the area. Cars park bumper to bumper on the narrow gravel road, while drivers wait and watch for that strange light that swings and sways and bobs along up in the night sky.

Sentries in the Night

St. Louis

The snow came, blanketing roofs and mortaring window frames. Inside the house on the hill, Dr. John J. O’Brien lit another lantern and set the dinner table. His wife, Elizabeth, added wood to the cookstove then peered through the kitchen window clouded by steam from the kettle of stew bubbling on the stove. Her husband stood behind her, his full, red beard barely touching the top of her head. Usually the gaslights of St. Louis shone like a jeweled carpet spread far below, but now, beyond the swirl of flakes, no lights were visible. Nor were there any sounds—not the clatter of buggy wheels on the cobblestone street or the call of children at play. Only the ceaseless howling of the wind.

“It’s unreal, isn’t it?” murmured Elizabeth, looking up into her husband’s face. “It’s as if we’re suspended in time, cut off from all living things.”

John detected a quiver of excitement in her voice. He knew that, like a child, she both loved and feared blizzards.

“I’m glad you finished your rounds early today,” she added, ladling the stew into bowls and setting out great slabs of freshly baked bread.

Her husband nodded and sat down at the table, the chair creaking beneath his weight. He was truly a massive man with a deep, hearty laugh and a streak of Irish whimsy that people said was his best medicine. Yet tonight no whimsy livened up the doctor’s face.

“Elizabeth,” he began, “I haven’t seen Mrs. Kilpatrick for a long time.”

He knifed a slab of butter onto his bread.

“I’ve had her on my mind all day. As you know, she has that weak heart.”

Elizabeth’s jaw tightened and her cheeks flushed, but John saw in her eyes the same gentle light that had first attracted him to her, when she was Elizabeth Fitzwilliam and he was the stranger passing through town—an Irish physician recently graduated from medical school in Dublin, traveling across America to see the world before settling down to a practice in Australia. But Elizabeth had charmed him; so had St. Louis. The adventurous young doctor-to-be never did get to the South Pacific.

John had known from the beginning that Elizabeth was the only woman with whom he wished to share his life; he sensed that she was proud that his patients’ needs came first, and he loved her deeply for it.

Now their eyes met across the table.

“But John, you wouldn’t be going to see Mrs. Kilpatrick on a night like this, would you?”

He stared into his empty bowl.

“If I thought for one moment . . .” His voice trailed off.

“. . . that she needed me,” finished Elizabeth.

She then murmured, “Of course.”

The dinner table conversation waned. John’s preoccupation distracted him and he fell silent. Finally he rose, went into the living room, and stood by the fireplace. He laid another log on the glowing embers.

Hands clasped before him, he watched fingers of flame encircle the dry wood and bounce the light off the soot-blackened back wall of the firebox. From the corner of his eye, he saw Elizabeth clearing away the dinner dishes. She moved deftly, with that certain resilience that all adaptable women possess.

John went to the kitchen doorway. “I’m going to Mrs. Kilpatrick.”

Elizabeth nodded. She knew that would be his decision long before he said it aloud.

He never knew how he had acquired that sixth sense about the condition of his patients, but this inexplicable intuition often meant the difference between life and death. He suspected it was a gift given to most country doctors in that era before the telephone.

Dr. O’Brien pulled on his boots, put on his heavy overcoat, fur-lined cap, and gloves; then wound the long, wool muffler Elizabeth had made for him around his neck. He kissed his wife good-bye and begged her not to wait up.

Trudging to the stable behind the house, he kicked the drifts into snow showers.

Moments later, the horse was hitched to his buggy.

The doctor sat high on the box spring cushion, his medical bag beside him. Glancing back, he barely saw Elizabeth’s face framed in the kitchen window, hands cupped to her cheeks, nose pressed against the glass. He knew she would watch the rig until its twin oil lamps vanished in the cold, snowy night.

What Dr. O’Brien did not know is that he was setting forth on the most unusual house call of his life, one that he would never forget.

The wind had picked up, driving the snow with stinging fury against his cheeks. He tried to shield his face with one hand while holding the reins to guide the horse with the other. Perhaps he should have put up the rubber side curtains, but he never liked to use them because they obstructed what little vision he had to the sides.

He hunched forward now on the seat, trying to see where to make his first turn. The Kilpatricks lived several miles away down a maze of side roads. In daylight and good weather the route was not difficult. But now, in the darkness and with swirling snow obstructing nearly everything in sight, even familiar landmarks were obliterated. Dr. O’Brien found it nearly impossible to see junctions with other roads.

Following a bend on the main road, he met the blizzard head on. He could see but a few feet ahead as the horse slowed its walk even further. The oil lamps were useless.

Then the wind seemed to take a momentary pause to catch its breath. At that moment came the faint sound of a barking dog. Dr. John thought he had imagined it. But there it was again, louder, and more distinct. He rose, leaned over the leather dash, and peered through the veil of snow.

That is when he saw them—two giant mastiffs, one on each side of the buggy, slightly ahead of it. Was he nearing the Kilpatricks and did the dogs belong to them? He could not remember; he had never noticed any, but he would not necessarily have seen them if they were kept outside.

If not that, where had they come from?

He had to take a chance; there were no other options. And so he followed them. When the dogs led to the left, Dr. O’Brien turned with them. When the dogs led right, the rig followed. The doctor lost track of all the turnings, the jigs and the jogs, but he never took his eyes off the barking four-footed guides as they plunged effortlessly through the driving, drifting snow.

After a final turn, Dr. O’Brien saw the Kilpatricks’ cozy frame farmhouse covered with snow, its roof rimmed with ice. A lantern’s glow shone through a frosted window. He drove the rig beneath an open shed at the side of the house, grabbed his medical kit, and eased himself down from the seat.

He knocked and Mr. Kilpatrick opened the door.

“Oh doctor, it’s so fine you came,” he said, shaking his guest’s hand warmly. “The missus is poorly today and has such trouble breathing. Here, let’s dry your clothes by the fire. And warm yourself, please.”

Mr. Kilpatrick took Dr. O’Brien’s overcoat and spread it over the back of a chair near the hearth and put his boots close by. The doctor warmed his hands, let the ice melt out of his beard, then went into the bedroom to check on his patient.

The woman’s pulse was slow and her breathing labored. Dr. O’Brien gave her medicine for her heart and something to put her to sleep. In a short time she breathed easier and drifted off to sleep.

Mr. Kilpatrick insisted that Dr. O’Brien stay for hot coffee and food. Grateful for the chance to relax after the strain of his trip, the doctor pulled a rocking chair closer to the fireplace.

“Tell me, sir, where do you keep your dogs in this weather?”

“Dogs?” echoed the host. “But I have no dogs.”

Neither did any of his neighbors.

By four o’clock in the morning, the storm had passed and the landscape bathed in the glow of a full moon.

Dr. O’Brien drove home slowly. At he labored to remember each turn, he watched for the dogs, listened for their barking. But he met no living thing on his trip home that night.

As dawn approached, Dr. O’Brien arrived at the back door of his house. He stomped the snow from his boots and pulled them off. He went inside quietly and hung his outer clothes on the hooks by the stove. His shoulders ached and his head hurt. Perhaps he could coax the living room fire into life and relax awhile before going to bed.

In stocking feet, he padded into the living room and found Elizabeth curled up in her rocker, sound asleep by the cold hearth.

Suddenly aware of her husband’s presence, Elizabeth jerked awake.

“Coffee first, then tell me,” she said quietly.

He never knew how she sensed what he needed. Tonight, after the long, late trip, he wanted to relax his body and unravel his mind. When Elizabeth stood, John took her into his arms and held her close. Then he added a log to the still-hot embers and watched the fire flame up.

John and Elizabeth sat together, drinking and talking until dawn fully washed the windows with gray light. He told her of the sudden appearance of the mastiffs and their unknown origin.

During the next few days, the O’Briens asked everyone they knew about the giant dogs. No one they knew kept such dogs nor knew of anyone who did. The doctor recalled that when he pulled into the Kilpatricks’ yard, the dogs were no longer there. At the time he had given it little thought, believing that they had found shelter or that his eyes were overly strained from trying to focus through the blizzard.

But Dr. John J. O’Brien, the practical, down-to-earth country doctor, eventually concluded that—as improbable as it sounded—the mastiffs were not real, that they were ghost dogs that had somehow materialized for the single purpose of guiding him to Mrs. Kilpatrick’s bedside.

He could think of no other explanation.

The Midnight Rider

Sand Springs

Before the American Civil War, wagon trains rumbling westward often stopped for the night at a place named Sand Springs, two miles west of Roubidoux Creek, between Rolla and Springfield. Sand Springs was a campground that took its name from a spring of soft lime water that boiled up through the sand and gravel. Near the spring stood a small, abandoned country church where countless freight drivers took shelter at night.

Soon after the Civil War ended, stories circulated that the church was haunted. People said that a phantom horseman rode into the building at midnight. The horse hesitated a moment at the door, then walked slowly down the aisle and stopped at the altar. A whinny was heard, then the dull thud of something striking the floor. Measured hoofbeats retreated up the aisle. At the church door there was a final, chilling human laugh.

Up until the 1930s, when the building was razed, people unsuccessfully went out to Sand Springs late at night trying to locate and follow the ghosts with lanterns and flashlights.

Only a few persons knew the true story of the unearthly drama that was reenacted in the building, a tale of passion, intrigue, and revenge.

In 1848 Wyndham Potter, a wealthy planter from Georgia, settled on a parcel of land near Sand Springs. He had no wife or family, but he brought a large number of slaves with him because Missouri allowed that, including a woman named Jenny and her daughter, Carolyne.

Potter built a handsome house and invited his new neighbors to a housewarming at which Jenny presided as hostess. Her daughter, sixteen-year-old Carolyne, was a slightly built but strong young woman who bore a striking resemblance to Wyndham Potter himself.

Two years later, in 1850, Potter died. He left the house and a trust fund to Jenny and Carolyne, along with their freedom. The rest of his estate, including a small piece of land nearby, went to a nephew, Charles Potter.

Charles soon arrived to take up residence on the land he had inherited. Before long, he began worshipping in the little church near Sand Springs each Sunday with Jenny and Carolyne.

A preacher who was called Elder Maupins often filled the pulpit. He was a formidable figure, nearly six feet tall, strong and muscular with black chin whiskers. He had a gaunt and weary wife and two grown sons. Although most people respected him, few truly liked him. His next-door neighbor, an old woman whom everyone called “Grandmother,” thought Elder Maupins was evil and cruel. As an example, she pointed to the occasion when she saw Maupins shoot and kill his sons’ dog simply because it refused to come to him.

Grandmother soon noticed that Maupins was becoming a regular visitor at Jenny’s home. After others questioned the propriety of such visits, Grandmother herself confronted Maupins. She demanded to know what he was doing in the woman’s home. Saving souls, he told her, as God had chosen him to do.

That explanation satisfied everyone, except Grandmother. Was she the only one who saw the dark looks exchanged between Maupins and Charles Potter in the church? Even Jenny and Carolyne were embarrassed and averted their eyes as Maupins, rising on tiptoe in the pulpit, arms outstretched and trembling, declaimed the evils of sin.

But Elder Maupins was soon taken out of the pulpit when a country preacher was assigned to the Sand Springs church. After that, Maupins seldom attended services.

One day cattle buyers passed through Sand Springs, announcing that horse thieves had raided a neighborhood on the Osage River, escaping with twenty head of mules and horses. A posse raced south after the gang. In the exchange of gunfire one officer was killed and another wounded. Supposedly, the lethal shots were fired by a tall man wearing a high-crowned black hat, a red linsey shirt, and dark pants tucked into his boots; he rode a large sorrel mule. It was an apt description of Maupins and his mule, Judy.

Several days later a detective arrived in Sand Springs to inquire about the ownership of a large sorrel mule. Maupins told his wife he had urgent business in the Boston Mountains. After dark, he fled, taking the mule with him.

At about the same time, Jenny’s daughter, Carolyne, vanished. Jenny was awakened the night before Carolyne’s disappearance by hoofbeats going past the house. The rider was singing a church hymn as he rode. Thinking he was a neighbor returning home, Jenny drifted back to sleep. In the morning, however, she awoke to find her daughter gone, along with many of her clothes.

The grief-stricken mother was certain that slave runners had abducted her and would sell her into slavery.

When the woman known as Grandmother found out, she said she knew better.

“She’s run off with Maupins,” she whispered. “When you find him, you’ll find her.”

Years passed and no word of either Elder Maupins or Carolyne ever reached the community.

The Civil War brought difficult times to the people of Sand Springs as husbands, fathers, and brothers went away to fight, some for the Union, others the Confederacy. Charles Potter himself had joined the Rebels and rode off with the cavalry that very year. Soon the parson of Sand Springs was the only able-bodied man left in the community. The women helped one another as best they could and prayed for the safe return of their men.

Then one Sunday morning in 1863, Elder Maupins showed up and sat in his pew. At the close of the sermon, Maupins leaped to the pulpit. The startled minister stood awkwardly to one side as Maupins announced that his mother had died in the Boston Mountains and he had been busy settling her estate. He said he was shocked to learn of Carolyne’s disappearance, which he attributed to slave traders, and asked the congregation to pray that she might be returned safely to her dear mother.

“And let us pray also,” he concluded, “for a Union victory!”

Grandmother listened attentively. She called him an excellent liar.

During the rest of that year and well into 1864, Elder Maupins stayed in Sand Springs but was often away on long trips to unknown destinations. Charles Potter survived the war and returned home in 1865.

The reason for Maupins’s mysterious trips soon became clear.

Someone in Sand Springs discovered that he had been a member of a bushwhacker gang that raided farms and ranches throughout the Finley Creek hills, spreading death and destruction in their wake. Maupins denied it and viciously denounced the Confederacy. Even staunch Unionists were sickened by his bluster.

The affair took an unexpected turn when Charles Potter sent word to the Sand Springs congregation that on a certain Sunday night when Maupins was preaching, he would ride on his horse down the aisle to the pulpit and by looks alone run the elder out of the church and the community forever.

At the appointed hour, the former Rebel officer, in full-dress gray uniform, mounted his horse and rode to the church. Near the close of the service, Potter rode into the church and made his way slowly down the aisle. He reined his horse to a halt in front of the pulpit. A few people gasped, while others anxiously waited for the fight.

Elder Maupins raised both arms to deliver the benediction.

Charles glared at him.

“May the Lord bless you and keep you . . . ,” intoned Maupins.

Shots rang out from beyond an open window. Young Potter toppled dead from his horse, blood streaming from his head.

The riderless horse stood for a moment, then turned and trotted out of the church.

The horrified worshippers did not move or speak. Elder Maupins sank to his knees and asked that they pray for guidance. He had uttered only a few words before he glanced up the aisle to the church door. Then, like a crazed animal, he leaped to his feet and dived through the window from which the shot had been fired.

While the congregation sat in stunned silence, the deacons covered Potter’s body. It would remain in the custody of two of the minister’s assistants until an inquest could be held the next day.

In the morning, a jury was convened and witnesses were called. But there were no clues and the identity of the murderer could not be learned. However, the jury did unravel the mystery of Elder Maupins’s hasty exit from the church when the community’s ne’erdo-well testified.

His name was Ginger and he admitted that he had been drunk when he had gotten to the church services and promptly fell asleep in the rear pew.

He was jerked awake by the sound of gunfire. Glancing up, his bleary eyes focused on a black horse with saddle and bridle walking toward him. He thought he was having a nightmare, he said, until he saw Maupins in the pulpit.

Ginger went on to say that after the horse left the church and the elder was kneeling, someone stepped through the door dressed in a man’s shirt, pants, and boots. He said it was not a man but a young, light-skinned black woman. She pointed a finger at Maupins and then unleashed a bloodcurdling laugh. That is when Maupins dived through the window. Ginger added that as the woman turned to leave he noticed a livid scar on the left side of her face and neck. She glanced down at Charles Potter’s body on the floor, then fled.

But still the question remained—who murdered Charles Potter?

Grandmother believed that some of Maupins’s raiders had carried out the ambush. Others said Potter could have been killed by a Union sympathizer living in the region.

Or was the killer Carolyne herself?

On the following Sunday, a search party found Maupins’s body face down in a cedar glade, his throat slit from ear to ear; only a bloody piece of flesh had kept his head attached to his torso. An exquisitely designed Mexican dagger was buried to its hilt between his shoulder blades. It was impossible to tell how long Maupins had been dead. The searchers concluded that after plunging through the church window, he must have made his way along the stream bank and to the glade where his body was discovered. Curiously, there was neither evidence of a struggle nor any footprints near the body.

After Elder Maupins was buried, Jenny told her neighbors she was selling everything and returning to her family in the South. She took only two saddle horses with her.

But why two horses? One would always be rested, she replied. Soon after, she left early one afternoon headed toward Georgia, riding one horse and leading the other.

A few days following Jenny’s departure, a horse trader showed up in Sand Springs. When he heard the story of what had transpired, he said he had passed two black women traveling south on the Wilderness Road. He met them in the Roark Hills, south of the old town of Forsyth. The younger woman was dressed in a man’s clothes and heavily armed.

The horse trader said she had a scar on her face.

The ghost rider of Sand Springs made its appearance not long after Jenny and Carolyne began their journey south and continued on for nearly seventy-five years. The old church finally succumbed to the elements, its few remaining walls razed in the 1930s.

The Ghost of Paris

Paris

Did the village of Paris, Missouri, play host for nearly seventy years to the gruesome specter of a woman in black floating along the community’s streets? Or was the ghost merely an eccentric old lady who rather enjoyed late evening strolls in the fashionable black clothing of a century or more ago, maybe frightening a gullible Parisian or two at the same time?

Although few know of the city’s interesting legend today, earlier generations in that northeast Missouri community passed on the story of this woman in black.

Darcy Ambrose saw the woman first. In the dusk of an October evening, she stood in her front yard calling for her children to come inside. Suddenly, a stranger swept down the street, swathed in black, her wide-brimmed bonnet shielding her face. In her hand she waved a cane. Darcy had never seen the woman before, but she assumed she was a soldier’s wife or mother. The Civil War had just ended and relatives swarmed into Paris to greet their men folk home from the battlefields.

The next night the woman in black returned. Darcy and her husband were sitting on the front stoop, talking. The stranger again brandished her cane as she passed, and the couple shrank into the shadows of their little porch. Then, in the bright moonlight, Darcy could have sworn that the woman’s feet never touched the ground. Although she looked three-dimensional, she told friends the woman herself was not real.

Soon the tavern on the courthouse square buzzed with talk of the ghost. It had an immediate impact on the community’s behavior. Tavern patrons arrived in groups of threes and fours and left the same way. Children, scurrying home from after-supper play, burst into hysterics when the stranger brushed past them; three youngsters said they had heard her long skirts rustling in the wind.

Indian summer lingered that year well into November in that part of Missouri.

So did the ghost.

Frightened residents kept their windows locked, doors bolted, and shades drawn. Travelers abroad at night were wary. In several instances, grown men, meeting the ghost, ran down the middle of the street crying for help. Little else was on the lips of city dwellers but this specter in black. Although the ghost always swung her cane at those she encountered, she never harmed anyone as far as is known.

Even when northwest winds stripped the trees, and the snows came, the woman in black did not leave.

Throughout the winter she glided down the icy streets late at night and sometimes peered into an uncurtained window.

Strangely enough when March arrived, she departed.

During the warm springtime and the long, hot summer of 1866, the people of Paris almost forgot their ghost.

But when the pumpkins ripened in mid-October, she returned and, as before, stayed until spring. No one saw her during the daylight hours. For nearly seventy years the dauntless figure in black roamed the village each winter, frightening everyone who saw her.

Who was she? What did she want?

Si Colborn edited the Monroe County Appeal for nearly sixty years before “retiring” at the age of eighty-two to write editorials and columns. Colborn said in an interview that he heard the story when he came to Paris in 1920. His late partner at the newspaper, Jack Blanton, often told the tale, sometimes with variations.

Occasionally the woman did not seem mortal, for instance. She was alleged to have had a face that glowed in the dark, and she floated rather than walked.

Colburn, however, said the woman might have been a Paris spinster spurned when her betrothed ran off with another woman. The spinster was very tall, nearly six feet, angular, and “formidable.” Having known the woman, Colborn adds, it is obvious why her husband-to-be thought better of the marriage proposal and left town.

There may be some truth to Colborn’s explanation.

The woman was not seen after the mid-1930s, shortly before the real-life spinster’s death at the age of ninety.

But an Associated Press news dispatch in November 1934 identified the woman as a Civil War soldier’s jilted sweetheart who swore on her deathbed to haunt forever her faithless lover and the entire town of Paris.

Whatever the truth of the Paris ghost, the legend that had been passed down for generations disappeared at about that time. Other means of telling ghost stories—radio broadcasts and motion pictures—were growing in popularity, even in rural America where electricity was sporadic at best. Perhaps the newspaper publicity represented the last gasp of interest in the subject. At any rate, the streets of Paris, Missouri, were safe again, and even the most timid citizen—which seemed to be most of them, as no one ever thought to confront the woman in black and ask for her identity—could walk fearlessly into the night.

The Corporal’s Lady

Columbia

Margaret Baker sat in her dormitory room in Senior Hall at Columbia Baptist Female College, staring at the front page of the newspaper until the print blurred before her eyes.

She read the two stories:

 

Columbia, Mo. Isaac Johnson, a Confederate corporal, was executed in this city yesterday. He was arrested as a spy in a dormitory room of the Columbia Baptist Female College by General Henry Halleck, commander of the Union forces occupying the city. The Rebel had been sought for weeks . . .

Columbia, Mo. Sarah June Wheeler, a student at the Columbia Baptist Female College, died yesterday in Senior Hall, the dormitory in which she resided. The body was found in the bell tower by classmates. An investigation into Miss Wheeler’s death has begun . . .

 

Cold, brutal facts—the kind you see every day in the newspaper. Margaret read no further. She knew the story by heart. The only thing she did not know was that these tragic events would be recounted over the years, the tale embellished until it achieved legendary status. Even today, new students at what is now Stephens College hear about the corporal and his lady. And every Halloween at midnight they wonder if the ghost of the lovely Sarah June once again will visit Senior Hall, searching for her Rebel.

In 1862 the Civil War raged throughout the South, into the border states and beyond. Although Missouri had declared for the Union, General Sterling Price tried to organize a Confederate campaign in the state. Any chance of concerted pro-Southern action ended when he was defeated at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, in March 1862. Yet Missouri remained a state divided where thousands remained Southern sympathizers.

After this decisive Union triumph, General Henry Halleck moved his Union forces into Columbia. The presence of Halleck’s Army of Occupation particularly upset Dr. Hubert Williams, president of the Columbia Baptist Female College, and its dean, Miss Clara Armstrong. The administrators feared for the safety of their young females and reminded them constantly not to call out from their windows to the soldiers in the streets.

One evening after dinner, a student named Sarah June Wheeler who was from Independence, Missouri, dashed up to her room in Senior Hall to get badminton racquets for herself and her roommate, Margaret Baker. Rummaging in the closet for the racquets, Sarah did not see the soldier climbing over the sill of her open window until he staggered toward her.

“Please, miss,” he began. “Where am I? What is this place?”

His gray uniform was soiled and torn, the rifle in his hands caked with mud.

“A Rebel!” screamed Sarah.

He sprang at her, clasping his hand over her mouth. She struggled to free herself but a moment later he collapsed. Just then Margaret Baker came in and gasped at the sight of the soldier sprawled on the floor beside a trunk.

“Oh my God!” she cried. “Did the South win the war? Hallelujah!”

She leaned out over the windowsill and gave a Rebel shout. Then she slammed the window shut and turned to Sarah.

“Why there’s nothin’ but damn Yankees out there.”

Sarah curled her small hands into fists. She had always tried to be fair, to understand another’s viewpoint and never knowingly hurt anyone. But Margaret’s allegiance to the Confederacy was too much. Margaret could scarcely be otherwise. She was born and raised in Little Rock, and her father, in lieu of paying his daughter’s tuition, sent two of his slaves to the college—Lucy Evans and Elijah Patterson. They cleaned, cooked, served, and worked in the school’s laundry.

The young women’s innate kindness took over their indecisiveness, and they knelt on either side of the soldier, loosening his uniform to check for injuries. He did not appear to be wounded; at least there was no blood anywhere. Sarah put smelling salts under his nose and the soldier quickly regained consciousness.

No, he was not ill or wounded, he said, only weak from hunger. The girls helped him into a chair. Margaret summoned Lucy and Elijah and ordered them to smuggle a tray of food from the kitchen and to say nothing of the soldier’s presence.

After the soldier had eaten, he introduced himself as Corporal Isaac Johnson, Fifth Cavalry, Mississippi section. He had fought at Pea Ridge and had just escaped from Camp Douglas, Illinois, traveling by night and hiding by day. His father had been killed in General Grant’s bombardment of Nashville. Isaac was seeking to avenge that death by sneaking into Columbia to kill General Halleck.

Sarah’s eyes filled. She understood his bitterness; her own father fighting for the Union had been killed by Robert E. Lee’s troops. She was so devastated by the loss that she twice attempted suicide.

Perhaps that is why she agreed with Margaret to hide this man, not that many years older than themselves.

In the coming days, Sarah busied herself in ways her mother never would have approved of. Keeping Isaac safe and secure in her room was a constant strain.

Whenever anyone knocked at the door, Isaac leaped into the closet to hide behind rows of crinoline dresses or rolled under the bed. Sarah was popular, and her many friends liked to congregate in her room because it was the largest and most beautiful room in Senior Hall. It was directly beneath the bell tower.

Although Sarah enjoyed these visits, she feared Isaac would be discovered. Margaret and the slaves had been sworn to secrecy, yet Margaret often spoke thoughtlessly.

Sarah remained with Isaac as much as possible, often feigning a headache at meal times in order to be with him, requesting that a tray be sent up later. Although she had never before talked to a Confederate soldier, they argued bitterly over slavery. Sometimes he would defend his cause, but more often he would smile and sit down at Sarah’s piano to play the old songs he had learned growing up in Senatobia, Mississippi. His gray eyes would sweep over the piano keys, then search Sarah’s face. When she knew the songs, she sang along.

In the music and in the softness of his eyes, Sarah found a tenderness, a warmth she had never known before in a man. She was only moderately taken aback when he declared his love for her.

One day, Elijah, tired of colluding with Sarah, told her it was her duty to turn in the soldier. But she assured the slave that Isaac meant no harm.

Finally word somehow reached General Halleck that a Rebel soldier was on the loose in Columbia. Knowing the attraction that young pretty girls held for bored soldiers, the general suspected that the Rebel might be hiding at the college. Perhaps even the college administration was providing protective custody, he thought, for Southern sympathies ran high in the city.

Halleck paid a call on President Williams and Dean Armstrong and warned them both that he would shut down the college unless the soldier was captured.

That evening the president gathered his young female students together and delivered the general’s ultimatum. His face was pale, his voice strained. The students were stunned.

Sarah was frightened. Had she been betrayed?

Perhaps Margaret’s loose tongue revealed Isaac’s presence?

Margaret had shouted the Confederate victory yell out the window after all. Had a Union soldier heard the cry and noted the room it came from? How much did General Halleck know?

Sarah urged Isaac to surrender. Escape was hopeless, she said; the city was ringed by Union forces. But Isaac had a better plan. He would flee to Canada disguised in a suit “borrowed” from President Williams’s own closet.

The next evening, after the students had gone downstairs to dinner, Elijah crept along the corridor, the president’s clothing draped neatly over one arm. Sarah waited in her room. Under the cover of darkness Isaac would be on his way to safety.

But at the close of the dinner hour, throngs of young women barged through Sarah’s door, screaming, “Turn him in, Sarah! Turn him in!”

Someone had seen Elijah delivering the clothing to Sarah’s room. Sarah’s thin shoulders trembled and she slumped against the piano.

Sarah searched the crowd for a friendly face. Margaret, her color ashen, pushed her way through the group and put an arm around her roommate.

“Silence!” Margaret yelled. Her classmates paid no attention.

The clamor rose until President Williams and Dean Armstrong burst in. General Halleck was at their heels.

“This college is closed—absolutely finished!” roared the general. “Now, pack up and leave—everyone!”

Isaac threw open the closet door, faced General Halleck, and introduced himself.

“I am the soldier you are looking for, sir. I beg you to let the students stay. I have been hiding here without their knowledge.”

General Halleck stepped forward. “I arrest you as a spy,” he said.

“But I am a soldier, sir.”

“That may be, but you are attired in civilian clothes.”

“What does that mean?” asked Sarah.

“It means the firing squad,” replied Halleck.

Three nights later, at twilight, Corporal Isaac Johnson was executed in the street beneath Sarah’s window. When the last shots rang out, the tower bell slowly rang. Above its tolling, Sarah thought she heard her lover’s voice. It grew louder and louder, telling her to join him in the bell tower.

Sarah rushed out her door and climbed the steps. The air blew fresh and cool against her cheeks. She took the bell cord in her hands.

“I’m coming, Isaac. I’m coming!” she called.

Her lifeless body was found hanging in the tower, the stout bell cord coiled around her neck.

Margaret put aside the newspaper, leaving thumbprints in the ink. She rose from her chair and walked to the window. Stars spangled the sky and a full moon had risen above the treetops, illuminating the cluster of soldiers in the street below. Although the Union troops were bivouacked up on the hill, a night patrol continued to keep guard in the street by Senior Hall. The men’s voices rose and fell and now and then broke into laughter.

Margaret lingered for a moment, then turned away. The tower bell began to toll. And the ghost of Sarah June Wheeler, searching for her Rebel, began its ceaseless journey.

Mark Twain, Psychic

St. Louis

The literary father of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn was a dreamer. How else could one man have created characters so authentic that they have become part of the American experience? The mind of Samuel Clemens, known to all as Mark Twain, roamed continents and centuries to create his fictional narratives.

But Sam Clemens also had nightmares. In one, he foresaw the tragic death of his own brother Henry Clemens.

In 1856, at the age of twenty-one, Sam left Missouri for New Orleans, determined to embark on the next steamer heading to the Southern Hemisphere. He had just finished reading a graphic account of Army Lieutenant William Herndon’s 1851 expedition to the Valley of the Amazon, and he dreamed of visiting Peru. Unfortunately for him, but perhaps providential for literary history, no steamboats left New Orleans for that port of call.

With no friends and even less money, Sam turned to a relatively new acquaintance, Captain Horace Bixby, a pilot on the steamer Paul Jones, which had brought Sam to New Orleans. Sam had struck up an acquaintance with Bixby on the journey, and the captain had let him take a few turns at the wheel. Now Sam asked his friend to take him on as an apprentice pilot. Bixby agreed—for a fee of five hundred dollars, one hundred of which was to be paid in advance.

Sam steered for Bixby north to St. Louis, where the fledgling apprentice borrowed one hundred dollars from his sister Pamela’s husband, William A. Moffett. The balance was to be paid out of Sam’s earnings as a cub pilot.

For the next eighteen months, Sam learned the art of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi River, first with Bixby aboard the Paul Jones and later with a pilot named William Brown aboard the Pennsylvania.

While apprenticing on the Pennsylvania, Sam found a job aboard the steamboat for his brother Henry. It was not nearly as glamorous as life seen from above in the pilothouse and it did not even pay a salary, but Henry was content to be a “mud clerk,” a sort of apprentice. The name derived from one of his duties, to secure all the landings, which meant the person ended up in the mud. But there was the promise of promotion, perhaps all the way to first clerk, or purser. Henry signed on early in 1858, his long hours including the time the boat spent in dock at New Orleans or St. Louis, the far ends of its usual Mississippi River run.

Pilots did not have any duties when the steamers lay in port. In St. Louis, Sam stayed with his sister and brotherin-law. Henry usually visited at dusk each evening, returning to the boat later that night. The mud clerk worked from dawn until nightfall seven days a week.

Sam’s eerie dream of death came one night before the Pennsylvania was scheduled to return to New Orleans. Henry left the family about eleven, more solemn than usual. He shook hands all around, as was the custom. His mother, who was staying with the Moffetts, said good-bye to Henry in the upstairs sitting room. Something made her follow him to the head of the stairs, where she again bade him farewell. Henry’s seriousness was unusual, and his mother noticed it.

Sam awoke before dawn the next day with horrifyingly clear pictures from a nightmare he had playing in his mind’s eye: his brother was laid out in a metal casket balanced on two chairs in the Moffetts’ sitting room. He wore one of Sam’s suits. His hands clasped an arrangement of roses to his chest. All the flowers were white, except for one bright red rose in the center.

Sam dressed quickly. Was his brother dead? His dream seemed so real. So real that he avoided the sitting room, where he feared his brother’s body lay, and left the house. The cool air bathed his face as he strode down Locust and then onto Fourteenth Street. He suddenly stopped. Henry was not dead, he realized. Of course, it had all been a bad dream, a nightmare. He sprinted back to the house, ran up the stairs, and burst into the sitting room. There was no casket. Although he still felt a chill about what he dreamt, Sam’s joy was profound. Yet he could not shake his memory of the dream, even on what turned out to be an uneventful trip downriver from St. Louis to New Orleans.

On that trip, Sam Clemens had an argument with his master, Mr. Brown, that led to his dismissal from the Pennsylvania on June 5, 1858.

Fortunately Sam had a backup job in New Orleans for the times when he was forced into idleness between river trips. He worked as night watchman on the freight dock, his pay three dollars for each twelve-hour shift. Henry often joined him on his rounds.

A few days later, the Pennsylvania left the port of New Orleans for St. Louis with Henry on board. Sam remained behind.

On June 13, 1858, near Ship Island, a few miles below Memphis, the Pennsylvania’s boilers exploded, killing over 250 passengers and crew and seriously injuring three dozen people, including Henry Clemens.

Remarkably, Clemens’s loss of his job aboard the steamboat may have saved the life of this future American author.

Sam was on another steamer about a day behind. At the towns they stopped in as they traveled north, he began hearing the news of the explosion aboard the Pennsylvania. But there was little news of the survivors, including, of, course Henry Clemens.

Once he reached Memphis, Sam Clemens worriedly searched for Henry. He finally found him on a mattress in a large Memphis warehouse, which had become a makeshift hospital and morgue. Around him were the burned and maimed survivors of the explosion, the screams of the dying echoing off the high ceilings. Henry had inhaled scalding steam during the explosion and was among the most critically injured. Doctors and nurses, forced to pay more attention to those they thought would live, told Sam that Henry’s scorched lungs gave him little chance of survival.

One of them, a Dr. Peyton, however, promised Sam he would take a special interest in Henry and try to save him. Miraculously, Henry responded to treatment. Within a week Henry Clemens was pronounced out of danger. However, Peyton warned Sam that his brother still needed much rest and must stay where he was. While Sam sat with his brother one evening, the cries of the injured were particularly disturbing to Henry. Dr. Peyton ordered a small amount of morphine for Henry to help him sleep.

Henry did not live to see the next sunrise.

The young physician on duty, whether due to a misunderstanding of Dr. Peyton’s instructions or the lack of measuring devices, administered too much morphine. Young Henry Clemens died within a few hours.

His body was carried into what was called the “dead room” and placed in the only metal coffin available, a gift from some wealthy Memphis women. That is where Sam found him. At once the dream he had weeks before in St. Louis came back to him in perfect detail. Henry even was dressed in one of the suits Sam had given him. As Sam stood near the casket, an elderly woman walked in and placed a bouquet of roses in the dead boy’s hands. They were white—with a single red rose at the center.

Sam Clemens took passage accompanying his brother’s body back to St. Louis. When the boat docked, he set off for his brotherin-law’s office, hoping to find him there, as the business day had just begun. Sam missed him, however, and by the time he got back to the boat, Moffett had already been there, recovered the body, and had it sent on to his own house.

Sam raced ahead, wanting to save his mother the trauma of viewing Henry’s morphine-twisted face. Undertakers made little effort to make corpses presentable in that era; wakes and funerals were often held in the home.

He arrived just in time to forestall the unloading while he went inside to comfort his mother. Upstairs in the sitting room, he found two chairs spaced a coffin’s length apart, waiting to receive their burden. If he had arrived a few minutes later, the casket would have been positioned on them, the final detail of his prophetic dream fulfilled.

This premonition of death stayed with Samuel Clemens for the rest of his life. Even as a very old man, more than fifty years after Henry’s ghastly death, he could still remember every detail of the nightmare—and its tragic, real-life counterpart.

Forever Mine

Kirksville

Henry Burchard and his wife, Harriet, were inseparable, she saw to that. She thought her farmer-husband was “too handsome for his own good,” as she put it. Harriet saved him from the lures of prettier women by accompanying him everywhere he went. Henry reacted with amused tolerance, although sometimes he complained that he could not even go out on the back stoop to cut a plug of tobacco without Harriet’s banging through the door after him.

Henry had never been unfaithful to his wife. She simply was born a jealous woman. He did have the conversational habit of looking a person directly in the eye, and women usually responded warmly to such attention. He believed it was common courtesy, although an oversensitive husband observing his own wife speaking to Henry might have had other words for it.

Just after the couple celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary, Harriet Burchard got sick and died of consumption. Henry was shocked and saddened by his wife’s death, but he recalled her words, “Man was not meant to live alone.”

So five months after Harriet’s death, Henry married Catherine Webster, a pretty young widow whom he and Harriet had known for several years. After the death of her husband in a farm accident, Catherine had rented out the farm and moved to town, where she lived on her rental income and some small savings.

Three weeks after her marriage to Henry, Catherine was home alone when a tremendous crash that sounded like large rocks clattering across the metal roof shook the very foundation of the house. Catherine dashed outside. Sure enough, rocks of all sizes lay strewn everywhere. Where had they come from?

The nearest neighbor was half a mile away down the dirt road. Catherine gathered up her long skirts and picked her way across the rocks and around the farmhouse. She saw no one.

Then, to her amazement, the rocks at her feet rose slowly into the cloudless sky, hovered above the rooftop, and cascaded over the shingles again.

The poor woman, too frightened to move, stood rigid, her hands shielding her face.

That night when Henry arrived home from work in town, Catherine related what had happened. He told her it was nonsense, just her imagination, that she was just tired and overwrought from the excitement of the wedding. They went outside to look, but the rocks had disappeared. Only clumps of coarse grass edged the foundation. Catherine was more alarmed than ever.

The next night, while the couple slept, their sheets and blankets were snatched away. Shivering in his nightshirt, Henry leaped up to find them heaped on the floor at the foot of the bed. Catherine had slept through it.

Henry put the bedding back on the bed and crawled in. No sooner had he fallen asleep than he was again awakened to find the covers on the floor. Catherine still lay unmoving, her eyes closed, her long hair spread like a fan across her silk pillow. Henry thought it unlikely that she had kicked off the bedding, unless, of course, she was punishing him for not believing her story of the rocks.

He remade the bed with Catherine in it, taking care this time to tuck in the quilts quite tightly. Now, they could not easily be thrown off.

Eventually, Henry got back to sleep, only to awaken a third time, when his pillow was ripped out from under his head. He found it on the floor. He got up and lit a lantern just as Catherine’s pillow flew out from beneath her head and landed at Henry’s feet. Her head fell back against the mattress and she woke up, screaming.

Henry stared, speechless and powerless to prevent this mayhem. What had jerked the pillows from under their heads? Putting down the lantern, he sat on the edge of the bed and took his wife in his arms.

She looked up at him, sleep still in her eyes, apparently unaware of what had been going on.

“But Henry, why are you up?”

He would not frighten her. “You were restless,” he began. “I thought maybe you were having a nightmare. You . . . you . . . threw your pillow on the floor.” He handed it to her.

“I don’t remember,” she murmured.

“No,” he sighed. “But now it’s very late and we both need sleep.” Henry tucked the covers tightly around his wife, extinguished the lantern, and crawled back into bed.

Daylight could come none too soon, Henry thought as he drifted off to sleep.

The mysterious events of that night recurred and Henry, who was not able to explain them, tried to forget. Yet he always woke up when the bedding and his pillow were jerked from the bed. Catherine, on the other hand, usually slept on. He envied her for that.

Then came the night Henry would never forget. Unable to sleep, he was in bed reading by dim lamplight. Catherine slept soundly beside him. Suddenly, a piece of the bedding rolled back. A handwritten message was scrawled on the underside of the white coverlet:

“These things shall continue forever.”

The handwriting was that of his first wife, Harriet Burchard.

The Curious Visitors

Ste. Genevieve

Night was coming on as Jules Felix Valle lay back against his bed pillows. He was in the process of recuperating from difficult surgery to remove one of his eyes, which he had injured many years before in a boxing match. Jules was surprisingly upbeat about the loss. He thought that he had much to be grateful for.

Along with his wife, Anne-Marie, who was nearly thirty years his junior, Jules lived in one of Ste. Genevieve’s most historic homes—the circa 1806 Creole-French inspired Guibourd House at One North Fourth Street. Jules had retired from business in St. Louis and bought the charming home in 1935. The couple devoted long hours to restoring the interior to its original state, filling the rooms with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiques. The home’s elegant gardens enclosed by century-old brick walls were being returned to their original grandeur. Jules’s roots in the community ran long and deep—he was a descendant of François Vallé, the first civil and military commander of Ste. Genevieve.

On this night, a light breeze coming in through an open window carried the sweet, heavy fragrance of honeysuckle from the verdant gardens.

He was nearly asleep when he felt a tap on his shoulder. Careful not to disturb his bandages, he turned to see what it was his wife wanted.

Instead of seeing Anne-Marie bending down to speak with him, Jules faced three small old men dressed in heavy woolen shirts hovering beside his bed, nodding and smiling at him but not making any sound at all. They looked rather like French voyageurs. And they were floating there because their bodies ended, simply faded away, at their waistlines. He saw right through them and to the wallpaper on the far side of the room.

Jules found that he was not a bit frightened, really only perplexed as to who these incomplete visitors might be and why they were standing next to his bed on that summer night in 1939, about four years after he and Anne-Marie moved into the Guibourd House.

For lack of a sensible answer, he smiled back at them, perfectly willing to accept that they very well might be the ghosts of earlier house tenants come back to pay a visit.

When Jules told his wife the next morning about the three men, the couple suspected that their sudden appearance probably was intertwined somehow with the long and colorful history of their home and that of Ste. Genevieve itself, the oldest town in Missouri.

Creole families from present-day Illinois crossed the Mississippi River in 1750 to establish farms in the rich bottomlands, and a settlement that would become Ste. Genevieve was soon established. In 1763 the Treaty of Paris assigned the territory west of the Mississippi River to Spain. Ste. Genevieve became a reluctant outpost of the Spanish empire. A garrison was established, but regular troops were stationed there only at intervals. Then in 1803, Ste. Genevieve and all of Missouri was acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. In 1812 the village was included as part of the Missouri Territory.

La Maison de Guibourd, or the Guibourd House, dates to about 1806, and perhaps earlier. The belief is that Jacques Dubreuil Guibourd, a native of Angers, France, built it. Guibourd ended up in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) working as a secretary to a wealthy planter. During the slave insurrection there in August 1791, Guibourd was saved from certain death by his valet, Moros, who sealed Guibourd inside a large keg that was then carried on board a ship bound for France.

Guibourd arrived back in Europe only to face the perils arising from the French Revolution. Somehow he made his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, where he met French merchants from the village of Ste. Genevieve who were there to buy supplies. Delighted to find men with whom he could communicate, Guibourd decided to accompany them back to Ste. Genevieve. The records are not clear, but it seems Guibourd (and his valet Moros too, apparently) lost his possessions and what money he had either when his ship to America capsized or they were robbed somewhere on his way to Missouri. At any rate, he arrived in Ste. Genevieve penniless but within a few years was able to regain his fortune enough to build the home that still bears his name, establish a business, and start a family. He loved the little French community from the moment he saw it.

Guibourd married Ursula Barbeau, daughter of the commander at Prairie du Rocher, the French fort across the river, and the sister of Jules Valle’s great-grandfather. The house remained in the Guibourd family until it was sold in 1906 to Clovis Boyer.

Jules and Anne-Marie Valle knew little of the Guibourd or Boyer families. They did recall that two of Guibourd’s descendants had been associated with tragedies in the house. A woman named Miss Victorine, whom everyone called Miss Vickie, died in the bedroom occupied by Anne-Marie. One of Miss Vickie’s brothers, a doctor, committed suicide in the house following a bank failure.

After Jules Valle’s eye operation and the appearance of the three little men, Anne-Marie looked further into the possibility that their house was haunted and invited her friend, who also happened to be a psychic, to visit them. Anne-Marie was intrigued with the house’s long history, the two tragedies associated with it, and Jules’s visitors.

The psychic’s name was Elizabeth Heins. The first order of business, she said, would be to take a walking tour around the property. She concluded that Spanish had been spoken there. The Valles thought it likely as the location of the house made it not inconceivable that Spanish civilians or soldiers might have been quartered there during the town’s brief time under the Spanish flag.

Perhaps the men Jules saw were not French voyageurs at all but Spanish viajeros.

Anne-Marie was not concerned by her husband’s story because she had felt presences throughout the house ever since they moved in. The little men were only the most recent in a long line of eerie episodes.

For instance, Anne-Marie once employed Dora Williams, a conscientious maid with a delightful personality who soon developed a close bond with Anne-Marie. Dora went quietly about her work each day, and at night returned to her private quarters, which were upstairs in the rear portion of the house; this area had originally been the slave quarters.

Dora passed away unexpectedly. Soon after her death, Anne-Marie heard footfalls overhead and knew instinctively they were Dora’s. She heard them only once, but various other housekeepers who worked in the house in the years to follow noticed them as well.

The Valles owned several dogs over their nearly forty years there. The canines seemed keenly aware that an extra presence might be about. Dusky the Scottish terrier sometimes cowered with fear and whined and scratched to get outdoors. While that may not seem unusual for a dog, Anne-Marie found it to be out of character for this terrier, normally not afraid of anything or anyone. She thought maybe he encountered the home’s animal spirits.

Then there was a dog they owned called Jamie, a playful collie who acted as if he were seeing another dog in the house. That happened as he stood at the living room door and growled softly, as he always did when strange dogs got too close. Yet his tail hung straight down, wagging slowly to signal friendship.

There may have been a reason for the collie’s behavior. Before acquiring Jamie, Anne-Marie owned another collie called Peter, who died of old age. She thought it might be his ghost that Jamie saw. The idea was bolstered because a family friend who had been extremely fond of Peter was a house-guest not long after the dog died. Jamie first behaved strangely when the guest visited that time. Anne-Marie thought that Jamie was seeing the ghost of Peter, who had come back, she thought, to say hello.

Despite all that went on during the Valles’ tenancy, Anne-Marie was never truly frightened until one early March night in 1949. Jules had died of a heart ailment at the age of sixty-six two months earlier. Anne-Marie was living in the house alone. On that March night, she was jolted out of bed by loud banging and crashing coming from Jules’s old bedroom. It was as if heavy furniture was being picked up and heaved against the walls; the whole house shook under the impact. Then Anne-Marie heard what seemed to be buckets of glass being poured on the polished bare wooden floor of his bedroom. She thought surely every lamp and picture had been smashed yet knew instinctively that was not possible.

“Listen to me, whoever or whatever you are!” Anne-Marie called out, pulling the blankets up to her chin. “You are not going to frighten me! You are not going to drive me from my home! Now, get out!”

The commotion stopped, and she went back to sleep. The fresh day brought great relief. The bedroom furnishings were all intact; not one piece had been moved. A quick search showed nothing in the house had been disturbed.

What had Anne-Marie Valle heard?

Poltergeists were intending to take over the house. She always maintained that if she had succumbed to fear, they would have done just that.

Anne-Marie Valle lived in the house until her own death in 1971. Jules left his entire estate to her. She is said to have never been happy in Ste. Genevieve, but the terms of her wealthy husband’s will required that she remain in her adopted town.

After Anne-Marie’s death, the house was donated to the Foundation for Restoration of Ste. Genevieve to be turned into a museum, which it has been for nearly fifty years.

But the uncanny at the Jacques Guibourd Historic House, as it is now known, did not end with Mrs. Valle’s death.

Kristine Basler, a Ste. Genevieve native, was a manager at the house about a decade later. Although Basler did not live in the house, the ghosts that frequented Jules and Anne-Marie Valle let her know they were still around in the most unusual circumstances.

On an especially cold December afternoon, Basler was in the cellar fleshing deer hides. To flesh a hide is to clean it of all remaining flesh; it is done on what’s called a fleshing beam. She was working on hides that would then be made into buckskin worn by some of the reenactors at the Jour de Fête, a celebration held the second full weekend of August each year to commemorate the early French settlement days.

Basler had just finished cleaning her fifth hide when she heard music coming from upstairs—a classical baroque tune played on what sounded like a piano or a harpsichord.

The same piece was played over and over several times. Basler said it was like a child practicing for a recital.

She got up and walked toward the front of the house, but the music stopped abruptly. Basler resumed her work.

Suddenly, a man’s voice shouted, “Hey!”

This time Basler dashed upstairs, looked around, and took a quick peek out the front window toward the street. She confirmed that no one else was in the house or outside nearby.

Everything was in order. The sidewalks and streets were empty. Later she learned that the Boyer family who owned the house before the Valles were musical, and the mother was said to be a pianist.

About a year later, Basler moved into the two-story rear portion of the house that was originally the slaves’ quarters. After she was settled in, she acquired an original RCA Victrola that turned on and off by itself while the heavy discs spun faster and faster when she attempted to play them. The vibrations shook even a nearby box of the heavy records. The phenomenon generally stopped as abruptly as it had started.

Anne-Marie Valle had owned a Victrola at one time.

Basler said that at certain times and in certain places she believed the house gave off “bad vibes.” She felt ill at ease in Jules’s bedroom; if it was after dark she did not go in at all. She knew that some thought there might be poltergeists, so she had never slept in Anne-Marie’s bed. She tried sleeping in the attic, which had housed the former slave and maid’s quarters, but she scrambled back down into her own bed a couple of hours into the experiment because she felt too uncomfortable there.

Like many houses alleged to be haunted, the Guibourd House also displayed electrical problems.

One night a bulb in the dining room chandelier blinked off while Basler was sitting in the room. Thinking the bulb was loose, she got up to tighten it. Before she even touched the bulb, it lit up and the bulb next to it went out.

Sometimes an illuminated light seemed to quickly blink somewhere just out of her range of sight. Yet she is not entirely certain it was just a light flickering.

“It was more like a shadow passing by,” she said. Much the same might be said of all the ghosts at the Guibourd House.