Home is where the heart is, right? Well, if you’re from Lawrence, it’s also where the spirits are. We’ve been lots of places, and pound for pound, Lawrence is one of the most haunted places on earth.
Hmm, where to begin…
How about Stull Cemetery?
America is full of haunted cemeteries. How could it not be? Cemeteries are full of dead people, and some of those people aren’t ready to go. And we’ve nailed all kinds of ghosts and supernatural baddies in various graveyards. Certain cemeteries, though, seem to be—we’ll just say they’re more active than the norm. One is Bachelor’s Grove in Chicago, home to ghosts as various as a woman in white and victims of Chicago’s Prohibition-era gangsters. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, in New Orleans, is home to another woman in white, who is also a vanishing hitchhiker. Old York Cemetery in York, Maine, is one of the few with an honest-to-god friendly ghost—apparently the spirit of a “wise woman” who died in 1774 but who still appears from time to time and gives children a push on the swing set next to the graveyard. McConnio Cemetery in Alabama hosts the ghosts of Civil War soldiers. A cemetery in Justice, Illinois, is home to Resurrection Mary, one of the most famous vanishing hitchhikers in the country.
There are more. Lots more. Stull Cemetery, though, has not only a haunted church but demonic apparitions and ghostly children to boot. The church has been abandoned since 1922 and without a roof for a long time; apparently, rain will not fall over it. And a crucifix that still hangs on the wall turns upside down at the approach of certain visitors. Creepy enough for you?
The Eldridge Hotel downtown stands on a cornerstone salvaged from the burned ruins of Lawrence after the infamous attack by Quantrill’s Raiders in 1863, when the Confederate guerrillas attacked Lawrence and slaughtered around two hundred men and boys. It wasn’t the worst thing that happened during the Civil War, but it was bad enough. Now the Eldridge is home to all kinds of spirits, especially on the fifth floor. We’ve heard stories of temperature changes, breath marks on the mirrors, and apparitions galore. If anyone harboring Confederate sympathies ever stays in room 506, we’ve got a feeling they’re not going to get much sleep.
And then there’s Haskell Indian Nations University, where every building is buzzing with the spirits of the Indian children who died there over the years. You can’t take a step on that campus without your EMF reader going off the charts. The school, founded to strip Indian kids of their heritage and stir them into the American melting pot, was infamous for its cruelty. It has its own cemetery, where local shamans have tried for years to soothe the children’s spirits, and it has other bodies as well. The University of Kansas has several skeletons of children in storage, dug up from Haskell’s campus but absent from the university’s attendance and death records. No one knows who they were, where they came from, or how they died, but you know what? We’ve got a feeling that one of these days, they’re going to make themselves heard.
We’d never been to any of those places until a couple of years ago. Why? Because we hadn’t been back to Lawrence since we left for New Mexico a couple of months after the Demon killed our mother. Dad never wanted to go back, and we were kids. We went where he went.
Until Sam had a dream.
It wasn’t his first dream. That one was about Jessica. Specifically about her dying. But he kept it to himself. Tried to write it off. Then, a couple weeks later, the Demon got her. After that, he was ready to pay attention to the nightmare.
Sam dreamed of a woman trapped in a house, unable to get out. And in front of the house there was a tree. Something about the tree got to him, like he’d seen it before. Which he had: in a photograph of our old house in Lawrence.
The next day we were in Lawrence, and that’s how we met Missouri Mosley, an old friend of Dad’s. The first sentence of his journal, in fact, is, “I went to Missouri, and learned the truth.” We’d always thought he meant he met someone in Missouri, but this someone who was Missouri turned out to be a psychic, and when we all got to the house, Missouri diagnosed the problem right away. There was not one, but two spirits in the house, attracted by the legacy of what happened to our mother.
It’s like Missouri said: That kind of evil leaves a wound. And sometimes wounds get infected.
This infection was a poltergeist—and something else. What, we didn’t know just yet.
You know about poltergeists. So do we. We’ve run into them here and there, and to tell you the truth, it’s usually a pretty easy job. The last one we remember before coming home to Lawrence was in Pennsylvania, for a guy named Jerry. They’re prankster ghosts, mostly. Throw things around, open and shut doors, spoil milk, that kind of thing. Theories about them range from psychokinesis—a child, usually, externalizing a trauma and creating a kind of thoughtform—to a spirit of someone who died angry, so the ghost acts like it’s having a tantrum all the time. The famous cases all seem to have something a little more serious about them, like the Demon Drummer of Tedworth, back in 1661, or the Borley Rectory in the 1820s. Poltergeists aren’t always just jokers. Sometimes they’re out for blood, like this one. It tried to trap a toddler in the refrigerator, and it munched a plumber’s hand while he was fixing the garbage disposal.
And that was before Missouri got us working on getting rid of it. Because of the house’s history, she said, it wasn’t going to be enough to chase this one ghost. We were going to have to purify the house and make sure no other ghosts ever could get in.
Which is how we ended up sitting at her coffee table putting together gris-gris bags. Angelica root, good for removing curses and strengthening exorcisms, plus crossroads dirt to focus on the nexus between this world and the next—you get the drift. It might seem weird to be working up hoodoo charms against a poltergeist, but it’s a weird business we’re in.
The charms worked, sort of. The poltergeist seemed gone, but as things turned out, either it was stronger than the gris-gris or the bags just trapped it inside the house. Either way, we almost bought it. We were trapped in our old house. We got the family out, but we were stuck.
Then Mom saved us.
She was the other spirit. She stepped out and she gave us a moment to see her, to know that she still watched over us and that she was out there.
And then she annihilated herself to save us.
We’ve seen other vengeful spirits. We’ve wasted the spiritual remains of sadistic asylum directors, legendary serial killers, unreconstructed rednecks who never got over integration—the list goes on. Every time we hear of a strange series of deaths, odds are there’s some kind of angry or unquiet spirit at the bottom of it all, and it’s always been that way. Take this version, which dates all the way back to cuneiform tablets from Sumeria that record a being called an ekimmu. If you died violently, especially in a way that mutilated your body, you might find yourself turned into an ekimmu. Like the banshee, the ekimmu was a death omen, howling in the night as a sign that misfortune was on the way. Dad recorded a cuneiform inscription in his journal, listing various types of Sumerian spirits:
The wicked Utukku who slays man alive on the plain.
The wicked Alû who covers (man) like a garment.
The wicked Etimmu, the wicked Gallû, who bind the body.
The Lamme (Lamashtu), the Lammea (Labasu), who cause disease in the body.
The Lilû who wanders in the plain.
They have come nigh unto a suffering man on the outside.
They have brought about a painful malady in his body.
The curse of evil has come into his body.
An evil goblin they have placed in his body.
An evil bane has come into his body.
Evil poison they have placed in his body.
An evil malediction has come into his parts.
Evil and trouble they have placed in his body.
Poison and taint have come into his body.
They have produced evil.
Evil being, evil face, evil mouth, evil tongue.
Sorcery, venom, slaver, wicked machinations,
Which are produced in the body of the sick man.
O woe for the sick man whom they cause to moan like a šaharrat-pot.
Sometimes spirits turn evil if they died as children. We’ve run across a few of those, including the drowned boy in Lake Manitoc, Wisconsin, and more recently an angry little girl in a New England hotel. Years after she died, the owners of the hotel decided to shut it down, and boy, she made it clear she didn’t want to go. Three or four dead bodies later, we showed up, and we found some things that you don’t expect in white-picket-fence, small-town New England.
The first thing was a series of quincunxes in and around the hotel. A quincunx is an arrangement of dots—or anything, really—that looks like the five-spot on a die. Hoodoo practitioners use them to fix a spell in place by creating a symbolic crossroads to enhance the magical potential of a particular location. That’s what was going on in that hotel, and the little girl spirit was indulging in some image magic, too, using her playmate’s collection of dolls to bring hotel guests—not to mention representatives of the people who wanted to buy the place—to gruesome and untimely ends.
The second thing we found was an old woman, squirreled away like the crazy aunt in Wuthering Heights (who said we never read a book?) and wearing a hoodoo necklace. That’s when we started to put things together and realized that the owner’s daughter wasn’t kidding when she talked about having an imaginary friend. Turned out that this girl had died in the hotel and couldn’t stand the idea of her playmate—now the old hoodoo-wearing woman—leaving her behind. So she started killing everybody in sight.
Kids, man. They’re tough. Eventually, we realized that like the drowned boy in Wisconsin, this one wouldn’t just go away without a sacrifice. All we could do was watch as the old lady went to join her friend. It wasn’t one of our more satisfying jobs.
By and large, child spirits are among the baddest of the bad, maybe because there’s so much potential in their souls that when it curdles, it really curdles. Here’s another kind of child spirit that we ran across in Dad’s journal while figuring this one out.
MYLING. Scandinavian child spirit, also called UTBURD. Typically the souls of murdered children, or children who died unbaptized. They will ride with travelers at night and demand to be taken to a graveyard so they can rest, but they get heavier and heavier as the graveyard gets closer, until the person carrying them is driven under the earth by their weight. This belief is derived from the practice of leaving unwanted or deformed infants out to die of exposure. Generally they haunt the location where they were abandoned, but folklore also notes their presence in the dwellings of those who killed them—usually a family member. If their remains can be located and buried in hallowed ground, they will disappear.