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Boozer Hank, Ghost Stories and Urban Legends

Most folks in the Twin Cities have never heard of Albin or Alvira Johnson. But more than eighty-five years after the fire, those names still resonate with many old-timers in East Central Minnesota—and even some of the younger residents.

Rush City resident Kelly Ann Hokanson was born decades after the flames and billowing smoke cast a pall over an otherwise peaceful Tuesday morning in Harris, Minnesota. She’s not related to anyone on the Johnson or Lundeen side of the mystery. She doesn’t have an agenda. But Hokanson grew up in the area, and she has heard all the stories. And the gregarious Kelly knows how to spin a yarn in her own right.

On a hot July morning in 2017, Hokanson offered a guided tour of the old haunts in and around Harris. Her car radio softly played classic rock tunes as she pointed out all the places of interest, from the old Krantz residence to Boozer Hank Johnson’s former home. As a youngster, Hokanson often rode her horse near the old Albin Johnson place. From time to time, Boozer Hank would playfully tease her, telling her to be watchful for the mysterious big man who had allegedly slaughtered his family so many years before. “I remember sometimes Boozer Hank, when I would ride by…he would say, ‘Be careful. Old Man Johnson is still out there. He’s going to get you,’” Hokanson said. “It was more of a ghost story. And I was told it was five kids.…And that the husband just split.”

As young Kelly understood it, Albin Johnson was similar to another legendary boogeyman in East Central Minnesota: Hinckley Harry. As that tall tale goes, an unfortunate gentleman named Harry was trying to flee the Great Hinckley Fire—a real-life disaster that killed more than four hundred people in 1894, when Albin Johnson was four years old. Harry supposedly tried to get away by jumping onto a moving train. Instead, he became trapped under the speeding locomotive, which chopped off poor Harry’s legs. “And he laid there and hollered for help. And nobody came. And a wolf got a hold of him. And so he is supposedly still up there, and sometimes when the moon is full, you’ve got to be careful because Hinckley Harry is still out there looking for his legs,” Hokanson said, completing the story in a convincing enough way that the listener almost believes it’s true.

Hokanson isn’t alone in equating the Johnson tragedy with a ghost story. Well into the twenty-first century, the story lives on in the minds—and perhaps vivid imaginations—of other Harris-area denizens.

A May 2017 ECM Post Review story about the tragedy and this book project elicited a number of comments from locals who still get goose bumps at the mention of Albin’s name. Storytellers likened the fugitive farmer to a boogeyman, a merciless monster who wouldn’t hesitate to intervene when young children misbehaved. One mischievous older brother went as far as to mention Albin in the same breath as mass killer Ed Gein, the notorious “Butcher of Plainfield” who terrorized the good folks of Wisconsin in the 1950s and 1960s. “Being raised with an older brother’s horror stories, I heard a lot,” Sandi Niemeyer wrote in a social media comment section. “I remember the story. Glenn used to alternate between telling us that Albin was going to get us [and telling] Ed Gein stories. Hadn’t thought about that in years.” The Post Review article also jogged the memory of SelenaRae Carlson, another local resident. “Remember this story well,” she wrote. “Many stories in our neighborhood of this man—sleeping in barns and stealing food—for a lot of years. Even our farm.”

Years later, Hokanson had another brush with the tragedy, one that was much more rooted in real life, far removed from the ghost stories of the past. At one point in her life, she worked at a nursing home in Rush City. One of the residents was an elderly Mary Johnson, wife of Big Hank Johnson, Albin’s brother. Another was Ellen Scherer, one of Alvira’s three sisters. Hokanson remembers Mary as a “spitfire.” On one occasion, Mary Johnson was eating dinner at the old folks’ home while a gentleman next to her was eyeing Mary’s tater tots. He asked if she would give him one. She ignored him. He repeated his request. Same non-answer. Finally, he reached over and grabbed one. And then another. And then Mary’s patience ran out. “She took the plate and flung it, like, ‘Here, eat the whole damn thing why don’t you?’” Hokanson said with a laugh. “We usually didn’t have any trouble, but if she didn’t want to do something, you realized, ‘OK, we will approach you later because we are not going to push your button.’” Hokanson liked Mary. Still, “if she got frustrated, she would call us some not nice things. She never hit us or anything. But she could cut you to pieces with her tongue,” Hokanson said.

Interest in the case has taken some eccentric twists. In at least one instance, the Albin Johnson case has been equated with the Lindbergh baby kidnapping—one of the most sensational crime stories of the twentieth century. A now-deceased woman who grew up near Harris contacted researcher Nan Hult a number of years back after reading a 2008 newspaper article about the Albin Johnson case. Alice Smith (not her real name) had a history of mental illness and an obsession with both the Albin Johnson mystery and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. She claimed that Johnson had been a father figure to her. “[Mrs. Smith] was born in 1930,” Hult recalled in a letter. “She says she was just two years old when she first met Albin, who was also called ‘Papa’ and ‘Papa Indian.’ So this would have been a year before the fire.” Mrs. Smith referred to Albin at times as her “Daddy” and kept a voluminous collection of scrapbooks and articles about the Johnson and Lindbergh cases. Every detail of the Johnson case, in particular, was etched in her brain. “She spent years compiling [the articles] and she knew every word in each article and could rattle off without hesitation what they all meant,” Hult noted. “She was so convincing.” Mrs. Smith’s claim that she personally knew Albin, and was like a daughter to him, should be taken with a huge dose of skepticism. Mrs. Smith was blessed with a strong imagination and a tendency to place herself at the center of historical events. Even so, her vivid stories, personal collections and musings about the Albin Johnson case speak to the intense local interest in the story.

And then there’s Gerry Roll, a grandmotherly North Branch resident who devotedly pays her respects to Alvira and the children and honors their memory though she never knew the family and isn’t related. Roll read about the tragedy when it was featured in a local newspaper in 2008. Since that time, she has taken it upon herself to, on a regular basis, put flowers, small toys or pinwheels on the shared grave of the eight family members.

The unsolved Harris murder mystery has also resonated with people in the Twin Cities who happened to stumble upon the story. With thinning shoulder-length hair, Al Terry looks like he just strolled out of Haight-Ashbury in search of a Grateful Dead concert. Terry lives in St. Paul, not San Francisco. But he decided on a whim to make the sixty-plus-mile drive to Rush City in June 2017 to hear a presentation at the North Chisago Historical Society about the fire. He was on his way through town a few weeks earlier when a newspaper story about the tragedy caught his eye. One thing that really struck a nerve with Terry was the unfathomable behavior of Albin’s father. “I was aware from the story that the owner of the property [Emil] had evicted that family in the Great Depression.…That one kid had a shoe with a hole in it. Now they are going to be homeless? It was an amazingly desperate time, it was, ‘God, what is going to happen to us? Is there any future…worth seeing?’ That kind of feeling.” Like others, Terry was able to muster some empathy for Albin. Here was a desperate man who, along with his wife and children, had been literally put out to pasture by the patriarch of the extended family.

And it was a time when men were supposed to take care of their family. And someone like Albin Johnson couldn’t do that. He could not do that. But he still has that reflex, that training, especially back then. And he is evicted. He failed—probably in his heart. It probably hurt so deeply. He probably felt so useless. What is going to happen to them?...Maybe [in Albin’s twisted mind] it was more important to allow these kids to go in a way they are not going to suffer rather than face amazing suffering with a dad who really can’t help them, and a mom who really can’t help them. So my sense is, it is very possible that he made that decision, and it might have broke his heart. It might have broke his heart.

Terry’s also open to the theory that Albin was buried in the field next to the fire-ravaged farmhouse, perhaps deposited into that makeshift grave by his own brothers. Rumor has it that Albin’s dog—a faithful pet that survived the fire—loitered in that field for days after the farmhouse burned, supposedly in grief over the loss of his master. “When a dog loves someone and that someone dies and they have access to the grave, they will lay there. They grieve like people do. And the dog will stay there, so I find that very interesting,” Terry said. “It’s very unfortunate that someone didn’t follow up on that in a sense.…The process of elimination.”

Like Christine Lundeen, Alvira’s mother, Terry admired President John F. Kennedy. He referenced Kennedy’s assassination while trying to wrap his mind around the terrible suffering that the Lundeen and Johnson families endured after the fire. “He was like someone who was like God to me. He was better than the one they told about in catechism who was mean and set people on fire.…And then he’s assassinated. It took me until my forties before I was able to let that go,” Terry said. “And the human mind, automatically as I learned in college, when it has a problem it can’t solve, this computer, this bio-computer, it just keeps at it. It just keeps at it. It’s looking for the answer and it keeps going. And so is it any wonder that we are sitting here and we can’t seem to get by this?” he said, pointing at the graves surrounding him at First Lutheran Cemetery in Rush City.

A cross is embedded in the lawn at First Lutheran Cemetery, resting place of Alvira Lundeen Johnson and her seven children. Bill Klotz.

In the end, Terry believed he was meant to come face-to-face with the story of the Johnson tragedy. “And if it’s any memorial to those children, and if the only thing I can do is change what’s in here,” he said, pointing to his heart, “that is my memorial to them.”