Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  But the elder O’Brien was not in the house. Cheryl continued to talk to her “grandfather,” while the rest of the family looked on. In a few minutes, Cheryl’s father asked what “Dad” was doing now. She replied that he was climbing the stairs.

  John O’Brien once encountered the Hannah House mystery man. The transparent specter was standing in an archway on the staircase, sporting mutton-chop whiskers and wearing a dark, old-fashioned suit of clothes.

  Quite often, the rustling of clothing and the sound of footsteps of varying loudness were heard on the staircase; some steps were light, others heavier. Oddly, the stairway was carpeted at that time. When either one of the O’Briens checked on the source of the sounds, they ceased.

  The door to a staircase leading to an attic from the second floor also had a mind of its own. John O’Brien heard something upstairs as he worked on the lower floor. He rushed up the staircase and down the hallway, throwing open each closed door. His eagerness waned, however, once he reached the attic door and saw the handle itself turning slowly. The door swung open, emitting a cool draft from the unused loft. He did not go in.

  The O’Briens often watched television in a room on the second floor. Once John heard what he identified as loud groaning. A few minutes later it began again. He yelled to the ghost to stop its “bellyaching” and leave them in peace. The groaning stopped for that night.

  In the early 1980s, the house’s ghostly reputation led the Indianapolis Jaycees to use Hannah House for their annual Halloween haunted house project. They sponsored tours of the old mansion for youngsters, replete with rigged, spooky effects—except that some of the effects were not planned.

  Dick Raasch was once the Jaycees’ coordinator for the project. One day he was relaxing with fellow workers in the old summer kitchen, a part of the original house. A scratching suddenly arose from inside the staircase wall, the rear staircase originally used by servants. David Elder, who was there assisting the Jaycees with their setup, dashed beneath the stairs looking for the sound but could not locate a source for it.

  A local television station got in on the supernatural action when it visited Hannah House for a Halloween segment. One of the cameramen stood in the dining room doorway in order to take a shot across the room. An old chandelier hung from the ceiling.

  “Wouldn’t it be eerie if the chandelier moved?” he said, looking up. At that instant, the chandelier started to swing in about a half-foot arc.

  On that very same day, the television crew brought a psychic to the house. She sensed cold spots. The crew then moved into a room where they were going to film some “exit” footage. The cameraman stood in one of two doorways to the room, and a reporter stood near an empty coffin that had been propped up against a wall. Suddenly, a picture above the coffin fell to the floor. The two-penny nail holding the picture had not moved. In fact, it was nailed into a stud at an upward angle. The wire on the old picture remained attached.

  “There is no conceivable way the picture could have fallen of its own accord,” Dick Raasch observed. “It lifted up and fell. It looked like somebody dropped it to the floor.”

  How to explain these incidents?

  “I can’t explain them,” Raasch confided. “Something was in [the house] . . . I just don’t know what it was.”

  The Vigil

  Terre Haute

  Deloris Hart opened her eyes and tried to focus on the unfamiliar surroundings. Where is this place? What am I doing here? So many questions for a young child.

  The bed was much bigger than the one she had at home. The sheets were pulled taut, a light blanket drawn over the top, so tight in fact that they practically pinned her to the mattress. She could barely turn her body. Her legs and arms felt as if rocks held them down. Something white was wrapped around them. She could not move her head, which hurt terribly anyway.

  The child’s eyes shifted slowly about the room, noticing the window with the drawn curtain, and the shade pulled down that cast the room in a veil of darkness. A door in one of the walls went somewhere, she surmised, and two, simple, wooden chairs were positioned next to the bed.

  This was not her home. Of that she was certain.

  But where was she then?

  The pleasant lady standing at the foot of her bed was definitely not her mother. Deloris tried to speak to her, but the woman pressed her right forefinger against her lips. There was something peculiar about her, the little girl thought. She looked a lot like a pretty lady from her fairy-tale books. A kind of haze shimmered around her. She had such a nice smile that Deloris was not a bit afraid—she felt very warm and comfortable in her presence.

  Deloris drifted in and out of consciousness over the next several days. She could not remember exactly what had happened, only that she had been in the car with her grandpa and greatgrandpa when something bad happened; of that much she was certain. And then there was darkness.

  Now she was someplace where men and women in white coats often came into the room. Oddly, Deloris thought, they never acknowledged the nice lady who never moved or spoke.

  One man peered into Deloris’s eyes and throat with a small light. She tried to ask him where her mama and papa were, but somehow she could not make the right sounds.

  What Deloris Hart did not know was that her parents, Herbert and Rose Hart, in an earlier time of hospital care policies, were not allowed into their daughter’s Terre Haute hospital room for the first few days after the accident. She was in critical condition and not expected to live.

  On an earlier afternoon, an automobile had swerved across the centerline directly into the path of her grandfather’s car, in which she was riding. Her great-grandfather had been killed instantly. Grandfather lingered close to death in another hospital room.

  Deloris was terribly injured; flying glass had sliced off nearly half her scalp. Despite all this, Deloris Hart recovered. The doctors actually termed her recovery a miracle. Her parents were thankful; their prayers had been answered.

  Although she remembered nothing of the accident and little of her days of recovery, she did know that the kind, smiling lady was always there in her room. The other people who silently entered her room ignored the woman. That was so silly, Deloris thought; why did they not say hello? Could they not see her? How rude.

  The mystery woman had jet-black hair, deep-brown eyes, and a light complexion. She never touched Deloris or came any closer than the end of her bed. Once Deloris had sufficiently recovered, she was able to tell her parents about the nice lady. Hospital doctors and nurses insisted that no one of that description had been allowed into the girl’s room.

  Who then was the visitor who kept a vigil over Deloris?

  Following Deloris’s release from the hospital, her father became obsessed with discovering this mystery woman’s identity. He firmly believed that someone only Deloris could see and interact with had been a constant, caring presence in the hospital room.

  The answer came much later. As Herbert Hart was clearing out some boxes and trunks, he came upon a batch of old family photographs. Deloris’s eyes shone when he happened to show the pictures to her.

  That was the nice lady who was in my room, she told her dad, pointing to one of the photos.

  Impossible, her father replied. It simply could not be.

  Yes, the child insisted, that was the woman. “She made me want to live.”

  The photograph was of Herbert Hart’s mother, Belle Hart.

  She had been dead for twenty years.

  One of the Family

  Evansville

  We only know him by his first name, Oscar. The kids in his Evansville neighborhood knew him as a friendly, outgoing nineteen-year-old who took delight in giving them rides in his car when automobiles were still a new and exciting way of getting around. They piled in, eager to meander the dusty roads around the city. Late in the evening Oscar brought them back to his house, and, calling good night, he watched as they scattered to their own homes.

  The routine did not va
ry on that one evening in the early 1920s when everyone waved as Oscar went into his house. They never saw him again. His parents found him the next morning dead in bed of undetermined causes.

  Yet Oscar’s ghost apparently lingered for many years in Evansville, attached to a family that moved into Oscar’s old home years after his death. Warren and Gladys Reynolds believed they were the targets of Oscar’s friendly antics for over forty years, beginning when they moved into his home as a young married couple in 1942.

  “At first I thought they were ordinary noises,” soft-spoken Gladys Reynolds remembered. “But my husband thought from the beginning that something peculiar was going on. He always seemed to have the most experiences. I worked during the days, and he was on the night shift as a deputy sheriff. Oscar seemed to be around more during the day when my husband was at home.”

  The Reynoldses’ first indication that Oscar was still in “his” house came during a thunderstorm. The family was in a downstairs room when footsteps suddenly pounded down an upstairs hallway. What followed sounded like windows being shut in the bedrooms. Sure enough, when the family went upstairs to close them, each window that had been open was now firmly closed against the developing storm.

  On another day, the couple’s twelve-year-old daughter was home alone finishing homework at the dining room table. Someone came pounding down the staircase. The child was so frightened she slid under the big round table and covered her eyes. The footsteps stopped abruptly. She carefully peered out from under the table but saw she was quite alone.

  Oscar, it seems, was a very shy ghost.

  On only two occasions did he allow himself to be seen. The witness in both cases was Warren Reynolds’s mother. She lived with her son and his family for several years.

  Grandmother Reynolds occupied the same bedroom in which Oscar was reputed to have died. The first time she saw Oscar was quite late at night, when a sharp noise forced her awake. There was Oscar standing with his back to her, bending over the fireplace grate. She pulled the blanket over her head and waited a few moments before peeking out again. The shadowy figure lingered for a few moments before melting into the darkness.

  Oscar’s second visit to his old bedroom was a bit shorter, and again at night. He was standing stock still with his back toward Grandmother Reynolds. And as before, after a few seconds, he seemed to dissolve into the darkness.

  Oscar liked to prowl about the partially finished attic.

  “My husband heard someone up there one afternoon,” Gladys Reynolds said. “He thought some kids had broken in through a window.”

  Since Warren was a deputy sheriff, he took out his revolver and headed up the stairs. All the windows were locked and nothing had been disturbed. He was convinced someone had been walking around up there.

  Another incident involved a friend of Gladys who came to visit for several days. Late the first evening, after her friend had gone to bed, from upstairs Gladys distinctly heard drawers opening and slamming shut, footfalls across the squeaky floorboards, and doors slamming. She thought perhaps her friend was walking about. At breakfast the next morning, however, the friend emphatically denied being the source of the nocturnal activity.

  The Reynolds family eventually moved out of Oscar’s house. It was taken down long ago.

  Might he have moved with them into their next home? The family thought so.

  Gladys Reynolds says there were two occasions when objects mysteriously disappeared, only to be found later in places the family had thoroughly searched.

  “When I couldn’t find my makeup compact in its usual drawer,” she said, “I thought my granddaughter had taken it to play with. . . . I looked everywhere and after a few days I just gave up. My daughter and her family left and I still couldn’t find the compact. Well I opened a cabinet and there it was right in front of my eyes. I had looked there and would certainly have seen it if it had been there earlier.”

  Gladys thinks these were Oscar’s pranks. After forty years of living with him, the Reynoldses treated the ghost like one of the family. There was no fear of him and, indeed, the family responded to his infrequent visits with a matter-of-factness characteristic of people who have accepted what is sometimes so hard for others to believe.

  “I never did believe in ghosts either,” Gladys Reynolds laughed. “But I know what I heard, what my husband believes, and what my mother-in-law saw.”

  That was good enough for her. Oscar was “their” ghost. He was a member of the family for all time.

  Tippecanoe and Tecumseh, Too

  Warren County

  William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, and the great Shawnee Tecumseh were of two different worlds, yet their lives were intertwined.

  Each was a great leader of his people, each was a bitter enemy of the other, each would die an untimely death—and each has become the center of beguiling Indiana legends: that ghost soldiers from the army Harrison commanded in the Battle of Tippecanoe still march across the Indiana soil, and that the most devastating earthquake in American history occurred shortly after Tecumseh promised to “make the earth tremble” as retribution against his faltering Indian allies.

  Although he was born in 1773 to wealthy parents near Richmond, Virginia, William Henry Harrison spurned the comfortable life of a gentleman for the privations of the military. After dropping out of medical school, Harrison joined the fledgling U.S. Army in 1791, where he served with merit in the early Indian wars in the wilderness that became Ohio and Indiana. He rose quickly to the rank of lieutenant.

  President John Adams appointed him governor of the Indiana territory in 1800 when he was still commandant of Fort Washington, Ohio. In later years, Harrison served as congressman, U.S. senator, ambassador to Colombia, and, of course, for only thirty-one days, as the ninth American president. On the rain-chilled day of his inauguration, the old soldier contracted pneumonia and died a month later, on April 4, 1841. He became the first American president to die in office.

  Harrison is also remembered for the famous political slogan of that 1840 presidential campaign, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too.” John Tyler of Virginia was his running mate, and the man who became the tenth president of the United States when he finished Harrison’s abbreviated term.

  The Tippecanoe phrase came about from Harrison’s victory over the Shawnee at the 1811 battle on the Tippecanoe River, a few miles northeast of present-day Lafayette, Indiana.

  As governor of the Indiana Territory, Harrison banned the sale of liquor to the tribe and ordered that they be inoculated against smallpox.

  But his largesse did not extend to treating them with respect or as equals. In 1809 he negotiated a treaty with Shawnee leaders whereby nearly three million acres of wilderness on the Wabash and White rivers were forfeited to white settlers.

  Several Shawnee leaders, however, objected vehemently to the new treaty, including the celebrated Tecumseh, and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet. Both declared their intentions to regain the land surrendered to the U.S. government . . . by any means necessary.

  Early in 1811, Chief Tecumseh set out on a long, more or less campaign journey that took him to tribal villages throughout the West, Middle West, and South. From the Sioux and Apache in the West, to the Alabama people along the southern Mississippi River, Tecumseh boasted that he could deliver a war that would drive the white settlers back into the sea.

  He met with only partial success. Although many young men joined with him, others doubted Tecumseh’s promise of eventual victory over the whites.

  One tribe of Alabama people that made its camp on the banks of the Mississippi was especially contemptuous of Tecumseh.

  “Your promises are like the wind,” their chief scoffed when Tecumseh finished his speech. “The wind is free. Talk is nothing.”

  As the snow of late winter swirled through the Alabama camp, Tecumseh made a promise to his hosts of what he would do when he returned to his own people near present-day Detroit: “I will stamp the ground,
the earth will tremble and shake down all your wigwams. You will remember Tecumseh!”

  The Alabama people laughed and shook their heads.

  Yet did Tecumseh’s “curse” come true only a few months later?

  On December 16, 1811, the most violent earthquake in the history of the United States roared through the lower Middle West. The New Madrid Earthquake, so named because the epicenter was located near that small Missouri town, destroyed homes, wigwams, and much more, from Cincinnati to Kansas City. The Mississippi River itself actually cut new channels and even reversed its southerly flow for a time, throwing riverboats against the shore.

  Forty thousand square miles of undulating earth swallowed farms and villages. The exact number of human casualties is unknown because the land was so sparsely settled, but estimates range from several hundred to many thousands.

  The Alabama said it was Tecumseh’s prophecy come true.

  “He has stamped his feet at Detroit!”

  A tragic and bizarre coincidence? Probably. But Tecumseh did say he would make the earth tremble.

  The Indian nations that joined up with Tecumseh terrorized white settlers up and down the length of the Wabash River Valley in late 1811. Westward immigration had steadily increased the number of settlers in Indiana and eastern Illinois. The land was being stripped of the virgin wilderness by European settlers, replaced by farms and settlements. Tecumseh, his brother the Prophet, and their followers refused to accept the prospect of being driven from their homes to new land in the West.

  Thus it was that the Indiana territorial governor General William Henry Harrison took control of the militia and marched northward from the capital of Vincennes to Terre Haute, where he built a fort to defend the Wabash Valley.

  General Harrison left Terre Haute with his troops in the first week of November 1811 to forcibly remove the remaining native people from what he declared to be newly designated “federal” land.

  As the general’s well-armed force approached the mouth of the Tippecanoe River, near present-day Americus, Indiana, in Tippecanoe County, the soldiers were met by a delegation of Shawnee from the village of the Prophet. They wanted to talk. Although he was suspicious, Harrison agreed to meet with them the next day, November 7, 1811.