Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  In a freezing drizzle just before dawn, however, the Shawnee warriors swarmed upon Harrison’s troops. Harrison had wisely ordered the militia to sleep in full battle attire, and thus they were able to keep the Prophet’s men at bay until daylight, when the soldiers mounted a bloody counterattack.

  In the hand-to-hand combat, sixty soldiers were killed and more than one hundred were wounded. Scores of Shawnee fighters were also killed and wounded. The Prophet’s men fled but General Harrison was not content. He marched on the main Indian encampment and burned it to the ground. The Prophet and most of his followers escaped. Harrison returned to Vincennes a hero.

  Meanwhile, Tecumseh was in southern Indiana when his brother attacked Harrison’s soldiers. He had not approved of the foray, and in fact publicly criticized the Prophet for upsetting his careful plans to wrest control of the territory from the Americans.

  In the end, Tecumseh and most of his followers fled to Canada, where they joined the British in their fight against the United States in the War of 1812. The Indian wars in the Middle West had ended for all practical purposes when Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of Thames, Ontario. The British had virtually abandoned their posts in the Middle West by 1813.

  Are the wars really over for General Harrison’s militia, or do their ghostly remains still march across western Indiana on their way to a phantom Battle of Tippecanoe?

  For well over a century, a two-story, wood-frame house, about twelve miles north of Williamsport, in Warren County, has been noted in local legend as the scene of curious activities that some have linked to the paranormal. Indeed, the house was on the precise route that Harrison and his militiamen took on their way to the Tippecanoe engagement.

  On certain nights in early November, the unmistakable cadence of hundreds of marching feet approaches from a southerly direction. With drums rolling and steps reverberating against the cold, fall air, the spectral sounds grow louder as they approach the house and then gradually recede as the procession passes to the northeast. There are never any apparitions, only the resonant echoes of a vanished army.

  Moody’s Light

  Rensselaer

  What is the peculiar shimmering orb that so many people claim to have seen between Francesville and Rensselaer in northwest Indiana? The glowing, evanescent light in an isolated wood mutates in color from red to white, chases cars and people, and, according to local folklore, is connected to several deaths.

  The origins of Moody’s Light, or the Francesville Light as it is sometimes known, reaches back over a century, although its specific source is unknown. There are some unsubstantiated claims that scientists have investigated it, but it is most widely known in the folklore of northern Indiana.

  The light’s geographic center is hard to pinpoint. It is not listed on county maps, of course, making it necessary to ask a local for directions. The core of its activity is often said to be along rural Meridian Road, about fifteen miles west of Francesville; it is most often reported across an open field in a dank woodlot. It flashes red to white and back again. Once, a young woman watching the light with some friends claimed it shot across the field with bullet-like speed. The light was so bright, the young woman said, that she and her friends had to shield their eyes. The edges of the sphere were clearly visible to them.

  One man who claimed to have seen it offered that the light looks quite like an automobile’s headlights, though he did not see how that was possible. “We’ve been out there when it will come right up to the car. It illuminates the whole area. It’s scary. It sits way out in the woods and as it comes close it changes colors back and forth. It scares you to death when it comes up like that.”

  There are several legends connected to the origin of the Moody name.

  The most commonly held belief is that it originated with a family by that name that lived in the neighborhood long ago. Late one night, the father returned home to find his family trapped inside their burning home. The light is said to be the father swinging his lantern, searching for his lost family. However, that would not explain why the light turns various colors.

  Some investigators say rotting organic matter, light reflecting from a fog bank, or periodic emissions of natural gas deposits may be possible causes for the light.

  The Indiana University Folklore Archives has collected several versions of the legend. More recently, Indiana-based ghost hunters have created YouTube videos purporting to show the light.

  Whatever its origin, Moody’s Light adds a touch of the unknown to the bucolic countryside of rural Indiana.

  The Stump

  Bloomington

  The worn, narrow dirt trail to Stepp Cemetery begins at a curved rock wall near a state highway in a dense Indiana state forest not far from Bloomington. The path winds up a short hill, skirts a broad, brushy thicket, then finds its way through a stand of massive oak and poplar trees, emerging at the graveyard. A few dozen headstones are all that remain. Most of the markers date to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Faded plastic flowers are strewn over some of the simple graves.

  It is a peaceful atmosphere.

  Along the south boundary there is a row of broken, lichen-covered tombstones, including one on which time and nature have expunged the deceased’s name. The barely visible outline of sunken earth is less than three feet in length. A child’s grave, it would seem. Nearby is a small stump in the shape of a chair.

  It is here, on what some have termed a natural “throne,” that the legend of Stepp Cemetery may have originated, for it is said the ghost of a nameless old woman sits there each night—watching . . . and waiting.

  Or so the legend associated with this hallowed place would have you believe. It is one of the state’s most enduring ghost tales.

  Folklorists identify one popular version of the woman’s presence this way:

  [Many] years ago, a woman gave birth to a child who was struck and killed by a car when just a toddler. She buried the child in Stepp Cemetery. The woman had a tree with twisted branches next to the grave cut down and the stump shaped into a chair. She desired to sit in it and protect her child from strangers. When she was not on her chair, she put a “curse” on it to protect the grave. If anyone sat there, or even touched it when she was not there, that person would die one year later—to the day.

  Presumably, it is the woman’s ghost that has taken over the chore of guarding the small grave.

  Other “witnesses” to the ghostly guardian are more precise.

  The child’s mother had long, white hair, was quite old but not ugly, and always dressed in black. A strange triangular mark scarred her forehead. The woman rarely accosted visitors, preferring to sit on the stump swaying back and forth as if the child lay nestled in her arms.

  Folklorists at the nearby Indiana University–Bloomington have collected some of the other popular origin stories for the ghost.

  In one version, sometime during the 1950s a girl was killed and her body dumped in Stepp Cemetery. The girl’s mother comes to the cemetery nightly in search of the killer. If he runs, he will die as the girl did—stabbed and beaten beyond recognition.

  In another story, during a drive through the state forest, a girl told her boyfriend that she did not love him. He shoved her from the car and sped away. She was never seen again. Several days later, the girl’s mother also vanished in that same area. When couples go into the forest in search of the girl’s body, her mother’s ghost secretly checks their car to see if her daughter might be hiding in it.

  A final variation is disturbing albeit poignant for any mother. In it, a mysterious woman in black visits the grave of her small daughter every midnight. She disinters the girl’s corpse and cuddles it through the night.

  The tales of Stepp Cemetery have also taken on some of the characteristics of modern horror folklore.

  In every state, for instance, tales are told of a character called “The Hook,” a nefarious being who skulks about lovers’ lanes waiting to pounce on unsuspecting couples. He
is generally described as an escaped convict who can be easily identified: he has a steel hook where a hand ought to be. The lovers generally learn of the man’s escape over the car radio and become so afraid they decide to leave their isolated location. At home, they find a steel claw—or a deep scratch from one—embedded in their car door.

  The Hook of Stepp Cemetery, however, is female and she is not an escaped convict.

  A local version of the tale explains that a woman and her small son were involved in a horrible automobile accident. She was seriously injured and her son killed. He was buried in Stepp Cemetery. His mother’s hand was smashed in the accident and replaced with a steel claw. The boy had always been afraid of the dark. His mother decided to use the tree stump as her perch to watch over the grave each day after nightfall. She continued to do so until her own death; her ghost now sits on that stump. But she is so shy she flees when a car approaches yet manages to shake her hook-hand at the intruders. Her only companion is a ghostly white dog.

  Detailed written encounters with the ghost of Stepp Cemetery are scarce, as one might suspect. The legends rarely include actual physical encounters with the ghost. However, several late-night visitors claim to have been frightened by something. A teen girl remembered the following harrowing experience:

  Connie and Jeanne and I went out to Stepp Cemetery. They had told me stories, but I had never been there. I really didn’t want to go, but they talked me into it. I really didn’t believe the stories.

  I wouldn’t get out of the car, but Jeanne finally got out and said we should just walk around. After awhile, we got back in the car and started to drive out. Right where the road curves and goes back to the highway, we suddenly heard the wind, like things rushing through the trees. It was really dark, too. I was driving, and then, right in the middle of the road, there was this image, rippling right in front of the car. The car lights went off. The motor died, too.

  We all screamed, and I closed my eyes. Connie started to cry. We locked the doors and rolled up the windows. We tried turning the key, but the car just wouldn’t start. We could hear that wind on both sides of the road. That image drifted on across the road. Then all by itself, the car started. No one touched the ignition. Connie wanted to get out and look at the battery and engine, but I wasn’t going to let anybody out of the car. We took off!

  The three girls never again ventured into Stepp Cemetery.

  Perhaps the oddest legend associated with this old cemetery has nothing to do with women in black.

  State forest rangers will tell visitors the cemetery was begun by area families in the early 1800s. (The earliest identifiable graves are from the Civil War era.) However, some believe in the legend of the Crabbites, an alleged nineteenth-century religious sect that is supposed to have used it for their bizarre church services, which included speaking in tongues, handling live snakes, and sexual promiscuity.

  A longtime resident of Monroe County told an earlier researcher that her father had been called to the cemetery late one evening to help quell a particularly frenetic Crabbite sexual rite. He snapped a bullwhip above their heads to break up the orgy.

  Despite the scant evidence to support orgies among the tombstones or phantom women in black mourning a deceased child, Stepp Cemetery continues to draw visitors fascinated by legends that will not go away. These visitors want to discover for themselves if it is perhaps only the occasional teenager who finds a “twisted tree stump” to sit on and say boo, or if there might not be another thing that perches there in the darkness. Waiting.

  Iowa

  Gone Too Soon

  Southeast Iowa

  Travelers through southeastern Iowa can find a quintessentially rural American landscape with serene country roads stretching straight on until the asphalt highway disappears beyond the horizon.

  Interspersed throughout the twenty-two counties, drowsy country villages and small cities struggle to retain their dignity and basic essential services in the face of twenty-first-century challenges; yet most of the concerns they face are of human origin.

  Experiences from outside the expected routine of daily life—especially incidents that might be labeled supernatural in origin—can disturb this outward calm.

  Take what happened to the Sterling family on their 350-acre farmstead in that part of Iowa. Thirteen children had been born to Blanche and Clarence Sterling. Three of the children died young. Clarence himself died in the late 1990s.

  It is their daughter Linda Sterling who talks about her brushes with the “other side.” Despite the passage of some years, neither Linda nor her family quite understands what was happening and perhaps more importantly why it all took place. Although her experiences may seem of minor consequence to those expecting visits from the netherworld to be accompanied by howling winds and yowling wraiths, Linda’s episodes fit into that category. They were defining moments in her life.

  It was all a very frustrating experience for her. Nearly everyone she told the stories to thought they could not possibly be true. To not be believed may have been the hardest part of it all. Yet she calmly accepts that assessment from others: “I’d probably say the same thing if it had happened to someone else.”

  Linda’s experiences with the supernatural seem connected to the tragic death of her older brother by nine years, Brad Sterling, when he was only fourteen and Linda five. The circumstances are so ordinary as to make his passing even the more agonizing. He was doing what typical Iowa farm kids have done for generations—riding a small motorcycle around the family farmstead. He especially enjoyed zooming to the end of their long driveway, in and out of the ditches along the county road, and then turning around to peal back up the Sterling driveway.

  “It had been very dry and dusty” that day, Linda says. At the end of one swing down the long drive, Brad rode his cycle onto the gravel country road—directly into the path of an oncoming car that had been enveloped in a cloud of dust caused by a car in front of it. A neighbor was driving the car that struck him. Brad was killed instantly.

  As one would expect, the boy’s death had a tragic and lasting effect on his family. He was his father’s favorite, for one thing. Everyone knew that. Linda said her father, Clarence, never fully got over the cruel way fate had snatched his boy away from him.

  Linda said the family never spoke of the accident: “It was just like Brad had never existed because none of us could say anything. Dad was just a basket case. He never did recover.”

  “Dad told my brother Mark that he’d have to take Brad’s place. That bothered Mark so much. He realized later that dad was [really] saying he’d never be as good as Brad, that he’d have to become more like him. Mark is a doctor now, a very smart man, but he just never got over that.”

  Nearly twenty years passed after the boy’s death and Linda Sterling was still living at home when she encountered some things that made her wonder if Brad had never truly left the family. She remembers that the first incident was in the middle of the night. She woke up with a sudden chill, like being aware that someone else was in the room with her—someone she could not see.

  “I wasn’t truly scared, so I just lay in bed. Then my mom came in and asked me if I was okay.” Linda realized that she must have called out or made some noise that brought her mother to her room.

  Not wanting to upset her mother, Linda assured her that she was having a bad dream and all was okay.

  Linda’s mother, Blanche Sterling, actually had awakened earlier because she had one of those sixth-sense episodes moms sometimes have that one of her children was in distress. Blanche wanted to check on her own brood still living at home. She had started with Linda, who was in her early twenties at the time.

  As Blanche turned to leave, mother and daughter were stopped cold when they heard “Mom!” cried out from a corner of the bedroom. It was a clear, distinct male voice.

  The women stared at one another. Each had heard the same thing. Later, Blanche confided to Linda that she heard it repeated a few hours later
but in a different part of the house.

  But at that moment, Blanche quickly left the bedroom to check on her son Jeff. Perhaps he was playing some sort of mean-spirited prank. Blanche found him asleep, as she did another son.

  A religious woman, Blanche went to the living room and prayed. Linda fell back to sleep. Neither one heard the voice ever again.

  Later Linda realized something else: her bedroom had been Brad Sterling’s old room.

  “My mother doesn’t believe in ghosts,” Linda said of that night. In fact, Blanche did not think Brad was the source of the disembodied voice at all but rather thought it was the product of “demonic activity.”

  Linda disagreed but kept her opinion to herself.

  “Who else could it have been?” Linda asks, if not her long-dead brother.

  The aftermath of young Brad’s death also touched her brother Mark in another way. He sometimes experienced a distinctive, albeit disturbing and terrifying, pull toward the location on that gravel road where Brad had been killed.

  Is it possible that the spirit of a boy who died too young could have returned with an attitude and behavior uncharacteristic of him during his few brief years on earth? Although he could be “ornery” or mischievous, Linda said, he was at heart a “good boy.”

  That may well be a central question because Linda Sterling herself faced far more than an utterance by something unseen in an early morning hour.

  For a period of several weeks, Linda was terrified by what she termed a “perception of evil” so keen that she was barely able to stay in the house.

  It all began on an evening near dusk on a routine drive home with her sister. That harmless trip was punctuated by a most disturbing conclusion.