As they neared the family farm’s driveway, Linda saw what looked like a man staggering toward them. She quickly turned to ask her sister if she saw the man, but when Linda looked back he had disappeared. “I looked along the ditch to see if maybe he had fallen. But there was absolutely nobody there.”
The man she saw on the road was in dusky light, so she could not distinguish his age or what he might have been wearing, but she could tell he was tall and lanky. Linda thought it might be her younger brother Jeff who fit that description. Maybe he had wrecked his four-wheeler and was trying to get back to the house.
Then another thought occurred to her. Brad had the same build at fourteen as Jeff did.
“I suppose it could have been Brad I saw,” she speculated.
Sometime later she found out a neighboring farmer had been killed near that spot many years earlier when his tractor accidentally turned over on him. Perhaps it was his ghost she had seen.
Once Linda and her sister got home, there was another mystery waiting, that “evil presence,” she called it, so distinctive that for her it permeated the house and its surroundings.
She was sure somebody was in the house with her, somebody who meant to do her harm.
“I had to get out. It was frightening to feel that way in my own house. I still try not to think about it too much.”
She compares the sensation to what she felt on the night she heard that voice cry out “Mom!” That someone was around you could not see, someone in the shadowy corners of a familiar room.
Although the dreadful feelings passed in time, Linda still harbors some reluctance to return to her family’s farm.
“I do go back occasionally, but not often, though. I don’t really like going there. You’d think I would since that’s where I grew up.”
Linda Sterling does not directly connect the vanishing man on the road to the malevolent atmosphere in the house, and she certainly cannot understand why a brother who has been dead for three decades would return to call out in the nighttime, thereby frightening his mother and sister. In the end, however, she does not like to dwell on these disquieting incidents from her past, nor does she think about them very much.
She knows some mysteries will remain unsolved.
The Guttenberg Poltergeist
Guttenberg
Some fifty years ago the Meyer house near Guttenberg, Iowa, was the most exciting place in Clayton County. In fact, it was so thrilling that on a cold December night, the family fled their home—they claimed a poltergeist had taken over the premises. The events leading up to their flight are truly amazing.
It all began late one evening as Bill and Annie Meyer were sitting in their living room. A booming crash from the kitchen shook the house right down to its foundation. The couple hurried into the kitchen to find their refrigerator tipped over. In the next instant, a flower stand flew across the kitchen and slammed against the stove, splintering into dozens of pieces. Then an egg rose from a basket on the windowsill, soared through the air, and bounced off a door.
Annie Meyer was speechless; her husband was bewildered. How could these things be happening? Yet that was only the beginning.
Too upset to prepare dinner that night, Annie insisted that the couple eat out. She felt more relaxed away from home and out among people. In fact, while she was gone she almost forgot about the destruction in her home.
At home later that night she decided to read herself to sleep. She placed a glass of water on the nightstand and climbed into bed with her book. That glass rose from the table, hung in midair, and exploded over her head, showering her with water and shards of glass.
Her husband, who had witnessed the incident, was as frightened as his wife. He suggested that they move into one of the other bedrooms, which they did. But no sooner were the Meyers settled in bed than soot began falling on them from the ceiling.
In the morning, Bill called the sheriff, who tramped through the house, looking unsuccessfully over, under, and inside their possessions.
The sheriff was called home suddenly but promised to check back later. When he returned to the Meyer place later in the afternoon, he found the couple huddled in their front yard. They claimed that several chairs had scooted across the floor and that every window in the house had cracked. The sheriff examined the windows and shook his head. He confessed that he could not help them. This particular problem was beyond the long arm of the law.
Word soon spread of the strange goings-on at Bill Meyer’s house, and visitors from Guttenberg and neighboring communities besieged the family with tour requests. A towboat captain on the Mississippi River a few miles away arrived one night with some friends.
“I was just wondering, ma’am,” he began, “if I could spend the night. You see, I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Annie courteously offered the captain a bedroom. Shortly after he had gone to bed, his friends and the Meyers were drinking coffee at the kitchen table. Then they heard a loud commotion in the bedroom. They rushed into the room. There the river pilot lay on the mattress, which was now on the floor eight feet away from the bed frame. The perplexed captain claimed he had no idea how he and the mattress had gotten there.
Sometime later, an expert on parapsychology reportedly came to study the unexplained phenomena. He said that the activity was a result of “some intelligent motivation.” He explained that a young person who, unconsciously, transfers his suppressed rage and energy force to inanimate objects usually sets a poltergeist in motion.
By that time, however, the Meyers did not care much for theories. Weary of visitors, of assaults by unseen tormentors, and of too many sleepless nights, they moved out. The house, however, had become so notorious that curiosity seekers could not stay away; they arrived regularly, uninvited, tramping through the place and spreading stories about the antics of the “ghost.”
Eventually the Meyers sold the house to their former neighbors, the Wallace Finnegans. Vandals then began vandalizing it, smashing windows and breaking down locked doors. Young people came from near and far to hold all-night beer parties in the place. Mr. Finnegan, in desperation, filled the house with hay and turned it into a barn.
The Guttenberg poltergeist at last was laid to rest.
Mildred Hedges
Indianola
It was a Monday morning, May 6, 1935. A new week had begun at picturesque Simpson College, Indianola, and classes were changing. Students rushed along the sidewalks on the tranquil campus and in and out of the charming brick campus buildings.
In Old Chapel, the college’s oldest building, a vivacious young home economics major named Mildred Hedges balanced a handful of books in her arms as she started to make her way down the steep, open staircase from the top floor. No one knows precisely how it happened but one of her high heels caught on a top step. She lost her balance and tumbled over the handrail, plummeting thirty-five feet to her death below. Mildred was gone at the age of twenty-two. But she has not been forgotten.
Old Chapel became College Hall after it was remodeled in the 1980s. It is an imposing, three-story, brick building with white trim and a grand bell tower; it is a campus centerpiece.
Today College Hall is home to administrative offices and meeting rooms. The admissions office is on the first floor. Yet up on its third floor is a reminder of Mildred Hedges’s tragic death. The Red and Gold Room is a re-creation of a college student’s room in the 1930s. In fact it may have been where Mildred lived during her brief life there. One former student described it as a perfect little bedroom: “There should be a little old lady living in there.”
The idea of someone living there may be close to the mark. And it is definitely not an old lady.
The haunting of what is now College Hall by the ghost of Mildred Hedges is an enduring legend on the Simpson College campus.
College Hall was built in 1870. For years students, faculty, alumni, and employees have both cherished and feared the building that once held the library and conservatory. The first religious
chapel was there. However by 1980 it was condemned because of crumbling ceilings and unsafe staircases, prompting its remodeling.
Since Mildred Hedges’s death over eighty years ago, some have reported strange things inside College Hall: floating lights nod and dip, something invisible but weighty seems to climb the creaking stairs; shadowy forms pace the halls or peer out of third-floor windows.
Some of the College Hall ghost legends are quite vague, while others are based on historical events, like those associated with young Mildred.
One story holds that in the late nineteenth century a young man distraught over a failed romance hanged himself in that early chapel’s belfry. After his death, friends believed he was the one they saw wandering the gloomy halls or gazing out a window. Skeptics, however, say the suicide tale was a myth handed down after a professor was hanged in effigy in the tower.
Two female students purportedly committed suicide by hanging. The words “In Memoriam” follow one student’s name in a 1924 yearbook. Alumni who were there in the 1920s recalled only that “something happened” and not specifically a death by hanging. Another woman is alleged to have hanged herself from a massive chandelier that was visible through the Palladian window on the second floor.
Dark deeds have been unjustifiably attributed to the building. In at least one instance from the 1880s, a young student who fell to his death in another campus building was reported to have died in College Hall.
Past students tell of meeting the apparition of a young woman on a College Hall staircase. One insisted the ghost talked to him. It said in no uncertain terms that she wanted to be left alone.
A security guard was badly frightened one night after stumbling upon a translucent figure in the corridor. And a cleaning lady once told a news reporter that she knew mysterious things went on “all the time.” She claimed that she and her coworkers witnessed what they could not explain—basement lights turning on when no one was in the building, lights on the third floor blinking on and off. Electricians were not able to find any reason for the erratic behaviors in the otherwise empty building.
Through the years these legends have intertwined, been told and retold, until fact and fiction are inseparable.
Famed Connecticut ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren looked into the ghost legends of College Hall during a visit to campus.
Accompanied by a crowd of students, photographers, and press reporters, the Warrens worked their way up the old, three-story staircase, throughout the drafty corridors, and all the way to the third floor, gathering their own psychic vibrations and impressions.
The couple reported the building was occupied by something not of flesh and blood.
The old hall had “an earthbound spirit,” they concluded.
“She died here, but she’s convinced herself that she didn’t. She might have been contemplating suicide. But she didn’t want to die at the end.”
That did not seem to jibe with Mildred Hedge’s untimely death. But another conclusion by the ghost hunters did seem to make sense.
In a trance, Lorraine Warren said the ghost was that of a dark-haired woman in her twenties wearing a skirt with a calf-length hem.
That description was close to the one obtained by Twyla Dillard in her research on the ghosts of Simpson College that included information about Mildred Hedges’s 1935 death. Period photographs of her matched the Warrens’ description.
A few nights after the Warrens’ visit, a hypnotist and psychic led another group of students through the hall. He suspected that as many as five students had died there over the years. Although the man knew nothing of College Hall’s history, he said that there were no ghosts left there.
But, he added, “I believe they were here.”
Whether the ghost of Mildred Hedges remains or not, her story will not fade away anytime soon. The college has produced a video about her and posted it on YouTube for the world to view.
Its title?
“Mildred: The Spirit of College Hall.”
The Man in the Doorway
Oskaloosa
In 1949 Hal and Elaine Worrel lived in a century-old house in Oskaloosa that a short time before had been remodeled into apartments. The Worrels lived at one end of the top floor. At the opposite end lived Patricia Burns, a young widow. The landlady told the Worrels that Patricia had recently lost her husband, Raymond Burns, in an industrial accident. She moved to Oskaloosa to try to rebuild her life.
Patricia was an accomplished pianist. Elaine often heard music coming from the woman’s small apartment. When they passed one another in the hall going to or coming from the shared bathroom, Elaine exchanged smiles with her, perhaps a quick hello, but not much conversation. Elaine respected her neighbor’s privacy as she grieved over Raymond’s death.
Elaine felt uneasy one Saturday while Hal was away at work, though she did not know why. Perhaps a warm bath would relax her. Slipping into a robe and slippers, she headed toward the bathroom. As she opened the door and groped for the dangling ceiling-light cord, the pungent aroma of pipe smoke suddenly filled the air.
Elaine spun around. A young man lingered in the doorway, his head of black, curly hair spilling down over his collar, a faint horseshoe-shaped scar outlining his left cheekbone. Cupped in his hand was a briar pipe. He was not looking at her and he did not speak; he seemed to be intently staring off into the distance.
Elaine’s scream caught in her throat as she shrank back in surprise, for the stranger most definitely did not belong in this house.
The young man turned and moved toward Patricia Burns’s apartment. Elaine was swept by an unaccountable compulsion to follow him, which she did, from a distance. At the door of Patricia’s apartment, the man disappeared.
Concerned about her neighbor, Elaine knocked on the door several times but there was no answer. She tried the doorknob. It turned in her hand and she pushed open the door. Just visible through a doorway was Patricia lying across the bed, her arms red with blood. She had slit her wrists and was barely conscious.
Elaine quickly put tourniquets above the gashes and then phoned her husband at work. He arrived a few minutes later with a doctor in tow.
The next day Patricia thanked the couple for saving her life. She told Elaine that she had been overcome with despair after a night out drinking and decided to join her husband in death.
Elaine said nothing of her own mysterious encounter outside her apartment. It was clear to her that Patricia had slashed her wrists at about the same time she had seen the ghost.
Later that evening, Elaine again checked on her young friend. Patricia sat on the sofa clutching a photograph. She showed it to Elaine. “His name was Ray,” she said.
There was the black, curly hair, the scar on his left cheek, even a briar pipe.
Raymond Burns was the man in the doorway.
Ham House
Dubuque
Dubuque pioneer Mathias Ham built his home to last. The twenty-three-room Victorian gothic mansion straddles a wind-wracked bluff on the city’s north end, its massive native limestone walls as sound today as the day they were completed. This antebellum house has long been the pride of Dubuque, a symbol of wealth and a statement of the owner’s faith in the future of his Mississippi River hometown. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places.
As with many old mansions, it seems natural that the Ham House has been the subject of ghost stories over the decades, eerie incidents in which it is claimed that strange lights move through the vast, dark corridors and cold, sudden breezes seem to have no natural origin. And then there’s the story of an old river pilot whose ghost seeks revenge on the woman who killed him with a fatal shotgun blast to the abdomen.
The history of the house would certainly support more than a few remarkable tales.
The energetic Mathias Ham prospered in lead mining, lumbering, and agriculture and operated a fleet of vessels to ship his products up and down the river. He married Zerelda Marklin, his childhood sweetheart, in 18
37. Three years later, he built a five-room, two-story, stone-block house. It was considered lavish for the time, as most of the surrounding homes were log cabins. In 1856 Zerelda died, leaving Ham with five young children to raise. He was devastated by his wife’s death and by a number of business setbacks that followed, but nevertheless made plans to vastly enlarge his original house.
In 1857, while the Dubuque Federal Customs House was under construction, several loads of stones shipped from southern Illinois were rejected because of inferior quality. Mathias Ham bought the shipment and started on a twenty-three-room, three-story addition made of limestone to his Lincoln Avenue home for himself and his family. Then in 1860 he married Margaret McLean, who bore him two more children. As Ham was recouping his losses, he completed his Dubuque mansion, furnishing it with taste and elegance.
Soon the Hams, Mathias and Margaret, opened their luxurious home to entertain the socially prominent in the city.
Their parties became well known and guests felt honored to be invited. Many partygoers remarked that Matthias Ham had thought of everything, noting the exquisite plaster rosettes and moldings of the fourteen-foot ceilings, the beautifully decorated window casings, and the burnished walnut staircases.
But there were things about the Ham house that fawning guests would probably never see: for instance, those twentyfive steps that led from the third floor up into a tall cupola that, like a giant crown, topped the building and afforded a splendid view of the river. Ham built it to observe the movement of his riverboats, an important part of guarding his steamboat fleet.
Pirates still roamed the Mississippi River in that era, plundering steamboats carrying lumber, foodstuffs, and various supplies. The story is that Ham’s spying out of the cupola eventually led to the capture of a band of pirates. When the pirates vowed vengeance, the Ham children seemed more excited than frightened. Nothing came of the threat. Then.
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