Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  She had grown used to dramatic temperature plunges in the shop—that was just part of having Deg around—but the temperature would always go right back up.

  Deg was passing by, she figured.

  But this time when she sat down in the chair, the air turned much, much colder. And it stayed that way.

  She knew Deg was there in the other chair.

  Ghost of the Purple Masque

  Manhattan

  Drama professor Carl Hinrichs was working alone late one night in the scene shops at the Purple Masque Theatre in its former location in Kansas State University’s East Stadium.

  The Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady was well into rehearsal and Hinrichs, the scene designer, still had a great deal of work to do.

  A few hours after midnight, Hinrichs poured paint from a five-gallon container into a smaller bucket that he carried back to the stage area.

  Then he heard a tremendous crash.

  “Who’s there?”

  With no answer, he went back into the scene shop to find the bucket of paint turned upside down in the middle of the floor. It was sitting at least ten feet from where he had left it.

  The good professor may have had his first encounter with Nick, the mischievous ghost of the old Purple Masque Theatre.

  Nick’s origins date to the 1950s when the old East Stadium space was a cafeteria and a residence hall for athletes. The story goes that a football player named Nick was injured in a game, carried into the cafeteria, and placed on a table, where he died.

  Nick, it seems, never left the building. He clomped through hallways and up and down stairs, and he talked on tape recorders. He also famously played tricks to get attention. He became one of the crowd, as it were, and generally was quite happy to share the small stage there with students and faculty.

  Nick sometimes ran the show his way, however, frustrating the casts and crews.

  In one case, rehearsals for the play American Yard were underway. After a rehearsal one evening, the theater doors and the building itself were locked. In the morning, a stagehand found all the chairs from the set piled in the hallway. The doors were still locked. The worker put the chairs back on stage. That night at rehearsal, after the houselights dimmed, the actors found their entrance blocked by the same chairs.

  Later, when the stage manager ordered the stage lights to be brought up, the student running the light board was bewildered by what happened.

  “I can’t,” he called out. “I gave them power. I can hear them, but they’re not coming up.”

  A few moments later, the lights complied and came up slowly. The student was amazed. He said he had nothing to do with it. It was just Nick, others said, up to more pranks.

  Sometimes Nick’s pranks with chairs could be helpful. A theater major recalled that a stage crew once unloaded chairs in the Purple Masque to be set up later, then went outside. Less than five minutes later they heard a commotion from the theater. Once they got back in they found all the audience chairs set up and playbill programs neatly placed on the seats.

  “There was nobody around,” the student said. “It happened in five minutes, and it usually takes at least half an hour to do that job.”

  Nick’s pranks were often purely playful. Two students setting up sound for an upcoming production ran into a puzzling scenario when, after finishing up for the night, they locked the doors and started out only to hear the show’s music coming from inside the theater. They unlocked the door and found the tape running. Again they locked up and again the tape started up once they were out.

  “It came on four more times,” one of them said at the time. “We looked for someone playing a joke but there wasn’t a soul around.”

  David Laughland was taping sound cues late one night. When he listened to what he had recorded, he heard a voice call out on the tape, “Hi Dave!”

  Laughland rewound the tape and played it again.

  There was no voice on the tape.

  Nick’s pranks usually startled, and sometimes even frightened, novice actors or backstage crew.

  One night an actress was alone in a dressing room waiting for her cue. The room held a desk and several old wooden cubes. She made a quick costume change and sat down on the desk to rest.

  One of the cubes in the room raised up in the air, turned over, and set itself gently down on the floor in front of the student, as if someone had invited her to put her feet up.

  “Not nice, Nick,” the actress said, quickly standing up, definitely not amused.

  She edged toward the doorway and took a quick look back over her shoulder. The cube had moved back to its original position atop another one.

  When Nick was not taking a hand in productions, he was often clomping through the theater.

  Once, a former president of the K-State Players heard footsteps in the hallway even though he was alone in the theater. Another time, he and a friend stood at opposite ends of the hall and heard footsteps tread the entire length of the corridor between them. The pressure of invisible feet caused a number of the floorboards to creak.

  One fall evening three students were working at the theater. During a break they all heard what sounded “like a two-hundred-pound person walking.” The doors to the second floor remained locked. Although the students had keys, no one dared to go up and check.

  It is not only students, however, who have experienced an unseen presence lurking in and around the theater. A visitor, touring the campus, told her guide that she felt a presence in the Purple Masque though she knew nothing of the supernatural history of the place. Her guide simply smiled and nodded.

  When they entered the room where platforms were stored, the visitor stopped dead in her tracks, then fled, screaming. After she calmed down she said there was a dangerous element in that room; no one should ever enter it alone.

  But one student who did said she always felt presences around her that made her uneasy. Others felt icy hands on their shoulders in that same storeroom. What was the “dangerous element” in that place? No one knew, but few believed it to be Nick. Mischievous, but friendly, he was never known to have knowingly harmed anyone.

  Nick was such a familiar and beloved fixture that when plans were made to relocate the Purple Masque Theatre to West Stadium in 2014, students, faculty, and staff were hopeful Nick would move with them. A séance was planned to tell him about the move and invite him along.

  “It just wouldn’t be the same without him,” one faculty member said.

  A medium once claimed to have made contact with Nick’s spirit. She asked him what they should do to put his soul at rest and relieve him of his need to haunt.

  “Run a dalmatian through the theater at midnight,” his spirit supposedly replied.

  Some thought that sounded precisely like something Nick would say.

  Ménage à Trois

  Wichita

  Billy Plummer was restless. He was tossing and turning in bed on that frigid night in December 1939 when suddenly he felt his wife, Gert, tickling his feet.

  “No, Gert, no! Quit that!” he shrieked, jerking his knees up to his chin.

  But when Billy glanced across the bed, he saw his wife sound asleep. In the next instant, she jumped.

  “Billy, cut it out!”

  “What d’ya mean, cut it out?”

  Gert propped herself up on an elbow.

  “You’ve got a sick sense of humor, Billy. You know I hate being tickled.”

  “But I never touched you!”

  “You didn’t?” Gert sat bolt upright.

  Billy threw off the covers and snapped on the light.

  “Look, if you weren’t tickling me and I wasn’t tickling you, then we’ve got bedbugs,” he grumbled. Gert was horrified.

  They jumped out of bed and together stripped it of sheets, blankets, even the mattress pad. They shook it all out yet found nothing.

  At about four o’clock in the morning, taps and thumps from the bed frame awakened them. Billy reached over and turned on the
light. The thumping continued. It seemed to emanate from the headboard, the side rails, the springs—indeed, from all around them. The couple lay rigid, bedclothes pulled up under their chins.

  Night after night the Plummers’ sleep was interrupted by the strange sounds. One night in February, their misery was taken to a new level when a deep, male voice called from beneath the bed, “Is the baby asleep?”

  Gert Plummer, wild with fright, dashed into their toddler’s bedroom. Their son was sleeping soundly.

  Billy Plummer finally decided to take the bed apart. He found nothing unusual and put it back together again.

  By mid-March the couple was getting desperate.

  Billy tried setting a snare for whatever it was that was in the bedroom. He strung a copper wire from the bedspring to a gas pipe in the kitchen. Not a tap, a thump, or a tickle disturbed the couple all night. Gert rose happy and refreshed. Her joy was short-lived. The next night “the thing” was back in the bedroom tapping, thumping, and tickling.

  Amateur ghost hunters from Wichita and the surrounding area decided it must be a ghost of some sort. The police were consulted. They all found the ghost accommodating as well as agile in producing noises anywhere on the bed, yet they were unable to learn its identity or to discover what it might have wanted.

  At the end of March, Dr. William H. Mikesell, a psychologist and author, was brought in to the Plummers’ Wichita home. Another seven witnesses, including a detective, were gathered when the professor arrived. His first command was to ask the ghost to thump the bed; it obeyed. Dr. Mikesell then ordered it to rap on one side of the bed and it likewise obliged. He asked it to rap a certain number of times in another place on the bed and it promptly obeyed.

  “I could feel several raps near my hand on the bed,” Dr. Mikesell told a news reporter. But when he asked the ghost to tap on the cedar chest in the room, it refused. It would touch no other piece of furniture than the bed.

  Dr. Mikesell’s rendezvous with the entity lasted several hours. By then the professor was tired and ill at ease because of the large number of spectators. He promised to return at some other time when fewer persons were present.

  But the professor never had a chance.

  On the first warm day of spring, the Plummers hauled the bed to the Wichita dump. Where it stayed.

  Legend of White Woman Creek

  Greeley County

  Today, the streambed is dry and pocked with gravel. But once—many years ago—clear water flowed through the sweeping prairie of Greeley, Wichita, and Scott counties in western Kansas. The meager stream would doubtlessly receive only a passing glance today, if that, yet the origin of its most peculiar name is one of the most enduring of Kansas legends. It is said that the ghost of a young woman captured by the Cheyenne people over a century ago haunts this creek.

  The Cheyenne once roamed the vast grasslands of Kansas, hunting bison and antelope. Their quarry was numerous, their lives relatively untouched by the encroachment of white soldiers and settlers.

  Cheyenne Chief Tee-Wah-Nee led a small party of hunters during one foray for game. They camped near the bank of a stream they called “River-That-Runs-Between-the-Hills-That-Are-Always-Covered-With-Smoke.” The bison had been plentiful, and the men spent many days in this camp curing the meat and preparing the hide for clothing and blankets.

  One night, a band of white men raided the camp. They stole the meat and hides and many horses. Chief Tee-Wah-Nee and his brother, Tan-Ka-Wah, were wounded; many of their brothers were killed.

  At dawn, the Cheyenne rode after the enemy and seized ten men and two women from a white settlement to which the raiders had retreated and also recovered the meat and hides.

  The prisoners were forced to return to the Cheyenne camp with the horses they had stolen. The women, two sisters named Anna and May, were given the job of nursing the injured Cheyenne men back to health.

  The months passed, summer faded into autumn. Chief Tee-Wah-Nee and his brother were fully recovered . . . and deeply in love with the sisters. Both women returned their affection.

  On the day set for the party’s return to their village, Tee-Wah-Nee convened a council and proclaimed himself the husband of Anna. Tan-Ka-Wah stood next to him and repeated the phrase, asking May to be his wife.

  Anna then sought permission to address the group, although women rarely spoke before councils. The men listened intently as she spoke in their own language:

  My heart is swollen with love for you, my people. To Tee-Wah-Nee I promise my love until the rain no longer falls from the sky.

  At first we were afraid. But no longer do we fear. The names by which you call my sister and me, Anna-Wee and May-O-Wee, are signs of our acceptance.

  I have only one request. We are now going home—to a home I have never seen. When five suns have gone, release the white men who are still with us. In return, they must promise never to steal the Cheyenne’s horses or take my sister and me away from our husbands. Our only brother is among those you hold and we are thinking of him and his future happiness.

  The council granted Anna’s request. Then Anna-Wee’s own brother, Daniel, rose to speak. None of the prisoners wanted to return, he said. None had families in the settlement, nor could they promise that other white men would honor a promise not to attack the Cheyenne. He asked that he and the other white men be accepted as brothers. The Cheyenne, who had long since stopped guarding the men as prisoners, granted their request.

  Camp was struck and the party set out for the Cheyenne village. Scouts rode ahead to announce the arrival of Chief Tee-Wah-Nee, his brother, and their wives. A ceremonial feast of thanksgiving was prepared.

  In time, Anna-Wee bore a son. The happiest lodge in the whole village was that of Tee-Wah-Nee and AnnaWee. The child was just learning to crawl when word came that Henrich, one of the adopted white men, had left the village. He had stolen one of Tee-Wah-Nee’s finest ponies, but no attempt was made to stop him.

  Henrich eventually reached Fort Wallace. He lied to the army commander that the white men and women held by Tee-Wah-Nee were still prisoners.

  Tee-Wah-Nee heard of Henrich’s tale. Before he could send a delegation to correct the story, cavalry troops lay siege to the Cheyenne village.

  Henrich rode at the front of the first charge. The troops fell back many times after being repulsed by the well-fortified Cheyenne. Eventually, Henrich and Tee-Wah-Nee found one another at nightfall, realizing full well that one of them must die. Henrich fell upon Tee-Wah-Nee with his bayonet; the Cheyenne chief lay mortally wounded.

  Henrich ran to the lodge of Anna-Wee. He killed her infant son, grabbed up the terrified woman into his arms, mounted his horse, and sped away with her down the streambed.

  A short distance from the smoldering village, Anna-Wee spotted the body of Tee-Wah-Nee. She feigned illness, sat on the ground, and asked Henrich to allow her to take some beads and bracelets from her husband’s body. Henrich sneered his assent. Anna-Wee knelt close, gathered Tee-Wah-Nee’s bow and quiver of arrows, and hid them in the folds of her skirt. As Henrich turned to watch the fighting, she picked up the bow, slid in an arrow against the curved wood, and shot him in the back.

  “You are a traitor to both your own people and to my adopted people,” she cried as Henrich fell to the ground.

  Anna-Wee took his rifle and ammunition, along with the bow and arrow, and returned to the battleground. At dusk, the body of Tee-Wah-Nee was carried to the ruins of his lodge. Anna-Wee kept vigil beside the remains of her husband and son, singing the Cheyenne death song and imploring Manitou, the Great Spirit, to take their souls. Cavalry attacked the Cheyenne village again the next day. Anna-Wee was killed as she bravely fought the troops.

  On fall evenings, in those brief minutes of dusk, a mist rises from the sandy banks of White Woman Creek. Out of that mist, it is said, comes the ghost of Anna-Wee, singing her song for Tee-Wah-Nee and her son. Her soft voice drifts and rises across the tall grasses like a single white cloud in the endless
ly blue Kansas sky.

  Phantom Riders of the Pony Express

  Hanover

  Near the town of Hanover, in northern Kansas, stands the weather-beaten wood-frame Hollenberg Pony Express Station, the largest relief stop on that famed trail that stretched from Missouri to California. Hollenberg is today the only unaltered station in its original location.

  It has another distinction too. Some claim it holds the specters of the Pony Express riders who pounded across the prairie, carrying the mail over a century and a half ago.

  In 1860 the railroad and the telegraph ended at St. Joseph, Missouri. From there the mail was carried by stagecoach to California, a trip that took three weeks or longer. Nearly half a million Americans were then living west of the Rocky Mountains. Many had gone to prospect for gold or to take up lands, and all hungered for news from family and friends in the East. It was frustrating to wait for the slow and sometimes unpredictable stagecoaches to arrive, if they did at all. Besides, the rapid expansion of the young country required a faster means of communication between the federal government in Washington and the settlements on the Pacific Ocean. To fill this need, the Pony Express was born.

  The hope was that horsemen, riding fast ponies in relays, could carry the mail across two thousand miles of prairie and mountain in half the time it took the stagecoach. It was a grand and daring scheme fraught with every imaginable danger. Even the Pony Express Company itself recognized the risks. Its advertisement of March 1860 read: “WANTED—Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.”

  Orphans or not, 100 to 120 riders were quickly hired, and at least 80 were in the saddle at any one time. One at a time, several hours apart, 40 riders headed westward from St. Joseph and 40 others started eastward from Sacramento, California.