Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  “If I could live through that, I think I can survive anything in the world. I almost had a heart attack.”

  As she would later learn, Nancy Bagshaw-Reasoner had met Ben, the ghost of the Fitzgerald Theater.

  After his sudden disappearance, she slammed closed the ticket window and ran into the business office to hide. She called her husband and pleaded with him to come pick her up. In her fear, she struggled to set the alarm and the motion detector. At one point, the alarm even blinked motion detected, which only added to her panic.

  She did not tell anyone else about her experience until several weeks later. She and Jude Martin, a supervisor in the business office, were sharing duties one afternoon in the box office. Bagshaw-Reasoner happened to glance out that little-used side window. She screamed. The same man had appeared, though this time he was hazier.

  “I saw his face, his dark hair, and I saw his shirt. The rest of him was a blur.”

  Martin had been elsewhere in the booth waiting for a computer printer job to finish. She was startled by the scream, but she saw nothing.

  “It’s back again.” Bagshaw-Reasoner pointed.

  This time when Martin looked out the window she saw a white, translucent figure moving past.

  Martin told Bagshaw-Reasoner they might have just seen Ben, the resident ghost of the Fitzgerald Theater. But she assured her that seeing him was not unusual and that he did not seem to be evil or malicious.

  Bagshaw-Reasoner was relieved and told Martin about her previous encounter. She had no idea that the theater might be haunted.

  “I thought I’d been losing my mind,” she said.

  When the theater first opened as the Sam S. Shubert Theater in 1910, a tribute by show business tycoon brothers J. J. and Lee Shubert to their late brother, it was one of the most elegant theaters anywhere in the country. It first hosted vaudeville stars and silent films until the rise of talkies in the late 1930s. This theatrical grande dame was renamed the World Theater when live entertainment was eliminated. Later, the theater focused on showing foreign films. Minnesota Public Radio bought the deteriorating building in 1980, and after a few years of extensive remodeling that restored its earlier elegance, the theater became the home of A Prairie Home Companion. The World was rechristened in 1996 to honor native son F. Scott Fitzgerald on the centenary of his birth.

  For decades, theater employees have said that the ghost of a man called Ben has startled them with sudden appearances or has puzzled them with his trickster behavior. Although old theaters like the Fitz are expected to have a ghost or two, the close encounters people have had with Ben—including Nancy Bagshaw-Reasoner’s experience—make this theater a distinctive addition to the roster of haunted playhouses. There is speculation (but scant evidence) that Ben may have been a stagehand whose supposed signature was found on a note hidden in the ceiling during the theater’s remodeling; another suggestion is that he was a workman who drank himself to death in the stage door alley adjacent to the theater.

  It is difficult to pinpoint just when the stories of Ben the ghost originated. Sightings increased in the 1980s during the theater’s renovation, but it seems he has not been as active in more recent years.

  Most encounters with Ben have taken place at two theater “hot spots”—the box office and business office complex, and then in the theater itself around a set of upper-level audience box seats.

  In the theater’s business office near the box office, staffers have had issues with their chairs and blamed trickster Ben.

  One member of the business staff had been running envelopes through a postage meter in another part of the complex and returned to find his desk chair missing. A search discovered it behind the gift shop off the lobby. Another person was alone finishing up some ticket accounting in the box office when he left to use the restroom. He returned to discover his chair gone. He found it sitting in the middle of the inner lobby. He said it was like the chair tried to follow him into the restroom.

  In the box seating area, sightings usually revolve around audience members or others seeing someone up there. Members of a ballet company spotted a lone man standing next to one of the seats when no one should have been up there. On another occasion Ben may have been prowling about during a production of the British ghost drama The Woman in Black. At an invited audience preview of that show, theater staff noticed that at one point many audience members turned their heads nearly in unison to look up at those box seats. When curious staff members later asked several audience members what they were looking at, all of them said they had seen an actor there and supposed a scene was beginning. It was not.

  Both Jude Martin and Nancy Bagshaw-Reasoner agreed that seeing Ben was scary, but not in the way one might think. “It’s not fear,” Martin said. “It’s knowing you might get surprised when you least expect it.”

  Although Bagshaw-Reasoner no longer works at the Fitz, she continues to have one nagging question: “Was he somehow reaching out to me? Here was this sad man looking at me. That was the most dramatic element to it, other than the fact that it scared me to death.”

  At first she was frightened this intruder meant her harm. She was more terrified when she realized she was not dealing with a flesh and blood being. Even then she thought she ought to make an emergency call to someone, perhaps the police.

  “And then when [he] moved like whooooosh, I thought, Oh my God this isn’t a police issue. Somebody call the Ghostbusters!”

  “You never forget it. I can picture it like it happened yesterday. It was such a strange, strange thing.”

  Now You See Them

  Rochester and Becker County

  There are several haunted highways in Minnesota, but two stories of supernatural roadside experiences stand out, though they were separated by nearly a century and a half in time.

  Legendary stories of women in white haunting American roadways—such as this first story from Rochester—have been told in every state of the Union. Sometimes, however, tales of haunted highways arise from a specific, tragic event, as in the story from Becker County whose roots go back nearly a century and a half.

  Stan Sauder was driving south on U.S. Highway 52 coming into Rochester as he does five times a week from his home outside Pine Island to his job at the Mayo Clinic. As usual, he eased into the right-hand exit onto the cloverleaf with Highway 14 so he could connect with eastbound Civic Center Drive. It was about nine thirty in the morning. The weather was clear, nearly perfect on this fall day in 2007.

  As he rounded the curve to get on Civic Center Drive, Sauder was startled to see an attractive middle-aged woman with blonde hair standing in the grassy median of the cloverleaf; her arms hung loosely at her sides. She did not move. Her light, white summer dress fluttering in a gentle breeze seemed out of place for the time of year.

  The inside of that exit ramp is surrounded on all sides by asphalt—the two-lane exit and four-lane Civic Center Drive. There are no sidewalks or other pedestrian access points that would allow a person on foot to safely reach it on a high-traffic morning like this one.

  There is a bike path but still Sauder said one has to climb over fences to get to where she was standing. And she was certainly not dressed for fence climbing or bicycling.

  “It was the strangest, most bizarre thing that’s ever happened to me,” he said. “I thought, What on earth is this woman doing just standing there?”

  Surprisingly, she made eye contact with him as he carefully rounded the curve, trying at the same time to keep his eyes on her. For what he estimates was over half a minute, the two stared at each other. She followed his progress around the cloverleaf. He took a momentary look for oncoming eastbound traffic on Civic Center Drive before he glanced back to this mystery woman.

  She had vanished.

  “It’s virtually impossible that she crossed the street without getting hit. There’s so much traffic,” Sauder said. Neither was there anywhere for her to hide.

  He did not see any parked vehicle along the ro
ad, nor did she look to him to be outwardly upset or distraught.

  She seemed, he said, peaceful.

  To this day Sauder often takes that exit. And to this day he tries to figure out who this vanishing woman might have been and how she could have gotten there.

  “I know that she was there, but what was it I saw? What does it mean?”

  Is it possible this was a real person who somehow got into the inner area of a busy highway cloverleaf? Perhaps. Is it probable? Not really.

  Although he carefully chooses his words, it is clear Stan Sauder thinks this vision in white was not a living entity.

  In the summer of 1989, Norman Reeser was in his car creeping along Becker County Highway 11 on an early foggy morning. He had left his cabin on Pelican Lake in the far northwestern corner of Otter Tail County to make his way to Audubon, about twenty miles to the north.

  It was slow going in the heavy fog past Pike’s Bay, along Big and Little Cormorant Lakes, and through tiny Lake Center.

  Sometime after passing Little Cormorant Lake, as he hunched over the steering wheel squinting to see down the highway, Reeser’s attention was suddenly taken by sudden movement along the edge of the woods. A woman and a child—a young boy, it seemed—were walking away from the woods and directly onto the highway only a few yards in front of him. Both of them stared straight ahead, looking neither left nor right.

  Reeser slammed on the brakes waiting for the inevitable impact of metal against flesh. He knew it would come; they were now on the road itself. But as Reeser came to a stop, the two figures astonishingly reappeared in the southbound lane walking down through the fog-shrouded ditch and into the woods. They did not look back or acknowledge him in any other way. Reeser could not understand how he avoided hitting them—even at the speed he was traveling, the few yards that separated his car from them was too short a distance to have avoided an impact.

  Reeser still was traumatized by the incident when he stopped at a café in Audubon a short time later. He told the waitress about his near miss with the woman and child on County Road 11. A couple of local men sitting nearby overheard what he said and walked over.

  The men told Reeser that the two people he had seen were not of real flesh and blood but the ghosts of Deantha Cook and her son Freddie. They were murdered on their farmstead outside Audobon nearly 120 years earlier.

  Although it was nearing midnight, John Cook was still wide awake, reading by lamplight in his favorite armchair. His wife, Deantha, lingered nearby finishing some housework. Upstairs, their three children were fast asleep.

  The Cook family led an arduous life, eking out a subsistence living on the western Minnesota frontier of the 1870s while still trying to hold on to some sense of civilized normalcy in rough conditions.

  John Cook was a Civil War veteran of the Union Navy. After the war, he worked as a government agent on the White Earth Reservation and traded furs with the Ojibwe, which he still did on occasion. He had staked a land claim near the village of Oak Lake, in Becker County’s Audubon Township. No doubt he hoped the Northern Pacific depot built in Oak Lake the year before would bring prosperity to the area and by extension to his family.

  On his land claim he planted crops and erected a house for his family—his wife and eight-year-old Freddie, seven-year-old Mary, and little John, not quite two.

  It was April 26, 1872, and John Cook had reason to be relaxed and in a good mood. Earlier in the day, he had bought a hundred muskrat pelts from an Ojibwe friend. They were now piled in an upstairs corner, awaiting sale to a fur dealer. What he got from their sale would be much-needed cash in hand. As with many farmers, Cook was land rich and cash poor. Little Freddie had gotten so excited by the new pile of valuable soft furs that he ran to tell his aunt Nellie Small, Deantha Cook’s sister, who lived with her own family less than a mile away.

  Unfortunately, others also heard the news that John Cook had a large cache of valuable pelts soon to bring in a sizable cash fortune.

  Sometime before midnight on April 26, John Cook was shot to death in his chair, perhaps by someone standing outside a lighted window. The killers broke down the door and fatally struck Deantha over the head with several hatchet blows. Minutes later the killers clubbed the three children to death as they slept.

  The muskrat furs were stolen, and the house was set afire in an attempt to cover up the murders.

  Nellie Small’s son discovered the still smoldering ruins the next morning when he went over to get some fresh milk. He ran home to tell his mother, who rushed to the grisly scene. Only a few charred timbers remained, still hot to the touch.

  Other neighbors soon arrived. They found scattered bits of human remains—children’s small teeth, gold fillings, a set of false teeth, and charred bones—barely enough to fill a small bucket. A few of the bones were in the embers; other human remains had fallen into the cellar as the house collapsed in on itself. Shreds of clothing seemed to contain bloodstains.

  The Cook family massacre created a sensation in frontier Minnesota.

  Deantha’s sister knew about the stash of furs and reported that to authorities. An investigation quickly focused attention on an Ojibwe man named Kahkahbesha, who was known as Bobolink. He was eventually charged with the killings and put on trial. After just ninety minutes, a jury found Kahkahbesha guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. He died in jail under mysterious circumstances before the sentence could be carried out.

  Neighbors buried the Cook family’s few remains at the old farmstead. A plaque erected in 1923 by the Grand Army of the Republic marks the site.

  Little else is left to denote the lives of John and Deantha and little Freddie, Mary, and John Jr. except the story of their terrible departure from this world. There is, however, the legend told by locals in Becker County that their ghosts haunt the woods of Audubon Township. If victims of bloody crimes sometimes rest uneasily in their graves, then surely this is a circumstance when spirits might prowl the countryside.

  Norman Reeser’s encounter in the summer of 1989 brought the Cook family massacre out of the footnotes of history. Though he did not believe in ghosts, he could not find an explanation for how the woman and boy could have gotten across the road unscathed that did not involve some sort of supernatural intervention.

  The Luminescent Attic

  Eveleth

  On a harsh October day in 1980 in Eveleth, with wind-borne rain tearing leaves from the trees and pasting them to the ground, Tim Mack pulled his car up in front of an old house that had been remodeled into small apartments.

  “You wait here,” he said to his wife, Jan, and their two young daughters, “while I turn on the lights and take up the luggage.”

  He tried to sound positive, all the while thinking that he found something oppressive about the place. It had seemed cheerful enough when the landlord showed the second-floor apartment to him days earlier. Darkness came early this time of year, and the house now sat in shadowed gloom. No lights welcomed him. The house seemed desolate.

  Mack grabbed two suitcases and climbed the stairs to the front porch. Setting down one suitcase, he slipped the key from his pocket and unlocked the front door. Mack could not find a light switch on the wall so he had to feel his way up the narrow stairway, the suitcases banging against the walls. Near the top of the stairs a light suddenly snapped on. Mack nearly fell back down the stairs. That was when he recalled that the switch for the stair light was inside their new apartment—behind its still-locked door.

  After unlocking their door and depositing the suitcases inside the apartment, Mack turned on other lights and went back down to their landlord’s apartment. A note on the door read, “Gone fishing for a week. Please make yourselves at home.”

  Then who turned on the light, he wondered.

  As the Macks settled into their new home, Tim tried to forget about the light’s mysterious “greeting” and concentrate instead on his new job as advertising manager for the local newspaper, the Mesabi Daily News.

  T
heir new apartment, however, continued to distract him as it produced more mysteries.

  Some three weeks after they moved in, on a cold November day, the Mack family was watching television in the living room when they heard a crash in the kitchen. Parents and girls rushed en masse to the kitchen to find a drinking glass shattered on the counter. Tim Mack said it was from a wedding set that had survived a number of moves.

  Jan Mack was not uneasy, but she never knew what to expect next. Like the night the family came home to find the apartment lights turned on. Jan knew neither she nor any other family member had left them on.

  “On that night I wouldn’t go up those stairs alone!”

  There were other perplexing episodes with the frisky lights. Tim discussed the problem with their landlord, but the man simply shrugged his shoulders. Doubting he would get any real help from him anyway, Tim did not mention the broken glass episode.

  “That was just too strange,” he said.

  Then there was the attic.

  The attic of legend is, of course, filled with bats, eerie groans, or perhaps chains being dragged across the floorboards in the night. But the Macks’ attic was a quiet, pleasant place, and yet it presented its own quirks. They were using it to store household furnishings until they could move to a larger, more permanent home.

  “If I went up there anytime during the day or night,” Jan remembered, “there was a translucent light, a warm friendly glow about it. I never felt afraid. It made me feel at peace.”

  There was a skylight at one end of the attic, but at night, of course, no light filtered through. The streetlights were not bright enough to penetrate the far ends of the attic, and yet that faint luminescence at all hours of the day was always there. It was as if the attic itself was giving off the light. The couple could never determine what caused it.

  The Macks also found curious similarities between the Eveleth apartment and their old house in Webster City, Iowa, including attics that had their own mysteries about them.