Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  Bob was the first to discover that there was something more than a little bit odd with their “castle.”

  He went upstairs one evening to begin work on a bedroom. His two puppies, Homer and Roy, trotted by his side. But once inside the room, they whimpered and then crawled under the bed.

  A moment later, the dogs yelped as if they had been pinched, crawled out with their tails between their legs, and then plunged back downstairs. Another family dog dashed out of that same bedroom on another occasion and did not stop running until he scooted under a car parked several blocks away.

  On another occasion Bob was sitting in a downstairs room recording jazz LP records onto audiotapes. He was using two microphones for the job when, suddenly, footsteps reverberated across the bare floor of that same bedroom directly overhead. Bob figured Marion was cleaning up there, and called to her to be quieter. The footfalls only got louder. Shutting off his equipment, Bob went into the hallway and yelled: “Hey, Marion, either quiet down or put on some slippers!”

  There was no response. He started up the staircase and the footfalls ceased. A short time later Marion came into the room where Bob was working. She had been out back all evening working in one of their outbuildings.

  The couple had still not identified Tobias Mealey as their resident ghost. But it was not long before their son, David, joined them in solving the mystery. The owner of a construction business in Minneapolis, David Jameson usually visited his parents overnight and slept in a bedroom at the top of the stairs. Well after midnight during one visit, Marion was going back to bed after a trip to the bathroom when she saw David standing at the top of the stairs, swinging his Navy lantern in great arcs to illuminate the walls, the stairs, and the doorway to his room. She thought he was walking in his sleep.

  But David was far from asleep.

  “There’s something in that room, Mom,” he shouted.

  Something had shaken his bed violently enough to wake him up.

  “I thought I dreamed it,” he told his mother, “but then after I got back to sleep someone knocked twice from outside my window. I got up and couldn’t see anything. I went back to sleep, but then the bed shook again and something knocked again at the window.”

  Meanwhile, various lights in the Jameson house developed wills of their own.

  Marion often remained downstairs reading in a comfortable chair after Bob had gone to bed. On one particular evening she asked Bob to leave the light on for her at the foot of the stairs. She had been reading for some time before she heard Bob come back down the stairs, flip off the light, and walk back up again. She thought he was trying to tell her it was time to go to bed. She resented his attitude and marched up the steps to tell him so. She pushed open the bedroom door.

  But Bob was sound asleep. She shook him by the shoulder. He rolled over and opened his eyes. She told him what happened. He assured her that he had never been out of bed.

  Similarly, the living room lights blinked on and off for no apparent reason. At first, Marion again accused Bob of being the culprit. But after he vehemently denied it, they called in an electrician. The man spent an entire morning checking every light in the house and could find nothing wrong with any of them. But as the man walked toward the door to leave, all the lights came on at once.

  “How’d you do that?” Bob asked.

  “I wish I knew,” the electrician said, shaking his head.

  The house had an old-fashioned parlor in which Bob sometimes smelled frankincense. The odor filled the room and drifted into the hallway. Bob later learned that Tobias Mealey had his wake in that very room when he died in 1905. Perhaps Bob was smelling the lingering odor of incense that had perfumed the room where the corpse had lain.

  But not all the phenomena occurred inside the house. Late one fall evening when Bob was alone in the house, he heard a creaking noise from outside, like that of an ox cart. It was coming along the old dirt road outside their house, which was really just a faint trail through the pasture that had been a section of the old Territorial Road from St. Anthony (Minneapolis) to North Dakota.

  Bob went to the window and peered out but saw nothing amiss. Then he heard bells like those on harnesses. They were clear and distinct, yet receding into the distance. On another evening when Bob was alone, he saw a ball of light several feet in diameter go by the front door, turn a corner, and float past a first-floor window. At first he thought it was St. Elmo’s fire (a bluish glow seen sometimes before and during electrical storms) but decided it was too large for that. He was never able to determine what it was.

  Although the Jamesons were never frightened by these experiences, they wanted to discuss them with the previous residents of the house.

  Marion contacted Jeanette Sebey, who, with her husband, Carl, had bought the house in 1947 and lived in it until Carl’s death. It turns out the Sebeys had some peculiar incidents as well. The two women corresponded at length and were intrigued by the similarities.

  Six weeks after the Sebeys moved into the house in 1947, Jeanette claimed that she was ready to move out.

  On a sunny May morning, Jeanette and her mother were waiting for a crew from Northern States Power Company to install the poles and make the electrical connections. Loud thumping and banging suddenly shook the house.

  Jeanette suspected the workmen were putting up their ladders. But no one had arrived yet.

  After Jeanette got back inside, she and her mother heard heavy pieces of furniture being dragged across the floor of a bedroom at the top of the stairs. The commotion was so strong it literally shook the walls.

  When Jeanette told her husband the story, he laughed that it was old Tobias cavorting around. According to local gossip, “T. G.” was a “lecherous old goat” who chased the cleaning woman all over the house.

  When friends of the Sebeys arrived from Minneapolis to spend the night, they were assigned the haunted bedroom at the top of the stairs. The two couples stayed up late visiting around the fireplace. Suddenly, they heard the scraping of furniture overhead as if heavy chests were being pushed across the bare floor. The guests laughed and congratulated Carl on his skill in rigging a room to sound “exactly like a haunted house.” But they passed the night without any further incident.

  On another occasion, the Sebeys were working in their front yard, burning out the stump of a large elm tree that had blown down the previous year. With a hot fire going, they decided to have a wiener roast and enjoy a picnic supper. The couple had just sat down on the lawn to eat when someone banged on the kitchen door around the corner of the house from where they were. The Sebeys’ dog raised her hackles, barked, and ran toward it.

  Carl started for the rear of the house and met the dog racing back with her tail between her legs. She dived over a grassy bank and hid. Carl saw no one.

  The couple had just settled down again to eat when they again heard the distant knock. As a joke, Carl hollered, “T. G., you old goat, if it’s you, knock twice!”

  There were two knocks.

  Marion Jameson also corresponded with relatives of Tobias Mealey. She shared with them some of the strange incidents in the house. Up until then, the Jamesons always thought that Mr. Mealey’s middle name was Godfrey. But in 1975 his granddaughter wrote and told them that his middle name was Gilmore. She said that maybe all the troubles sprang from the fact that the Jamesons were calling him by the wrong name.

  If the Jamesons would call the old gentleman by his correct name, then he might go in peace and stop bothering them, Tobias’s granddaughter said in her letter. They started calling him by his full name of Tobias Gilmore Mealey.

  At about the same time, the Jamesons jacked up the center of the house and replaced the old horsehair and plaster ceiling in the living room. “The ceiling we tore out is right underneath that bedroom where we had the problems,” Marion observed.

  After that the Jamesons had no more manifestations of any kind.

  Whether it was following the advice in the relative’s letter or co
mpleting the repairs on the house that eventually drove Tobias away is unknown, of course. Maybe he appreciated the dignity of being called by his correct name. Or perhaps he simply wanted the Jamesons to replace the dangerous ceiling and fix the sagging timbers.

  The Phantom Miner

  Crosby

  Fourteen-year-old Frank Hrvatin Jr. would never forget that date—February 5, 1924.

  On that day’s blustery morning, he shivered as he removed his street clothes and climbed into his slicker and waterproof boots in the dry house of the Milford manganese mine. A high water table in the area kept the mines wet most of the time, even in midwinter. Young Frank did not mind; he was glad to be working instead of going to school. He toiled at the 175-foot level, shoveling the dirt that remained after timbermen erected the cribbing in newly opened drifts.

  At the bottom of the two-hundred-foot shaft, Clinton Harris, the skip tender, operated the electric hoist that dumped iron ore from the ore cars into the bucket, or skip, which was then raised to the surface, emptied, and sent back down.

  Two skips were in use, each counterbalancing the other. Harris was substituting that day for Harvey Rice, the regular skip tender, who had called in sick.

  Just after three o’clock that afternoon, a crew of miners blasted a cut near Foley’s Pond, which abutted a portion of the mine. A terrific wind rushed through the mine, knocking down many of the men. Suddenly, the electric lights went out. Someone tripped the circuit breaker, the lights came on briefly, then they went off again. And then on and off again two more times.

  Young Frank Hrvatin was the first to hear the roar of water and to see it spilling down a tunnel.

  “The lake is coming in! The lake is coming in!” he screamed, running for a ladder and some safety.

  Frank spotted old Matt Kangas, a veteran miner, and helped him along. He scampered as hard as he could to keep up with Hrvatin, but by the time he reached the ladder, the old man could barely climb. Hrvatin got behind Kangas, jumped between the old man’s legs, and boosted him up rung by rung.

  The last man up the ladder was soaked to the waist and encased in mud when he staggered to safety. Some of the miners were slammed against the walls of the mine tunnels and crushed to death by the terrific impact of rushing air; others, caught by the wall of water, drowned. In fifteen minutes it was all over. Of the fifty men on the shift, only seven lived.

  Clinton Harris, the skip tender, died at the foot of the shaft. He apparently could have escaped but chose to remain at his post. Standing next to the ladder, Harris pulled on the whistle cord in order to warn miners on the upper levels that water was coming in.

  For four and a half hours, after silt had closed the shaft, the bell he tended rang incessantly. Whether Harris’s body had caught in the rope or whether he had tied it off to himself was never known. Workmen from the engine room finally disconnected the bell, silencing the last voice from deep in the mine.

  The Milford survivors fell exhausted and gasping on the frozen ground, where men from the mine office tended them as best they could. Young Frank Hrvatin stood by the shaft for hours, staring down into the rising black, churning water. Frank Sr. was somewhere below—alive or dead, his son did not know.

  Within minutes word of the disaster was out. The village siren in nearby Crosby blew for hours, as did locomotive whistles, summoning families to the mine. Some residents stood on the shore of Foley’s Pond and watched with horror as the water level went down, the ice on the surface sinking further still as the water beneath poured into the mine. Others gathered silently by the entrance to the shaft, aware but unwilling to admit that those miners who had not escaped were dead. Clusters of new widows eased their pain by linking arms, their bright shawls shielding their heads and faces from the biting wind and thin, sharp flakes of snow.

  By midnight, mine-clearing operations were underway. In the subzero temperature, men took turns operating the giant pumps that sucked out twelve thousand gallons of water and slime each minute. Yet water continued to pour in, filling the small drifts and crossworkings in the tunnels. The Crow Wing County mine inspector said he doubted that most of the bodies would ever be found.

  For a while it seemed he might be right. Pumping crews worked for twelve days to drain Foley’s Pond; it took some three months to drain the mine. Then mud had to be shoveled by hand from the clogged mine drifts before the bodies of the victims could be retrieved. Nine months later the bodies were finally brought out. The Milford mine collapse was the worst disaster to that date on Minnesota’s iron range.

  True to their strong and independent nature, many miners signed up to go back underground when the Milford reopened. Manganese was in great demand by the steel industry and mine owners guaranteed steady work to every man who wanted it. Most did. And, of course, in almost every case, mining was the only job the men of Milford knew.

  But not a miner on the entire Cuyuna Range that opening day was prepared for what they saw in the bowels of the Milford mine. Not only was there the lingering stench of decomposed flesh, but there was also something even more shocking. At the base of the shaft—at the two-hundred-foot level—the men’s carbide lamps shone upon the translucent form of Clinton Harris. The ghost’s bony fingers clutched the side rail of the ladder, its vacant eyes gazing upward. The whistle cord was still knotted around his waist.

  The miners staggered back. Then the phantom whistle screamed through the dark, winding tunnels.

  The terrified men did not look back as they scrambled up the ladder to the surface.

  Not a single one of them ever reentered the Milford mine.

  A House on Summit Avenue

  St. Paul

  Howling shattered the midnight air, trembled in the frozen treetops, and then subsided. Again. And again. A man parted the velvet drapes at his window and peered out. The house next door hulked in darkness, the bone-chilling cries coming from somewhere within. The neighbor called the St. Paul Police Department.

  Patrolman Jerry Dolan and his partner sped to the splendid Romanesque-style mansion on Summit Avenue, a boulevard of grand old homes.

  The officers parked their squad car and ran the spotlight slowly over the red sandstone walls of the darkened house, revealing nothing out of the ordinary. The patrolmen left their car, went to the back door of the house, and knocked. No one answered so they pushed it open. Standing on the threshold, they swept the room with their lights. Two steps led down into a combination utility-laundry room whose ceiling was webbed with clotheslines.

  In a far corner crouched a young man, black hair disheveled and eyes wild with fright. He wore only boxer undershorts. He crossed his arms over his bare chest and shivered uncontrollably.

  The officers leaped toward him. Just then the howling rose again.

  “I could feel my hair stand on end,” Officer Dolan said, recalling that February night.

  A quick search revealed no other occupant in the house, but there was no time for a thorough investigation.

  “I have seen death!” the young man cowering in the corner cried over and over again.

  The patrolmen wrapped him in blankets and rushed to the hospital. The examining physician told the officers the man was in deep shock but showed no signs of being physically injured. Dolan learned later that he was a university student caring for the house in the absence of the owner. The howling and the comments about seeing “death” were never explained.

  Chauncey W. Griggs, a wholesale grocery tycoon, built the mansion in 1883. Its twenty-four rooms are highceilinged and cavernous, the dark woodwork casting an aura of gloom on the sunniest day. Griggs, however, did not stay long in the house. He grew restless in his business and sought greater challenges. After four years, he sold his home and moved to the west coast, where he established lumber and transportation companies.

  Since it was built, the house has been used variously as a private residence and as an apartment house. It once housed an art school. It is reputed to be the most haunted house in St. Paul. At ti
mes it seemed to change hands so often that one observer remarked, “It’s like a hot potato.”

  Over the years, families moved in, spent thousands of dollars on furnishings and the hiring of servants, but left within a year or two. Official records do not disclose the reasons for the rapid turnover. It could have been the enormous expense of maintaining a stone fortress lacking in many twenty-first-century conveniences.

  The tales of the hauntings in the house can be traced to its earliest years. In 1915 a young maid, despondent over a love affair, purportedly hanged herself near the fourth-floor landing. Since her death, the maid’s presence has been strongly felt by many people, including those who know nothing of the history of the house. Visitors have sometimes fallen on the stairs near that top landing, or felt an uneasy sense of foreboding while climbing the staircase. The ghostly maid, however, is not alone. Apparently she shares the house with other apparitions.

  The ghost of a gardener named Charles Wade is believed to return to the house to consult books in the library. When he lived, he kept the grounds in immaculate condition.

  Roma Harris, a St. Paul spiritualist-medium, once visited the house and “saw,” clairvoyantly, a general in a blue uniform with gold trim. Griggs was an officer during the Civil War.

  Roma also felt the shadowy presence of a teenage girl named Amy who had often played the piano in the house. It is unclear whether Amy lived in the house at one time or was a frequent visitor. The psychic said the girl died young.

  “There has been much sorrow here, a lot of suffering,” Roma said.

  Most of the stories lack written documentation but the tales persist. Footsteps resound on empty staircases. Doors mysteriously open and close. Rasping coughs come from behind closed doors of unoccupied rooms. Light bulbs shatter. Heavy drapes rustle when no one is near them.