He could think of no other explanation.
The Midnight Rider
Sand Springs
Before the American Civil War, wagon trains rumbling westward often stopped for the night at a place named Sand Springs, two miles west of Roubidoux Creek, between Rolla and Springfield. Sand Springs was a campground that took its name from a spring of soft lime water that boiled up through the sand and gravel. Near the spring stood a small, abandoned country church where countless freight drivers took shelter at night.
Soon after the Civil War ended, stories circulated that the church was haunted. People said that a phantom horseman rode into the building at midnight. The horse hesitated a moment at the door, then walked slowly down the aisle and stopped at the altar. A whinny was heard, then the dull thud of something striking the floor. Measured hoofbeats retreated up the aisle. At the church door there was a final, chilling human laugh.
Up until the 1930s, when the building was razed, people unsuccessfully went out to Sand Springs late at night trying to locate and follow the ghosts with lanterns and flashlights.
Only a few persons knew the true story of the unearthly drama that was reenacted in the building, a tale of passion, intrigue, and revenge.
In 1848 Wyndham Potter, a wealthy planter from Georgia, settled on a parcel of land near Sand Springs. He had no wife or family, but he brought a large number of slaves with him because Missouri allowed that, including a woman named Jenny and her daughter, Carolyne.
Potter built a handsome house and invited his new neighbors to a housewarming at which Jenny presided as hostess. Her daughter, sixteen-year-old Carolyne, was a slightly built but strong young woman who bore a striking resemblance to Wyndham Potter himself.
Two years later, in 1850, Potter died. He left the house and a trust fund to Jenny and Carolyne, along with their freedom. The rest of his estate, including a small piece of land nearby, went to a nephew, Charles Potter.
Charles soon arrived to take up residence on the land he had inherited. Before long, he began worshipping in the little church near Sand Springs each Sunday with Jenny and Carolyne.
A preacher who was called Elder Maupins often filled the pulpit. He was a formidable figure, nearly six feet tall, strong and muscular with black chin whiskers. He had a gaunt and weary wife and two grown sons. Although most people respected him, few truly liked him. His next-door neighbor, an old woman whom everyone called “Grandmother,” thought Elder Maupins was evil and cruel. As an example, she pointed to the occasion when she saw Maupins shoot and kill his sons’ dog simply because it refused to come to him.
Grandmother soon noticed that Maupins was becoming a regular visitor at Jenny’s home. After others questioned the propriety of such visits, Grandmother herself confronted Maupins. She demanded to know what he was doing in the woman’s home. Saving souls, he told her, as God had chosen him to do.
That explanation satisfied everyone, except Grandmother. Was she the only one who saw the dark looks exchanged between Maupins and Charles Potter in the church? Even Jenny and Carolyne were embarrassed and averted their eyes as Maupins, rising on tiptoe in the pulpit, arms outstretched and trembling, declaimed the evils of sin.
But Elder Maupins was soon taken out of the pulpit when a country preacher was assigned to the Sand Springs church. After that, Maupins seldom attended services.
One day cattle buyers passed through Sand Springs, announcing that horse thieves had raided a neighborhood on the Osage River, escaping with twenty head of mules and horses. A posse raced south after the gang. In the exchange of gunfire one officer was killed and another wounded. Supposedly, the lethal shots were fired by a tall man wearing a high-crowned black hat, a red linsey shirt, and dark pants tucked into his boots; he rode a large sorrel mule. It was an apt description of Maupins and his mule, Judy.
Several days later a detective arrived in Sand Springs to inquire about the ownership of a large sorrel mule. Maupins told his wife he had urgent business in the Boston Mountains. After dark, he fled, taking the mule with him.
At about the same time, Jenny’s daughter, Carolyne, vanished. Jenny was awakened the night before Carolyne’s disappearance by hoofbeats going past the house. The rider was singing a church hymn as he rode. Thinking he was a neighbor returning home, Jenny drifted back to sleep. In the morning, however, she awoke to find her daughter gone, along with many of her clothes.
The grief-stricken mother was certain that slave runners had abducted her and would sell her into slavery.
When the woman known as Grandmother found out, she said she knew better.
“She’s run off with Maupins,” she whispered. “When you find him, you’ll find her.”
Years passed and no word of either Elder Maupins or Carolyne ever reached the community.
The Civil War brought difficult times to the people of Sand Springs as husbands, fathers, and brothers went away to fight, some for the Union, others the Confederacy. Charles Potter himself had joined the Rebels and rode off with the cavalry that very year. Soon the parson of Sand Springs was the only able-bodied man left in the community. The women helped one another as best they could and prayed for the safe return of their men.
Then one Sunday morning in 1863, Elder Maupins showed up and sat in his pew. At the close of the sermon, Maupins leaped to the pulpit. The startled minister stood awkwardly to one side as Maupins announced that his mother had died in the Boston Mountains and he had been busy settling her estate. He said he was shocked to learn of Carolyne’s disappearance, which he attributed to slave traders, and asked the congregation to pray that she might be returned safely to her dear mother.
“And let us pray also,” he concluded, “for a Union victory!”
Grandmother listened attentively. She called him an excellent liar.
During the rest of that year and well into 1864, Elder Maupins stayed in Sand Springs but was often away on long trips to unknown destinations. Charles Potter survived the war and returned home in 1865.
The reason for Maupins’s mysterious trips soon became clear.
Someone in Sand Springs discovered that he had been a member of a bushwhacker gang that raided farms and ranches throughout the Finley Creek hills, spreading death and destruction in their wake. Maupins denied it and viciously denounced the Confederacy. Even staunch Unionists were sickened by his bluster.
The affair took an unexpected turn when Charles Potter sent word to the Sand Springs congregation that on a certain Sunday night when Maupins was preaching, he would ride on his horse down the aisle to the pulpit and by looks alone run the elder out of the church and the community forever.
At the appointed hour, the former Rebel officer, in full-dress gray uniform, mounted his horse and rode to the church. Near the close of the service, Potter rode into the church and made his way slowly down the aisle. He reined his horse to a halt in front of the pulpit. A few people gasped, while others anxiously waited for the fight.
Elder Maupins raised both arms to deliver the benediction.
Charles glared at him.
“May the Lord bless you and keep you . . . ,” intoned Maupins.
Shots rang out from beyond an open window. Young Potter toppled dead from his horse, blood streaming from his head.
The riderless horse stood for a moment, then turned and trotted out of the church.
The horrified worshippers did not move or speak. Elder Maupins sank to his knees and asked that they pray for guidance. He had uttered only a few words before he glanced up the aisle to the church door. Then, like a crazed animal, he leaped to his feet and dived through the window from which the shot had been fired.
While the congregation sat in stunned silence, the deacons covered Potter’s body. It would remain in the custody of two of the minister’s assistants until an inquest could be held the next day.
In the morning, a jury was convened and witnesses were called. But there were no clues and the identity of the murderer could not be learned. However, the jury did
unravel the mystery of Elder Maupins’s hasty exit from the church when the community’s ne’erdo-well testified.
His name was Ginger and he admitted that he had been drunk when he had gotten to the church services and promptly fell asleep in the rear pew.
He was jerked awake by the sound of gunfire. Glancing up, his bleary eyes focused on a black horse with saddle and bridle walking toward him. He thought he was having a nightmare, he said, until he saw Maupins in the pulpit.
Ginger went on to say that after the horse left the church and the elder was kneeling, someone stepped through the door dressed in a man’s shirt, pants, and boots. He said it was not a man but a young, light-skinned black woman. She pointed a finger at Maupins and then unleashed a bloodcurdling laugh. That is when Maupins dived through the window. Ginger added that as the woman turned to leave he noticed a livid scar on the left side of her face and neck. She glanced down at Charles Potter’s body on the floor, then fled.
But still the question remained—who murdered Charles Potter?
Grandmother believed that some of Maupins’s raiders had carried out the ambush. Others said Potter could have been killed by a Union sympathizer living in the region.
Or was the killer Carolyne herself?
On the following Sunday, a search party found Maupins’s body face down in a cedar glade, his throat slit from ear to ear; only a bloody piece of flesh had kept his head attached to his torso. An exquisitely designed Mexican dagger was buried to its hilt between his shoulder blades. It was impossible to tell how long Maupins had been dead. The searchers concluded that after plunging through the church window, he must have made his way along the stream bank and to the glade where his body was discovered. Curiously, there was neither evidence of a struggle nor any footprints near the body.
After Elder Maupins was buried, Jenny told her neighbors she was selling everything and returning to her family in the South. She took only two saddle horses with her.
But why two horses? One would always be rested, she replied. Soon after, she left early one afternoon headed toward Georgia, riding one horse and leading the other.
A few days following Jenny’s departure, a horse trader showed up in Sand Springs. When he heard the story of what had transpired, he said he had passed two black women traveling south on the Wilderness Road. He met them in the Roark Hills, south of the old town of Forsyth. The younger woman was dressed in a man’s clothes and heavily armed.
The horse trader said she had a scar on her face.
The ghost rider of Sand Springs made its appearance not long after Jenny and Carolyne began their journey south and continued on for nearly seventy-five years. The old church finally succumbed to the elements, its few remaining walls razed in the 1930s.
The Ghost of Paris
Paris
Did the village of Paris, Missouri, play host for nearly seventy years to the gruesome specter of a woman in black floating along the community’s streets? Or was the ghost merely an eccentric old lady who rather enjoyed late evening strolls in the fashionable black clothing of a century or more ago, maybe frightening a gullible Parisian or two at the same time?
Although few know of the city’s interesting legend today, earlier generations in that northeast Missouri community passed on the story of this woman in black.
Darcy Ambrose saw the woman first. In the dusk of an October evening, she stood in her front yard calling for her children to come inside. Suddenly, a stranger swept down the street, swathed in black, her wide-brimmed bonnet shielding her face. In her hand she waved a cane. Darcy had never seen the woman before, but she assumed she was a soldier’s wife or mother. The Civil War had just ended and relatives swarmed into Paris to greet their men folk home from the battlefields.
The next night the woman in black returned. Darcy and her husband were sitting on the front stoop, talking. The stranger again brandished her cane as she passed, and the couple shrank into the shadows of their little porch. Then, in the bright moonlight, Darcy could have sworn that the woman’s feet never touched the ground. Although she looked three-dimensional, she told friends the woman herself was not real.
Soon the tavern on the courthouse square buzzed with talk of the ghost. It had an immediate impact on the community’s behavior. Tavern patrons arrived in groups of threes and fours and left the same way. Children, scurrying home from after-supper play, burst into hysterics when the stranger brushed past them; three youngsters said they had heard her long skirts rustling in the wind.
Indian summer lingered that year well into November in that part of Missouri.
So did the ghost.
Frightened residents kept their windows locked, doors bolted, and shades drawn. Travelers abroad at night were wary. In several instances, grown men, meeting the ghost, ran down the middle of the street crying for help. Little else was on the lips of city dwellers but this specter in black. Although the ghost always swung her cane at those she encountered, she never harmed anyone as far as is known.
Even when northwest winds stripped the trees, and the snows came, the woman in black did not leave.
Throughout the winter she glided down the icy streets late at night and sometimes peered into an uncurtained window.
Strangely enough when March arrived, she departed.
During the warm springtime and the long, hot summer of 1866, the people of Paris almost forgot their ghost.
But when the pumpkins ripened in mid-October, she returned and, as before, stayed until spring. No one saw her during the daylight hours. For nearly seventy years the dauntless figure in black roamed the village each winter, frightening everyone who saw her.
Who was she? What did she want?
Si Colborn edited the Monroe County Appeal for nearly sixty years before “retiring” at the age of eighty-two to write editorials and columns. Colborn said in an interview that he heard the story when he came to Paris in 1920. His late partner at the newspaper, Jack Blanton, often told the tale, sometimes with variations.
Occasionally the woman did not seem mortal, for instance. She was alleged to have had a face that glowed in the dark, and she floated rather than walked.
Colburn, however, said the woman might have been a Paris spinster spurned when her betrothed ran off with another woman. The spinster was very tall, nearly six feet, angular, and “formidable.” Having known the woman, Colborn adds, it is obvious why her husband-to-be thought better of the marriage proposal and left town.
There may be some truth to Colborn’s explanation.
The woman was not seen after the mid-1930s, shortly before the real-life spinster’s death at the age of ninety.
But an Associated Press news dispatch in November 1934 identified the woman as a Civil War soldier’s jilted sweetheart who swore on her deathbed to haunt forever her faithless lover and the entire town of Paris.
Whatever the truth of the Paris ghost, the legend that had been passed down for generations disappeared at about that time. Other means of telling ghost stories—radio broadcasts and motion pictures—were growing in popularity, even in rural America where electricity was sporadic at best. Perhaps the newspaper publicity represented the last gasp of interest in the subject. At any rate, the streets of Paris, Missouri, were safe again, and even the most timid citizen—which seemed to be most of them, as no one ever thought to confront the woman in black and ask for her identity—could walk fearlessly into the night.
The Corporal’s Lady
Columbia
Margaret Baker sat in her dormitory room in Senior Hall at Columbia Baptist Female College, staring at the front page of the newspaper until the print blurred before her eyes.
She read the two stories:
Columbia, Mo. Isaac Johnson, a Confederate corporal, was executed in this city yesterday. He was arrested as a spy in a dormitory room of the Columbia Baptist Female College by General Henry Halleck, commander of the Union forces occupying the city. The Rebel had been sought for weeks . . .
Columbia, Mo. Sa
rah June Wheeler, a student at the Columbia Baptist Female College, died yesterday in Senior Hall, the dormitory in which she resided. The body was found in the bell tower by classmates. An investigation into Miss Wheeler’s death has begun . . .
Cold, brutal facts—the kind you see every day in the newspaper. Margaret read no further. She knew the story by heart. The only thing she did not know was that these tragic events would be recounted over the years, the tale embellished until it achieved legendary status. Even today, new students at what is now Stephens College hear about the corporal and his lady. And every Halloween at midnight they wonder if the ghost of the lovely Sarah June once again will visit Senior Hall, searching for her Rebel.
In 1862 the Civil War raged throughout the South, into the border states and beyond. Although Missouri had declared for the Union, General Sterling Price tried to organize a Confederate campaign in the state. Any chance of concerted pro-Southern action ended when he was defeated at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, in March 1862. Yet Missouri remained a state divided where thousands remained Southern sympathizers.
After this decisive Union triumph, General Henry Halleck moved his Union forces into Columbia. The presence of Halleck’s Army of Occupation particularly upset Dr. Hubert Williams, president of the Columbia Baptist Female College, and its dean, Miss Clara Armstrong. The administrators feared for the safety of their young females and reminded them constantly not to call out from their windows to the soldiers in the streets.
One evening after dinner, a student named Sarah June Wheeler who was from Independence, Missouri, dashed up to her room in Senior Hall to get badminton racquets for herself and her roommate, Margaret Baker. Rummaging in the closet for the racquets, Sarah did not see the soldier climbing over the sill of her open window until he staggered toward her.
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