Henry put the bedding back on the bed and crawled in. No sooner had he fallen asleep than he was again awakened to find the covers on the floor. Catherine still lay unmoving, her eyes closed, her long hair spread like a fan across her silk pillow. Henry thought it unlikely that she had kicked off the bedding, unless, of course, she was punishing him for not believing her story of the rocks.
He remade the bed with Catherine in it, taking care this time to tuck in the quilts quite tightly. Now, they could not easily be thrown off.
Eventually, Henry got back to sleep, only to awaken a third time, when his pillow was ripped out from under his head. He found it on the floor. He got up and lit a lantern just as Catherine’s pillow flew out from beneath her head and landed at Henry’s feet. Her head fell back against the mattress and she woke up, screaming.
Henry stared, speechless and powerless to prevent this mayhem. What had jerked the pillows from under their heads? Putting down the lantern, he sat on the edge of the bed and took his wife in his arms.
She looked up at him, sleep still in her eyes, apparently unaware of what had been going on.
“But Henry, why are you up?”
He would not frighten her. “You were restless,” he began. “I thought maybe you were having a nightmare. You . . . you . . . threw your pillow on the floor.” He handed it to her.
“I don’t remember,” she murmured.
“No,” he sighed. “But now it’s very late and we both need sleep.” Henry tucked the covers tightly around his wife, extinguished the lantern, and crawled back into bed.
Daylight could come none too soon, Henry thought as he drifted off to sleep.
The mysterious events of that night recurred and Henry, who was not able to explain them, tried to forget. Yet he always woke up when the bedding and his pillow were jerked from the bed. Catherine, on the other hand, usually slept on. He envied her for that.
Then came the night Henry would never forget. Unable to sleep, he was in bed reading by dim lamplight. Catherine slept soundly beside him. Suddenly, a piece of the bedding rolled back. A handwritten message was scrawled on the underside of the white coverlet:
“These things shall continue forever.”
The handwriting was that of his first wife, Harriet Burchard.
The Curious Visitors
Ste. Genevieve
Night was coming on as Jules Felix Valle lay back against his bed pillows. He was in the process of recuperating from difficult surgery to remove one of his eyes, which he had injured many years before in a boxing match. Jules was surprisingly upbeat about the loss. He thought that he had much to be grateful for.
Along with his wife, Anne-Marie, who was nearly thirty years his junior, Jules lived in one of Ste. Genevieve’s most historic homes—the circa 1806 Creole-French inspired Guibourd House at One North Fourth Street. Jules had retired from business in St. Louis and bought the charming home in 1935. The couple devoted long hours to restoring the interior to its original state, filling the rooms with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiques. The home’s elegant gardens enclosed by century-old brick walls were being returned to their original grandeur. Jules’s roots in the community ran long and deep—he was a descendant of François Vallé, the first civil and military commander of Ste. Genevieve.
On this night, a light breeze coming in through an open window carried the sweet, heavy fragrance of honeysuckle from the verdant gardens.
He was nearly asleep when he felt a tap on his shoulder. Careful not to disturb his bandages, he turned to see what it was his wife wanted.
Instead of seeing Anne-Marie bending down to speak with him, Jules faced three small old men dressed in heavy woolen shirts hovering beside his bed, nodding and smiling at him but not making any sound at all. They looked rather like French voyageurs. And they were floating there because their bodies ended, simply faded away, at their waistlines. He saw right through them and to the wallpaper on the far side of the room.
Jules found that he was not a bit frightened, really only perplexed as to who these incomplete visitors might be and why they were standing next to his bed on that summer night in 1939, about four years after he and Anne-Marie moved into the Guibourd House.
For lack of a sensible answer, he smiled back at them, perfectly willing to accept that they very well might be the ghosts of earlier house tenants come back to pay a visit.
When Jules told his wife the next morning about the three men, the couple suspected that their sudden appearance probably was intertwined somehow with the long and colorful history of their home and that of Ste. Genevieve itself, the oldest town in Missouri.
Creole families from present-day Illinois crossed the Mississippi River in 1750 to establish farms in the rich bottomlands, and a settlement that would become Ste. Genevieve was soon established. In 1763 the Treaty of Paris assigned the territory west of the Mississippi River to Spain. Ste. Genevieve became a reluctant outpost of the Spanish empire. A garrison was established, but regular troops were stationed there only at intervals. Then in 1803, Ste. Genevieve and all of Missouri was acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. In 1812 the village was included as part of the Missouri Territory.
La Maison de Guibourd, or the Guibourd House, dates to about 1806, and perhaps earlier. The belief is that Jacques Dubreuil Guibourd, a native of Angers, France, built it. Guibourd ended up in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) working as a secretary to a wealthy planter. During the slave insurrection there in August 1791, Guibourd was saved from certain death by his valet, Moros, who sealed Guibourd inside a large keg that was then carried on board a ship bound for France.
Guibourd arrived back in Europe only to face the perils arising from the French Revolution. Somehow he made his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, where he met French merchants from the village of Ste. Genevieve who were there to buy supplies. Delighted to find men with whom he could communicate, Guibourd decided to accompany them back to Ste. Genevieve. The records are not clear, but it seems Guibourd (and his valet Moros too, apparently) lost his possessions and what money he had either when his ship to America capsized or they were robbed somewhere on his way to Missouri. At any rate, he arrived in Ste. Genevieve penniless but within a few years was able to regain his fortune enough to build the home that still bears his name, establish a business, and start a family. He loved the little French community from the moment he saw it.
Guibourd married Ursula Barbeau, daughter of the commander at Prairie du Rocher, the French fort across the river, and the sister of Jules Valle’s great-grandfather. The house remained in the Guibourd family until it was sold in 1906 to Clovis Boyer.
Jules and Anne-Marie Valle knew little of the Guibourd or Boyer families. They did recall that two of Guibourd’s descendants had been associated with tragedies in the house. A woman named Miss Victorine, whom everyone called Miss Vickie, died in the bedroom occupied by Anne-Marie. One of Miss Vickie’s brothers, a doctor, committed suicide in the house following a bank failure.
After Jules Valle’s eye operation and the appearance of the three little men, Anne-Marie looked further into the possibility that their house was haunted and invited her friend, who also happened to be a psychic, to visit them. Anne-Marie was intrigued with the house’s long history, the two tragedies associated with it, and Jules’s visitors.
The psychic’s name was Elizabeth Heins. The first order of business, she said, would be to take a walking tour around the property. She concluded that Spanish had been spoken there. The Valles thought it likely as the location of the house made it not inconceivable that Spanish civilians or soldiers might have been quartered there during the town’s brief time under the Spanish flag.
Perhaps the men Jules saw were not French voyageurs at all but Spanish viajeros.
Anne-Marie was not concerned by her husband’s story because she had felt presences throughout the house ever since they moved in. The little men were only the most recent in a long line of eerie
episodes.
For instance, Anne-Marie once employed Dora Williams, a conscientious maid with a delightful personality who soon developed a close bond with Anne-Marie. Dora went quietly about her work each day, and at night returned to her private quarters, which were upstairs in the rear portion of the house; this area had originally been the slave quarters.
Dora passed away unexpectedly. Soon after her death, Anne-Marie heard footfalls overhead and knew instinctively they were Dora’s. She heard them only once, but various other housekeepers who worked in the house in the years to follow noticed them as well.
The Valles owned several dogs over their nearly forty years there. The canines seemed keenly aware that an extra presence might be about. Dusky the Scottish terrier sometimes cowered with fear and whined and scratched to get outdoors. While that may not seem unusual for a dog, Anne-Marie found it to be out of character for this terrier, normally not afraid of anything or anyone. She thought maybe he encountered the home’s animal spirits.
Then there was a dog they owned called Jamie, a playful collie who acted as if he were seeing another dog in the house. That happened as he stood at the living room door and growled softly, as he always did when strange dogs got too close. Yet his tail hung straight down, wagging slowly to signal friendship.
There may have been a reason for the collie’s behavior. Before acquiring Jamie, Anne-Marie owned another collie called Peter, who died of old age. She thought it might be his ghost that Jamie saw. The idea was bolstered because a family friend who had been extremely fond of Peter was a house-guest not long after the dog died. Jamie first behaved strangely when the guest visited that time. Anne-Marie thought that Jamie was seeing the ghost of Peter, who had come back, she thought, to say hello.
Despite all that went on during the Valles’ tenancy, Anne-Marie was never truly frightened until one early March night in 1949. Jules had died of a heart ailment at the age of sixty-six two months earlier. Anne-Marie was living in the house alone. On that March night, she was jolted out of bed by loud banging and crashing coming from Jules’s old bedroom. It was as if heavy furniture was being picked up and heaved against the walls; the whole house shook under the impact. Then Anne-Marie heard what seemed to be buckets of glass being poured on the polished bare wooden floor of his bedroom. She thought surely every lamp and picture had been smashed yet knew instinctively that was not possible.
“Listen to me, whoever or whatever you are!” Anne-Marie called out, pulling the blankets up to her chin. “You are not going to frighten me! You are not going to drive me from my home! Now, get out!”
The commotion stopped, and she went back to sleep. The fresh day brought great relief. The bedroom furnishings were all intact; not one piece had been moved. A quick search showed nothing in the house had been disturbed.
What had Anne-Marie Valle heard?
Poltergeists were intending to take over the house. She always maintained that if she had succumbed to fear, they would have done just that.
Anne-Marie Valle lived in the house until her own death in 1971. Jules left his entire estate to her. She is said to have never been happy in Ste. Genevieve, but the terms of her wealthy husband’s will required that she remain in her adopted town.
After Anne-Marie’s death, the house was donated to the Foundation for Restoration of Ste. Genevieve to be turned into a museum, which it has been for nearly fifty years.
But the uncanny at the Jacques Guibourd Historic House, as it is now known, did not end with Mrs. Valle’s death.
Kristine Basler, a Ste. Genevieve native, was a manager at the house about a decade later. Although Basler did not live in the house, the ghosts that frequented Jules and Anne-Marie Valle let her know they were still around in the most unusual circumstances.
On an especially cold December afternoon, Basler was in the cellar fleshing deer hides. To flesh a hide is to clean it of all remaining flesh; it is done on what’s called a fleshing beam. She was working on hides that would then be made into buckskin worn by some of the reenactors at the Jour de Fête, a celebration held the second full weekend of August each year to commemorate the early French settlement days.
Basler had just finished cleaning her fifth hide when she heard music coming from upstairs—a classical baroque tune played on what sounded like a piano or a harpsichord.
The same piece was played over and over several times. Basler said it was like a child practicing for a recital.
She got up and walked toward the front of the house, but the music stopped abruptly. Basler resumed her work.
Suddenly, a man’s voice shouted, “Hey!”
This time Basler dashed upstairs, looked around, and took a quick peek out the front window toward the street. She confirmed that no one else was in the house or outside nearby.
Everything was in order. The sidewalks and streets were empty. Later she learned that the Boyer family who owned the house before the Valles were musical, and the mother was said to be a pianist.
About a year later, Basler moved into the two-story rear portion of the house that was originally the slaves’ quarters. After she was settled in, she acquired an original RCA Victrola that turned on and off by itself while the heavy discs spun faster and faster when she attempted to play them. The vibrations shook even a nearby box of the heavy records. The phenomenon generally stopped as abruptly as it had started.
Anne-Marie Valle had owned a Victrola at one time.
Basler said that at certain times and in certain places she believed the house gave off “bad vibes.” She felt ill at ease in Jules’s bedroom; if it was after dark she did not go in at all. She knew that some thought there might be poltergeists, so she had never slept in Anne-Marie’s bed. She tried sleeping in the attic, which had housed the former slave and maid’s quarters, but she scrambled back down into her own bed a couple of hours into the experiment because she felt too uncomfortable there.
Like many houses alleged to be haunted, the Guibourd House also displayed electrical problems.
One night a bulb in the dining room chandelier blinked off while Basler was sitting in the room. Thinking the bulb was loose, she got up to tighten it. Before she even touched the bulb, it lit up and the bulb next to it went out.
Sometimes an illuminated light seemed to quickly blink somewhere just out of her range of sight. Yet she is not entirely certain it was just a light flickering.
“It was more like a shadow passing by,” she said. Much the same might be said of all the ghosts at the Guibourd House.
Nebraska
Miss Anna
Hastings
Hastings, Nebraska, is a pleasant city of some twenty-five thousand residents. Within its city limits, one finds Hastings College, some half-dozen tree-shaded parks, the site of the Adams County Fair, and the Hastings Museum, noteworthy for a fine natural history collection, frontier memorabilia, and a small planetarium. The town is situated in the south-central part of the state, about twenty miles south of Interstate 80.
The people of Hastings are not given to pretension or hyperbole, thus their belief in events of an alleged supernatural origin is not intense, if it is there at all.
The story of Burton Nelson, a lifelong resident of Hastings who described himself as the “fairly stable” father of four sons, is even more remarkable because of this general local skepticism. He may have been the only man in Hastings to have seen a ghost and been willing to talk about it.
One day in 1962, Burton Nelson awoke in the early morning hours to a thunderstorm. His wife slept next to him. He was surprised to see a woman standing in their room next to their infant’s crib. She was turned away from him and yet he could see she was patting the baby’s back.
She was quite distinct with a “white misty form.” Just like a real person. Except for one thing. Nelson could see right through her to the wall behind.
She turned her head toward him and smiled. He smiled back.
Nelson was not afraid. When the woman looked at him, her wan smil
e somehow made him understand that she was not there to harm anyone.
And then most extraordinarily of all, this sad woman seemed to start communicating with Nelson but not in an audible way. It was like he could read her thoughts.
It was in this way that Burton learned she had lived in this very house during the 1930s and loved babies, but she herself had never married. Her greatest regret was not having any children of her own. Her name was Anna C. Peterson and she had worked at Mary Lanning Hospital in Hastings.
“It never entered my mind to be scared or to wake up my wife next to me, that’s the crazy part of it,” said Nelson.
“She was a quiet, private, lonely woman who loved babies,” he said, and that was all he learned about Miss Anna, as he called her, though he got the feeling she had either taken her own life or died in less than happy circumstances.
She was a “nice-looking lady,” Nelson thought, probably in her late thirties or early forties. She was of medium height with a stocky build but not overweight. Her brown hair was done up in a bun. She had on a green uniform with dark stockings and heavy, black, oxford-type shoes.
“She smiled and seemed to radiate kindness and love,” said Nelson. “I felt comfortable with her. In fact I thought that if anything was ever to go wrong in that house she would be the first to tell me.”
But the ghost never actually said a single word, nor did Burton Nelson initiate a conversation of any sort.
The next morning, Nelson thought it had all been some sort of weird dream and told his wife all about it. The more they hashed over the details—and there were many—the more they realized it was not a dream. He recalled a passing car on the rain-slicked street, for instance, and the ticking of an alarm clock.
Nelson decided to keep a pencil and paper in the kitchen to record the event should Miss Anna show up again. He would be certain he was not dreaming, as he would have to walk through the living room and into the kitchen to get to his writing material.
Haunted Heartland Page 27
