Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  He did not have to wait long.

  No more than a week after her first visit, something woke up Nelson at about the same hour of the morning. It was raining outside. Miss Anna was standing by the crib, once again stroking the baby’s back.

  The baby had been restless earlier in the evening.

  “It was obvious to me that she was trying to soothe him back to sleep,” Nelson said.

  He climbed out of bed and went to the kitchen table to write in his journal all that was happening and how he felt about it. When he got back to the bedroom, Miss Anna was gone, and the baby was sleeping soundly.

  Burton Nelson never saw Miss Anna again, but his quest to discover her identity had just begun.

  The Nelson family moved to another house shortly after Miss Anna’s final appearance. Burton Nelson pushed the incidents to the back of his mind for several years, but he could not help wondering if there was any connection between the woman who had “identified” herself as Anna C. Peterson and an actual woman who may have lived, and perhaps died, in Hastings, maybe even in the very house to which she seemed attached.

  Nelson decided to start a search for her at the Adams County Historical Society. He told the librarians he was doing family research because he thought they might be suspicious of someone looking up a ghost’s lineage.

  He began by scanning city directories for her name, beginning with those from the early twentieth century. His efforts were soon rewarded.

  He found an Anna C. Peterson listed in a 1930s city directory. She had lived in the Nelsons’ former house between the years of 1935 and 1937, though it is possible she had lived there longer, as city directories were only published every two years in that era. The information he could find on her was spotty. She changed addresses several times. Nelson did not find a telephone listing for her, indicating perhaps that she rented rooms and shared a telephone with others.

  During the 1920s, Anna’s occupations were listed variously as a store clerk, laundress, and finally a mangle operator at the Mary Lanning Hospital laundry. A mangle is the machine commercial launderers use to press clothes after they have been cleaned.

  Nelson could not find any trace of Anna in city records after 1939 nor could he locate an obituary for her. He looked through city cemetery records but found no grave listed. He assumes she may have been from another small town in Nebraska and, if she had died in Hastings, might have been buried in her hometown.

  Nelson went to the Mary Lanning Hospital personnel office to inquire about employment records dating to the 1920s and 1930s only to be told they had been thrown out years before. However, Nelson was in for a stroke of luck when he was told of a retired hospital employee who had worked at Mary Lanning during the years Anna Peterson had been employed there.

  “She remembered Miss Peterson quite well,” said Burton Nelson. “Anna was a quiet, shy, reserved person who worked right alongside this retired employee.”

  The retired laundry woman described Anna in almost the same detail as Nelson had seen her on those late-night visits, right down to the green uniform, dark stockings, and black shoes. Her hair was long but she kept it up in a bun for safety around the laundry room machinery.

  Nelson then asked if the retired hospital worker remembered when Anna died.

  The woman thought it had been in the late 1930s when she was still fairly young, but no one seemed to want to talk about it, she told Nelson.

  “Something was not quite right, but yet she couldn’t tell me exactly what,” said Nelson. “I asked if she might have taken her own life, but she said she couldn’t really say for sure. I got the feeling she knew more than she was ever going to tell me.”

  The old lady told Nelson that the thought of Anna C. Peterson dying young and childless still made her sad.

  Where Miss Anna came from, and where she died, remains a mystery. Apparently she never married, or at least there is no record of her taking a husband. It was obvious to Nelson that she had affection for babies. Today Miss Anna might well have become a single parent by adopting a child. In the 1930s, of course, that would have been virtually unheard of for an unmarried woman who would have been considered a spinster without prospects after she reached a certain age.

  Why did Miss Anna’s ghost linger in the Nelsons’ home? Could her affection for their baby have hinted about something in her past, perhaps the detail her former coworker held back when she talked about Anna’s life? Could she have become pregnant out of wedlock? No man wanted to call her his wife, but that would not have stopped someone from taking advantage of a trusting and genial disposition. If someone did father her baby, then what? There is no record of her ever having married. Did she move far away and have the child? Did she, or her baby, die in childbirth? Did something else happen to baby and mother? Or was it simply her unfulfilled desire for children that brought her back to her old home?

  This woman who led such a seemingly simple life left many complicated questions unanswered.

  Terror of Omaha Heights

  Omaha

  Irish coffee laced with gossip. That is what an invitation from Bridget O’Hanlon always implied, and Henrietta Hale was looking forward to a pleasant afternoon with her friend. She had no way of knowing how terrifying the visit would turn out to be.

  Dried leaves crackled underfoot and the wind tugged at her shawl as Henrietta hurried along the streets of Omaha Heights on that November day. Bridget saw her friend coming down the street and threw open the door.

  “Sure, and begorra, Henny, you’re looking fit! Do come in!” Bridget said, helping Henrietta with her shawl and bonnet. Then Bridget added abruptly, “Now I’ve got some work to finish, but I won’t be long.” With that she turned and slipped back up the staircase.

  Henrietta knew Bridget as well-meaning but distracted, often leaving her guests to fend for themselves for an hour or more while she finished a chore in another part of the house. Casual acquaintances thought her rude, but Henrietta and her other close friends learned to be tolerant of her eccentric, sometimes disconcerting ways.

  Henrietta went directly to the sitting room at the rear of the house and settled into a Morris chair by the windows. No sooner had she sat down than she heard a knock at the front door. Was another visitor expected? Bridget had not mentioned it.

  She listened a moment for Bridget’s steps on the stairs. When she did not hear her friend coming down, she went to the door herself. No one was there. She closed the door, but before she could lift her hand from the knob, the knocking outside came again, more insistent than before. Henrietta opened it a second time.

  She looked up and down the street, which, at this hour, was deserted. Unable to account for the sounds, she shut the door and returned to the sitting room.

  A moment later, the pounding on the front door shook the walls of the house.

  Quite upset by now with these nonsensical interruptions, Henrietta bolted from the chair and peered cautiously around the doorjamb before stepping into the hallway. This time the front door stood wide open; a few leaves even had blown in and lay on the carpet. At the same time, she heard heavy footsteps behind her coming from the sitting room where she had just been. When she turned to close the front door, it slammed shut on its own.

  Then the cacophony began—footfalls seemed to reverberate from nearly every room, the front parlor, the kitchen, the bedrooms. Everywhere there were the sounds of tramping feet. The dining room chairs rose and crashed against the walls, and agonizing groans and cries rose from the cellar under the kitchen.

  Henrietta Hale stood trembling in the hallway.

  Portraits in heavy frames on the wall opposite her fell to the floor, spraying shards of glass into the air. Terrified, fearing the imminent collapse of the house, she screamed and fled out the back door. She hiked up her long skirts and ran for her life. Fiendish yells from inside the house followed her as she raced down the street and to the safety of her own home.

  That evening Bridget O’Hanlon and her husband, Jo
hn, called on Henrietta. Bridget carried a pot of Irish coffee and her apologies to her friend.

  She confessed that she, too, heard the commotion that afternoon but had been too frightened to come downstairs. And when the walls started to shake, she had hidden under the bed until her husband got home. Henrietta was none too pleased to have been abandoned to fend for herself.

  John O’Hanlon apologized and picked up the events then and said he knew the source of the terrifying ordeal Henrietta had gone through.

  Five years earlier, when repairs were being made on the house, a human skeleton was discovered in the cellar. It was suspected that a peddler had been murdered, his remains dumped in a makeshift grave beneath the kitchen. Shortly after the body was found, the household disturbances began. Few families remained long in the house.

  When the O’Hanlons bought the house, John hired Eddie Warner, a painter, to do some redecorating. Warner worked half a day, and then quit because of the strange noises. His successor, Frank Hitchcock, did not stay much longer than a day.

  Bridget said she and John would be moving out of the house the next day. Although they had heard raps on the front door and footsteps on the stairs now and then, recent events like that which had transpired that afternoon had become more terrifying.

  John and Bridget O’Hanlon invited Henrietta Hale back for a farewell cup of Irish coffee the next day, but she had scarcely recovered from her ordeal.

  She sent her regrets.

  Beware the Soddy

  Phelps County

  Late one summer evening, two farmers were heading home from a board meeting at Phelps Center. Both men had spent the daylight hours cultivating corn on their own farms, and now they nursed their weariness in silence on the rough wagon seat. The owner of the wagon had left his double-shovel plow in the wagon box. It clattered from side to side as the wagon bounced over ruts along the trail.

  On a lonely lane half a mile south of the present-day village of Funk, an empty sod house on an abandoned farm sat forlornly by the side of the road. Its owner had been driven out by the devastating grasshopper plague of 1874. As the men’s farm wagon crawled past the empty farmstead, the two farmers thought they heard screams coming from within the soddy. Their hair stood on end.

  Their two horses spooked, then snapped their traces and bolted. The wagon ripped loose and flew at an angle so fast that the wheels nearly tore from the axles. The men were hurled into a field but were able to get up and limp home. The horses had beaten them there and paced nervously outside the barn.

  In the morning, neighbors found the wagon in a ditch with the rear wheels crushed. The plow was located behind the soddy. The two farmers never could explain the weird cries or their harrowing experience, but the no-nonsense people of the area did not question their story. They knew the farmers were not given to wild tales.

  As word of the haunted soddy spread—and few doubted that this was what the men had encountered—no one traveled that lane again after dark. Even during daylight hours people usually took another route to avoid it.

  Nothing much else happened until a few years later when a bachelor named Larson rented the abandoned farm and moved into the soddy. A pleasant man with a ready smile and a firm handshake, he made friends quickly. Neighbors warned Larson that the soddy was haunted.

  “I can live with ghosts,” Larson chuckled. “They might even be welcome companions on long winter evenings.”

  Larson worked the farm with diligence, planting, cultivating, and harvesting each crop in its time. He ignored the stories of the haunted soddy and got to work fixing up the place. He replaced the rotted leather hinges on the door, squared the rough window frames, and sealed up cracks in the earthen blocks. The rhythm of the seasons ordered Larson’s life in a calm and predictable fashion. He was making that old soddy into a real nice home.

  Then one summer night he had the strangest dream.

  He was running across a barren expanse of prairie, a herd of wild mustangs thundering after him. There was no tree to climb, no shack to duck into. He screamed, but only the wind answered. Just before the horses caught up to him he caught his boot in a prairie dog hole and fell. He was certain the weight of the wild animals would crush him.

  At that moment, Larson awoke in a cold sweat in his own bed. He could not recall a nightmare more vivid or frightening; he felt absolutely paralyzed. Sitting up on the edge of his bed, he rubbed life back into his arms and legs.

  But at that moment, he heard the galloping horses again, only this time they seemed directly outside, thundering toward the soddy. His nightmare had come to life. The walls and floor vibrated as the beasts whinnied and circled.

  Larson, steadying himself on tables and chairs, carefully made his way to the door and cracked it open. A full moon hung in the sky and a soft breeze murmured in the cottonwoods. He stepped cautiously out onto the grass stubble.

  There were no horses outside the soddy, no hoofprints.

  Larson wondered if he was losing his mind. How could he have imagined something so very vivid?

  The next night he stayed up, drinking coffee and pacing the floor—waiting for the horses. Again they came. He could not see them, but he heard them stomping around the soddy. Again he cracked open the door before opening it fully. There was nothing in sight to account for the commotion.

  Night after night the horses returned. Night after night Larson woke at their noisy arrival. Bur then a new sound filled the house, a low cooing like that of mourning doves. He never heard it in the daytime, only at night when he tried to sleep. It almost sounded like it was coming from within the earthen walls. And so he rapped and he probed but he found the walls solid and still no apparent source for any of the racket now nearly overwhelming his sensibilities.

  A night’s sleep was becoming impossible. A new dimension was added to the tumult. At night he would wake up to find all his bedding piled up on the floor; during the day doors between rooms were thrown open and banged shut by something unseen. Larson’s eyes grew puffy from sleeplessness and he jumped whenever a bird sang in the treetop. He was neglecting his crops and animals. His neighbors meeting him in the village noted the change that had come over him. Is there anything wrong? they inquired. He shook his head.

  By the start of the next planting season Larson had fled. Weeds and shrubs took over the fields behind the soddy.

  The next—and last—tenant was also a bachelor. His name was Nels, a giant of a man afraid of neither men nor beasts, real or imagined. He liked nothing better than to sit in the gathering dusk and play his violin after a long day of fieldwork. When he first moved in, a couple of neighbors stopped by to warn him of what happened to farmer Larson and the weird goings-on in and around the soddy. Nels listened attentively and snapped his red suspenders.

  “We drink!” he said with a grin as wide as the Platte River. Sitting in the sun of the open doorway, the three men drank and discussed the crops and the weather.

  Before the visitors went home, they knew that once again they had a fine new friend living in the soddy. They hoped Nels would stay and prosper.

  Like his predecessor, Nels worked the farm with care and made more improvements in the house. Things went well for the first few months. Then one night, just before crawling into bed, Nels glanced out a window. He caught his breath, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. A huge fire burned in the barnyard, the flames leaping higher than the tallest cottonwood.

  Nels felt his stomach tighten and pain shoot down his spine. The barn would go up in flames and with it his stock—a few cows, the team of oxen, and a horse. Then he saw that the flames had not yet reached the front of the barn. Maybe he could get to the barn door and save the horse at least.

  He dashed out, his nightshirt flapping in the cool night air, and with both hands he pulled open the heavy barn door. There was no heat from flames; no acrid smoke filled his nostrils. The flames he saw did not crackle.

  There was no fire.

  Cows, oxen, horse slept contentedly.
Nels sagged against the door as he looked around. There was no sign of a fire anywhere.

  His eye caught the glitter of a gold piece in the dirt. Where did that come from? What good fortune! He bent over to pick it up, then saw it was nothing but an old, rusted, two-cent piece. He took it back to the house anyway.

  Nels brewed a fresh pot of coffee and sat up the remainder of the night pondering the significance of the phenomenon he had witnessed.

  He had seen the fire with his own eyes, but how had it disappeared? Why had it not scorched the earth and the barn siding? Perhaps it was not a fire. But then, what was it?

  Finally, exhausted and without answers, he eased back into bed and fell asleep.

  The mysterious fires continued to erupt every week or two, lighting up the night sky. And each time Nels rushed outside, the flames vanished before his eyes.

  Late on a November night, when hoarfrost powdered the corn stubble and winds tore the last fluttering leaves from the trees, Nels became even more apprehensive.

  Normally an easy-going, relaxed man, he realized how much he had changed since the fires started. Now there was something new welling up inside him, a feeling he had never felt before, a feeling that seemed against his very nature—the feeling of dread. Nels was lightheaded, and his hands trembled. He decided he was getting sick and went to bed early for several nights in a row.

  Early one morning, he was jarred awake by violin music, wild and savage notes pouring out of the corners and walls. Nels struggled out of bed and lit a lantern. On the floor against the far wall his violin stood upright, the bow moving deftly and expertly by itself over the strings.

  He started to walk over to it, but a force of some kind held him back. It was as if he were pushing against a solid wall to cross his very own living room.

  Dropping onto the edge of the bed, Nels swung his head down between his knees to keep from fainting. The playing continued, swinging from one tune into the next.