Nels did not remember going back to sleep. The last piece he recalled hearing was “The Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim,” a song written in 1871 and popular with Great Plains settlers.
At dawn, Nels stretched himself awake and laughed heartily at his nightmare of the previous evening. It had seemed so real, like the nightmares he used to have as a child.
He got up to make his coffee but stopped short.
His beautiful violin lay on the floor in the same spot where he last remembered seeing it played.
The instrument’s case stood open in the corner. Nels felt sick to his stomach. It had not been a nightmare after all.
He put the violin away and locked the case. Then he threaded the key onto a thin piece of leather and draped it around his neck. Now nothing could get at the instrument without breaking the lock or smashing the case.
Or so he thought.
Nels was again awakened that very night by the chilling music. He groped for the metal key on his improvised necklace. It was there, still secure. He knew then that whatever was plaguing him had smashed the case to get at the fiddle.
At dawn’s first light, Nels found the violin on the floor. But the case was locked and showed no signs of having been tampered with.
Nels moved out that afternoon. Before he left, he told his neighbors what had happened to him. They all believed him and wished him well.
The soddy and the farmstead were abandoned and fell into ruin.
The Bates House
Dakota City
It was past midnight on that fall evening in 1879 when Benjamin Brill drove his gig toward Dakota City. As he passed the abandoned Bates House Hotel, he saw a glow in a second-story window. Strange, he thought. That place had not been used in many years. Bats and owls were its only tenants.
Brill stopped. As he gazed at the odd light, it wavered and moved from room to room, each window alternating bright and dark as it passed. Its bluish cast was unlike any light the man had ever seen.
He got out of his carriage, picked his way through the brush, and pushed open the heavy front door.
He called out, “Hello!”
Silence.
Again he tried to rouse someone inside. “Hello! Anyone here?”
A staircase loomed before him, its treads broken, and the banister cracked and hanging askew. Once the Bates House had been the pride of Nebraska Territory, the place where the United States District Court met each spring and fall. But time and vandals had erased all evidence of its early grandeur.
Brill shoved bullets into his revolver just to be on the safe side. Then, looking anxiously around him, he carefully picked his way up the staircase. In the hall at the end of the landing burned the ball of blue light he had seen through the window.
From somewhere else arose distant piano music—like sad notes in a minor key. Brill stopped to listen. There was something chilling, otherworldly about it. Like a sudden cold wind, it came from nowhere and yet everywhere and settled into his very bones.
At that moment, a being—for that is the only way he could describe it—swathed in a flowing, white robe crossed the landing. It carried a lamp.
Brill felt his scalp prickle. At first, he thought it was a real person. But then standing at the head of the landing, he watched it sweep in and out of every room on that top floor.
It seemed to be searching for something, moving in rhythm with the sad piano music. Brill, more fascinated than fearful, called to the figure. But it brushed past him, unseeing, intent solely on its own perplexing mission.
The figure slipped into a room near Brill, glided across the floor, and hovered in a corner. Meanwhile in the hallway, the blue light Brill had seen once again appeared, bouncing like a rubber ball up and down the corridor. Each time it reached a point a few feet above the floor, it emitted a sort of wail. Then as if by prearranged signal, the robed person in the room kneeled, then sank prostrate to the floor. The light paused at the doorway, wailing and trembling in the air.
Benjamin Brill stood against the opposite wall. He pulled the revolver from its holster, his finger closing on the trigger.
As the light in the doorway floated into the room, Brill followed and peered around the doorjamb. The ball of light changed into a slender taper. As he watched, it materialized into a being identical in every way to the other, also clothed in a long, white garment. The one who had been prostrate on the floor rose and the two stood side by side. They swept out of the room, past a startled Brill, and on down the hallway.
At the far end of the hall, both figures this time sank to the floor and chanted. The hairs on Brill’s neck bristled. When he saw them rise and head down the dark end of the hallway, he turned to follow. But it was too late. They had vanished. He staggered outside.
Benjamin Brill sat in his rig, gazing blankly up at the hotel, a derelict hulk limned by moonlight. He heard no sound from anywhere, not even the whisper of wind in the trees as he snapped the whip and was off. The strange blue orb throbbed behind a sagging windowpane, until it too was gone.
A Strange Interlude
Lincoln
On October 3, 1963, a secretary at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln who had lived an entirely uneventful life experienced one of the most intriguing cases of psychic phenomena ever reported on a college campus.
Colleen Buterbaugh opened a door and stepped back in time. Although for only less than a minute, she saw the campus as it had looked decades before.
The event transformed her from a peppy, lively, and outgoing wife and mother into a much more somber person, those who knew her said, one who never fully recovered from the ordeal of her experience.
On a bright October morning just before nine o’clock, Colleen Buterbaugh, a secretary to the dean, got up from her desk in Old Main clutching a fistful of telephone messages she had accumulated since the previous day. As was her daily routine this semester, she was to deliver the notes to Dr. Thomas McCourt, a popular and engaging Scottish visiting music professor who was spending the fall on campus. The notes Buterbaugh held were from students asking for appointments, or campus and community groups seeking a dynamic guest speaker about a range of topics from Scottish history to contemporary music.
Classes were changing as Buterbaugh headed for C. C. White Memorial Hall, which housed the fine arts departments, including the school’s music department. Once in the building, she went up the half flight of steps to the main floor that held the music office. As with many old college buildings constructed at the turn of the twentieth century, White’s first floor was actually several feet above ground level. Another half flight of steps led to a lower level. The wide staircase itself wound the entire height of the three-story building.
Colleen threaded her way through the throng of noisy students as she headed down the hall toward the music office, a two-room complex in the northeast corner of the main floor; music faculty had mailboxes in the outer office. Dr. McCourt had been assigned a desk in an inner workroom that also held a small music library. Along the hall she listened to the pleasant and familiar hubbub—a percussionist beat out a simple marimba melody, several piano students practiced various exercises, and some vocal students worked on their scales. She smiled at the happy sounds, all normal sounds of another weekday morning in the music department.
Colleen Buterbaugh did not expect to find Professor McCourt at his desk. In fact she found that he was rarely at his desk, preferring to linger in the classroom counseling students or scheduling meetings for those who wanted some of his time. By all accounts, Dr. McCourt was a born entertainer in great demand for his knowledgeable lectures. So busy was he that the campus telephone operator directed those trying to find him to Colleen’s desk in the dean’s office.
A few minutes before nine, Buterbaugh pushed open the door leading into the music office.
She very nearly fainted.
A pungent, musky odor swept up her nostrils, one that she instantly recognized as coming from something very, very old. She s
hivered at the suddenly cooled air, which hit her as hard as a blast of icy air through an open window on a winter’s day.
And there was silence. Absolute and total silence. It was as if she had been struck deaf.
Gone were the noisy students chattering away on the other side of the door.
Gone, too, were the sounds of the marimba and the pianos and the operatic voices she had been listening to as she opened the door.
It was a stillness so disorienting in its completeness that every reminder of what she had seen and heard outside the office door had been erased.
Within seconds, Colleen Buterbaugh had her world turned upside down.
Battling against the sharp odor and rattling cold, Buterbaugh struggled to keep her balance. She reached out to steady herself on a wooden counter directly inside the door, wondering how this, her daily routine, this simple errand of taking messages to the music office was now turning into something . . . well, into something very peculiar.
The furnishings were all familiar but the atmosphere was unlike anything she had encountered—the searing cold and musty odor, but also the sense that time itself had slowed down, that she was watching a scene from long ago play out before her eyes.
As she glanced around, her attention was drawn through a connecting doorway and into the inner office. At the back of the room, Buterbaugh saw a tall, dark-haired woman of indeterminate age. She was in the act of reaching up to a shelf, riffling through what appeared at this distance to be music scores. She had not turned at Buterbaugh’s entrance, nor did she acknowledge her in any way. She assiduously continued on with her search for whatever it was that she was looking for.
Buterbaugh could not see the woman’s face, as her back was turned toward the connecting door. However, Butterbaugh did think her dress oddly out of date—a white shirtwaist blouse with lace at the collars and cuffs. A dark-brown skirt reached nearly to the floor. Her heavy head of dark hair was done up in a tight bun in back with smaller buns over each ear.
Buterbaugh knew one thing for certain—she had never seen her before.
In those same few seconds that she stared at the woman, Buterbaugh had the impression that suddenly there was someone there with her in the outer office, a man perhaps, and he was sitting at the desk to her left. The problem was that there was no one at all in the chair.
A window overlooking the campus drew Colleen across the room. Perhaps she should not have, for the view of the outside world was not at all what it should have been. The main campus artery of Madison Street was there as it had been since the school’s founding in 1887, but she was looking at an avenue of packed earth and not the paved street laid decades before. The newly built Willard sorority house was not in view, as it should have been. She should also have seen a corner of Lucas Library—constructed from 1921 to 1923—but it was not there either.
The tall, graceful trees were barely visible through the window. Instead, she saw young saplings that looked recently planted.
Strangest of all was that despite its being a warm October morning, Buterbaugh had the feeling that what she saw outside the windows was from a midsummer day on which a visitor would find the peaceful slumber of a small college campus.
And then it was gone.
All of it. The woman at the bookshelf vanished, the view out the window returned to normal. The musty smell of old, cold things evaporated.
Gradually the muffled chatter of students rushing to class outside the door returned, as did the marimba music and piano playing. Somewhere a soprano hit a high C.
Colleen rushed from the room and back into the familiar hallway. It was if no time had passed at all.
Bewildered. Confused. Frightened.
Colleen Buterbaugh felt all of these emotions as she quickly retraced her steps back to Dean Sam Dahl’s office in Old Main. That is when Karen Norton Cook, the alumni office director, saw her returning to the building. The two women were well acquainted with one another.
Cook knew something was wrong as soon as she saw her friend.
“I wondered what was wrong with her because she was as white as a sheet. She looked like she’d seen a ghost,” Cook recalled, adding that she appeared to be “lost in her own thoughts.”
Cook did not speak to her and finished her errands before returning to her office. She did not realize how perceptive she had been in identifying the cause of her friend’s odd behavior. But Cook soon pieced together Buterbaugh’s story.
Shortly after Cook saw her, Colleen Buterbaugh was back at her desk in Dean Dahl’s office. She tried to type but ended up just shuffling papers and trying to figure out what had happened to her.
According to Cook, it did not take Colleen long to tell Dean Dahl about her experience.
“He wanted to know what was wrong with her,” said Cook. “She said she would tell him if he promised not to laugh.”
In a voice Dean Dahl later described as agitated, Colleen recounted her experience of only minutes before.
Roger Cognard, a retired professor of English who made a careful study of the Colleen Buterbaugh incident, described the dean as “a nice, gentlemanly, kind person, not given to flights of fancy.” Cognard explained, “He supported her story since he knew her to be a woman of calmness and reason. He had no particular reason to doubt her.”
The dean and his secretary returned to the music office to see if they could unravel the mystery. However, in the hallway they passed E. Glen Callen, a 1919 graduate of Nebraska Wesleyan who at the time was nearing the end of his career as a professor of political science and sociology.
Dahl and Buterbaugh told him the story. Callen did not flinch. He said the secretary’s description of the apparition neatly fit that of Clara Urania Mills, a professor of choral music who was on the faculty from about 1912 until her death.
The circumstances of Professor Mills’s death reflect a dedication to teaching not atypical on smaller college campuses. On April 12, 1943, Mills had struggled to campus from her apartment a few blocks away as a late-winter blizzard buffeted Lincoln. Later campus historians speculate that she was somewhat behind schedule and did not want to be late for her class in music composition. She went to her office in C. C. White Hall, sat down in a chair, took off her hat and scarf, and crumpled to the floor, dead of a heart attack while still in her sixties. She had taught on campus for over thirty years. Her office was only a few feet down the hall from the room in which Colleen Buterbaugh saw the mystery woman twenty years later.
Following the chance encounter with Dr. Callen, and a possible identification of the ghost, Colleen went to the alumni office and told her story to Karen Cook. She asked if the office might have a picture of Clara Urania Mills.
Cook knew instinctively to believe what Colleen was telling her. They had a range of years to work with and not a large number of faculty members.
“I don’t know if I would have believed her story except that I saw her when she came back into the building and something had happened to her. So I said let’s try to look her up in the yearbook.”
All the college yearbooks were lined up in a bookcase against the wall. Along the top of the bookshelf were several photographs, including some of former faculty members.
Colleen Butterbaugh gasped and pointed to a group of faculty members in one of the photos, and to one woman in particular in the back row. That was the woman she had seen.
There was only the date 1914 on the back of the photograph. They paged through the 1914 yearbook until they found the same photograph with a list of identifying names.
The person Butterbaugh recognized was Clara Urania Mills.
I have never doubted that Mrs. Buterbaugh saw what she thought she saw. There was no doubt in her mind that she had some sort of [psychic] experience,” said Dr. David Mickey, an emeritus professor of history at Nebraska Wesleyan and the author of a three-volume history of the school. He was a faculty member in 1963 and spoke with Buterbaugh about the incident shortly after it took place. He was also a st
udent there in the late 1930s and knew Clara Mills. He said she was a highly regarded faculty member.
“There were some who felt this incident had something to do with a desire to get some attention,” said Dr. Mickey, but he stressed that Dean Dahl believed Colleen Buterbaugh’s story implicitly.
“It’s my understanding that it wasn’t an unusual assignment for her to go over there to put messages on McCourt’s desk where he would find them later on. But that was the only time that she had anything like this happen.”
Roger Cognard was just as perplexed in trying to find any sort of rational explanation, even after studying the incident in depth.
People who knew Buterbaugh, Cognard said, described her as a normal, reasonable person who, as far as anyone knew, had never had an incident similar to this before or after it.
“I guess I would say that something did indeed happen to her. I think she saw something. I don’t know what it was, but I suppose it could range all the way from a hallucination to a visit by Clara Mills. I don’t discount the possibility, although by nature I am a skeptic,” said Cognard.
Cognard was intrigued that the apparition appeared during such an ordinary errand and in the middle of the morning on a busy school day.
“She was doing something very routine and bingo—she’s hit with the musty odor, the quiet, the vision, and then it all goes away. From what I know about her I’m sure she thought Dean Dahl would think she was nuts. He didn’t and so the story took on a . . . credence,” said Cognard.
As Colleen Buterbaugh’s story spread in the following weeks and months, newspapers statewide sent reporters to interview her and others on campus. The Associated Press and United Press International reported their own stories. Newspapers, radio, and TV stations nationwide, and even a few overseas, featured Buterbaugh’s amazing adventure at the small college.
Representatives of the Menninger Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kansas, interviewed Buterbaugh.
Haunted Heartland Page 29
