Cognard said, “She had some psychiatric exams and they wrote a journal article about her. I understand the bottom line was that she was pronounced normal with no history of hallucinations or anything like that.”
Karen Cook said, “The Menninger people even took the yearbooks and the pictures. They had her down there I think it was twice. Apparently they decided that she did see something, something did happen to her [in the music office]. I thought, well, I know that because I saw her when she came back into [Old Main].”
Others have suggested that she invented the story or was going through a personal emotional crisis that led her to imagine the entire episode. Some of this doubt is bolstered by the slightly varying versions of the events she seems to have later told interviewers and friends. However, as Buterbaugh herself said, the event lasted perhaps no longer than thirty seconds to a minute so remembering all the specific detail months or years later would be difficult for even the best witness to process.
It has also been suggested that marital discord was among the emotional issues she was dealing with at the time. Whatever the correct story, Colleen Buterbaugh did divorce and move out of state following the incident.
Karen Norton Cook kept up an interest in the case until her retirement. She was considered one of the most knowledgeable about the incident and as such was a primary source for the multitude of people who wanted information. It had brought the college national and international fame, if not precisely the kind they would prefer.
Cook collected newspaper clippings, letters, requests for information, and other material related to the case. Strangely, the neatly catalogued file disappeared about a year before her retirement. Also missing, said Cook, is the bound volume of the campus newspapers that reported the event in late 1963.
Is the ghost of Clara Urania Mills still on the campus?
Although the C. C. White Building was razed years ago and replaced with the Smith-Curtis Administration Building, there are still a few stories of Clara, or someone, haunting the campus.
Professor Cognard said the ghost migrated to Old Main when C. C. White was demolished. There were also accounts that Clara’s ghost was seen walking outside her old apartment building a few blocks from campus.
But one fact has never changed. Karen Norton Cook has no reservation whatsoever that her friend Colleen Buterbaugh saw a ghost on that singular October morning.
Ohio
Girl of the Lilacs
Bucyrus
For some men there is only one woman. It is as if love, once bestowed, is spent and cannot be given ever again. Frank Burbank was that kind of man. Ethel Hanley was the woman he loved. She loved him in return. Their devotion to one another transcended death.
One day in late May 1900, Frank Burbank, a surveyor in the Bucyrus office of the Ohio State Highway Commission, was inspecting land a few miles beyond town that the highway commission had arranged to buy. The acreage was part of a farm owned by a Mr. Hanley.
As Burbank and his assistant, Ted Davis, tramped across the fields, Frank felt the heavy heat that was more reminiscent of a July day. Summer had definitely arrived. The daffodils and tulips had already finished blooming and were now replaced by climbing roses and clematis.
Frank led the way up a hill. At the crest, the men paused to catch their breath. Laughing voices came from a white clapboard house a short distance away. The house was bordered by flowers and shrubs. But what caught Frank’s eye was a girl, radiant in a white ruffled dress. Hair the color of corn silk spilled over her shoulders, and in her arms she cradled a bouquet of fragrant white lilacs.
It was several moments before Frank saw the photographer with the black cloth draped over his head.
This girl with the lilacs was having her picture taken. A woman stood watching from the doorway of the house and two small children romped playfully at the photographer’s feet.
Frank then noticed a rough wooden sign nailed to a nearby tree:
COLD BUTTERMILK SERVED
He turned to Ted Davis.
“Ted, I won’t be going back to Bucyrus,” he smiled, jerking his thumb at the sign. “I need my daily glass of buttermilk.”
Frank never drank buttermilk. Ted knew that. He laughed and reminded his boss that there would be a full moon that night. Then he set off alone back down the path to town.
Mr. and Mrs. Hanley greeted Frank warmly and invited him to stay for dinner. They knew the surveyor by his good reputation. In fact it seemed nearly everyone in the small town knew Frank Burbank to be a hardworking and dependable young man who was saving for further schooling; he planned to become a fully qualified civil engineer.
As Mrs. Hanley bustled around the kitchen, she explained that the photographer had been engaged to take her daughter’s graduation picture. The final stitching of the white organdy dress had not been finished, she said, but that would not show in a photograph. There were many other preparations also to be made for the occasion. Mrs. Hanley was cheerful and easygoing, without pretension, and Frank liked her immediately. She put him at ease and so did her daughter, Ethel. At the dinner table Frank could not take his eyes off her and wondered if the others noticed. At the age of twenty-eight he had fallen head over heels in love at first sight.
After the meal Frank offered to help with the dishes, but Mrs. Hanley would not hear of it. Instead he played with Ethel’s little brother, Sammy, and the child’s orphaned cousin, Addie, who lived with the family.
Later that evening, Frank and Ethel walked down to the meadow and sat on the stone foundation wall of an old hay barn. The rocks held the heat of day and in a number of places wild roses grew, covering the crumbling wall with splashes of pink and red. The lambent light of the rising full moon bleached Ethel’s light hair bone white. When she saw that Frank was looking at it, she unpinned the bun and her long locks cascaded across her shoulders and down her back.
The gesture made a statement, wove a spell.
“Frank, when will you be leaving Bucyrus?” Ethel said, breaking the silence. “I mean when will you finish your surveying work here?”
Frank detected the slightest tremor in her voice and chose his words with care. He stood up and faced her.
“I could stay here, Ethel, in Bucyrus, as long as you want me to,” he said, reaching down to grasp both of her hands in his.
She smiled up at him. Frank pulled her into his arms.
Frank Burbank accompanied the Hanleys to the graduation exercises a few days later. Ethel, as valedictorian, gave the class oration, and Frank thought she looked lovelier than ever in her white dress with the blue sash. Tucked into the sash was a spray of white lilacs he had given her that afternoon. Lilacs and Ethel. They naturally belonged together, like peaches and cream, moonlight and romance. The thought of one reminded him of the other. Lost in these pleasant thoughts, Frank hardly heard what Ethel was saying up on the small stage. He was certain of only one thing: he was going to marry Ethel Hanley.
The next day Frank asked Ethel’s father for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He could scarcely conceal his disappointment when her father said no.
“She’s only seventeen,” the old man said, shaking his head. “That’s too young. If you wait two years, until she’s nineteen, I assure you I will give my consent. That’s how old her mother was when we got married.”
He extended his hand to Frank, and the men shook on the promise.
In the fall, Frank Burbank moved to Cincinnati to study engineering. The night before he left Bucyrus, Ethel gave him a copy of her graduation picture. He found a room in a small boardinghouse and worked nights at a newspaper office to earn part of his expenses. The acute loneliness he felt at first was eased by his immersion into his studies and by Ethel’s many letters. Frank kept her photograph on his bedside table. Each time he looked at the smiling girl in white he was intoxicated by the memory of the fragrance of the lilacs she held in her hands. It was as if the flowers had come to life within his room.
Meanwhile, Ethel fil
led her days and weeks to exhaustion so they would pass quickly. She helped with the housework and the care of the younger children. She was a hard worker who also helped with many of the outside farm chores.
She bore her father no grudge for his refusal to permit her marriage. She knew he had acted with her best interests in mind.
Two years later to the day, Frank Burbank returned to Bucyrus, a bona fide engineer. Ethel took the buggy to meet his train. As they drove up the hill toward the Hanley farm, Ethel needed to keep a strong hand on the reins.
“That’s a new horse, isn’t it?” said Frank.
Ethel laughed. “Yes, and he’s so nervous he shies at his own shadow. Don’t you, Bill?”
Frank grew uneasy. Skittish horses were always undependable.
The Hanleys rejoiced in Frank’s homecoming and set the wedding date for Ethel’s birthday, the fifth of June, two weeks away.
The following Sunday afternoon Ethel planned to show Frank a small house that was for sale out on Mansfield Road. Her father had taken the horse out that morning to drive her mother to church in Greggsville. She asked her father if Bill would be too worn out to be hitched up again so soon.
“I don’t think so,” said her father, “but he’s real jittery for being twelve years old. He acts like a two-year-old. Better let Frank drive. And tell him to be careful.”
Ethel went upstairs to change into the new dress she had bought to surprise Frank. It was white, of course, with a lace-trimmed ruffle at the waist. She put on a pale-blue straw bonnet with loops of dark-blue satin on the brim. As a final touch she pinned a spray of white lilacs to the ribbon.
Frank caught sight of Ethel starting down the stairway and caught his breath. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She ran toward him and he swept her up into his arms.
The air was humid and still, the sun warm on their skin, a perfect day for a drive. Spring had been unseasonably long again that year and, in the protracted heat, the flowers had begun to lose color. The snowy apple blossoms had turned brown and the lilacs in the dooryards were starting to fade.
Setting off down the road, Bill trotted along at a steady, comfortable pace. Frank held the reins loosely. Ethel sat beside him on the buggy seat, commenting on the scenery and the houses of people she knew as they passed.
They had not gone far when Frank pulled to the side of the road to permit a fringed-top surrey to pass. A young woman with fiery-red hair and a large, green bow on her saucy bonnet waved from the front seat.
“Hello, Ethel!” the girl called.
Ethel returned the greeting. After the surrey had passed, she turned to Frank.
“That was my friend, Zelia Murdock. You met her at the graduation dance. Remember?”
“I saw only one girl at the dance.” Frank grinned and reached to squeeze Ethel’s hand. “But a red-haired girl driving a white horse is a good luck omen, I think. Let’s make a wish, shall we?”
They both laughed. Frank commented on the newly painted silo on the Hawkes’s farm and the nice condition of the Murdock home directly across the road. It was neat and attractive, but he promised Ethel that one day they would have an even finer place.
Just beyond the two farms was Hawkes’s Hill, at the bottom of which was a stone bridge spanning a narrow, weed-choked stream.
As Bill started the descent, a boy on a bicycle shot across in front of them from a side road. Frank tightened the reins and pulled up some. Bill shied and snorted anyway, then reared up and leaped forward, snapping the horizontal crossbar of the buggy to which the harness traces were attached.
Wild with fright, the horse plunged down the hill, sending the careening buggy slamming against a bridge parapet. Ethel was thrown from her seat and struck her head on the bridge abutment. She died instantly.
Frank Burbank left Bucyrus immediately after Ethel’s funeral. For three years he moved around the country, working in one city after another, trying in vain to shake his grief. He carried in his mind the picture of his beloved lying crumpled in his arms at the foot of Hawkes’s Hill.
Then one day in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he decided that he was done living such a nomadic life. He wrote to his former boss, Will Taylor, in Bucyrus. Was there an opening in the state highway commission there? If so, he wanted it, whatever the job was.
And so Frank returned. The job he was offered was keeping the books for the commission, hardly worthy of his advanced education, but it was enough. He did occasional surveying and on Sundays took long walks alone in the countryside.
Except for visits to the Hanleys, Frank saw few people socially. Mrs. Hanley often remarked to her husband how much Frank had changed. He never smiled and the light had gone out of his eyes; his whole face seemed immobilized, as if set in concrete.
One day in October, when the maples flamed in the woodlots, Frank walked along the highway’s edge. A buggy pulled up beside him and a young woman called out. “Hello there. Aren’t you Frank Burbank?”
He looked up at the woman holding the reins and nodded. She smiled down at him. “I’m Zelia Murdock. I’ll be happy to give you a ride into Bucyrus.”
Frank did not know if she had changed, but he doubted that he would have recognized her had she not introduced herself.
“I’m going to the Hanleys for supper, Miss Murdock,” said Frank.
“Get in,” she said. “I’ll be glad to drive you there.”
The waning light gilded wisps of red hair that curled beneath the brim of her bonnet. Frank hopped up beside her and the horse trotted on down the road.
After supper, Frank sat in the kitchen watching the children play and listening to Mrs. Hanley’s small talk that once made him feel so comfortable. Now the words seemed harsh and distant, like he was listening from a great distance. Part of the time he sensed that she was questioning him, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
When he left, he stopped at the lilac bush beside the millstone. Snapping off a bare twig, he passed it beneath his nose and sighed.
“The scent of lilacs is strong tonight,” said Frank, thinking he was alone.
But from the darkened doorway, Mrs. Hanley saw and heard and was perplexed.
No one was surprised when the marriage of Zelia Murdock and Frank Burbank took place. Zelia was headstrong and always got what she wanted. In Frank she got a consort with whom she had three children. That was all, though. She did not capture his heart as Ethel had, nor even share his thoughts; she seemed not to care for such depth of intimacy.
Zelia inherited wealth and, with hired help to care for the large house and to look after the two boys and their sister, she devoted her time to various clubs and social pursuits. She organized her life around her own interests. Frank was left to his own devices.
The first thing Frank did upon moving onto the Murdock farm was to plant white lilac bushes. Some he bought from nurseries, some he bought from farmers who were thinning out dooryard hedges, and others he dug up from old, abandoned places. In every free moment he wandered the hills and valley of the Scioto River searching for yet another lilac bush.
On a raw March day filled with strong winds, Frank went to the Hanley farm, where he had offered to help unload fertilizer. By late afternoon the men finished the work and Frank climbed into his buggy to leave for home. As he was about to drive off, he thought he saw a woman standing down by the old hay barn foundation. Frank climbed out of the buggy and tied the reins to a hitching post. He started down the path to see who it could have been at this hour and on such a foul day. He had gone only a few steps when he was overcome by the heady perfume of lilacs.
He turned to look back at the big lilac bush. The branches were bare. When he looked again toward the place where the barn had stood he saw her clearly. A young girl in a white dress and a wide, blue bonnet smiled up at him. He cried out and ran toward her. But the apparition faded, swallowed by the shadows of the coming night. Frank Burbank sat for a long time on the cold stones of the crumbling wall, his head cradled in hi
s arms.
The hunting was good that fall; quail and partridge were especially plentiful. On a November afternoon Frank took his gun and his setter, Sport, out to try his luck. The air was clear and crisp.
When Frank reached a dense thicket at the foot of the hill on which the Hanley farm lay, he whistled for the dog, which had raced on ahead.
The setter came bounding up to him trembling and whining with hackles raised. Frank looked in the direction the dog was staring. A girl in a white dress was coming toward them down the steep hill, from the direction of the Hanley farmhouse. She approached slowly; her feet did not quite seem to touch the ground. The network of branches and twigs that blocked her way never bent to permit her passage; the apparition passed right through them. Then, for just a moment she stood smiling, a luminous figure pierced by sapling twigs.
Frank once asked Mrs. Hanley if she had ever been aware of her daughter’s presence.
The woman nodded. “Once I thought I saw her walking down by the ruins of the old hay barn.”
Mrs. Hanley sighed and looked away. “But I guess it was just a trick of the moonlight.”
When Frank Burbank’s daughter, Joan, turned eighteen, Zelia gave a dinner-dance in her honor. Before the guests began to arrive, Frank wandered into the dining room. Joan stood by the bay window. Her father thought she looked radiant in her new apple-green silk gown and told her so.
“Daddy,” she began, “something strange is going on in the garden. A woman has been pacing out there by the white lilac hedge. She’s young, about my age, and she’s wearing a white dress and a broad-brimmed bonnet. She seems to float in and out of the lilacs. At first I thought it was one of my friends playing a trick on me, but when I went out I couldn’t find anybody. I’m sure I saw her. I was standing right here watching.”
Frank looked out but saw no one.
The doorbell rang and Joan hurried to answer. Frank did not greet the guests. Too many people around often oppressed him, even his own children whom he loved.
No, it was the soft, fragrant air of May that made him restless. At times his restlessness, his loneliness, seemed unbearable. He stared now into nothingness until Zelia came for him.
Haunted Heartland Page 30
