Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  As the days passed, search parties scoured the woods of John Robinson’s estate for some trace of the girl. Only her portrait and a few of her belongings left in the house testified to her life.

  Robinson’s disappearance was just as mystifying. He left his forest kingdom as stealthily as he had come into it. His hand-carved casket was found in his workshop. Behind the house the mausoleum was filled with snakes.

  In time, the neighbors could not resist the temptation anymore and swarmed over the mansion, determined to unearth the fortune they believed Robinson the pirate had taken in plunder and buried there. For months zealous plowmen and woodcutters swung picks, spades, and shovels, overturning stones, uprooting young trees and even undermining the foundation of the very house itself. Others ransacked its interior, tearing out the handsome paneling, pulling down the carved staircase, and stripping the walls bare in their frenzied search for Robinson’s ill-gotten gains.

  Yet not a single coin was ever found. Time and disregard eventually finished what the treasure hunters had begun, and the mansion was reduced to rubble.

  Only the ghost of the young senorita lingers. Legend has it that she still walks the banks of the Scioto River in the twilight of a late, summer evening. And sometimes, in the gathering gloom, a scream, her scream, shatters the stillness and echoes down the valley.

  Old Raridan

  Jackson and Pike Counties

  Whether it is the “elephant’s graveyard” or the dying place of the American bison, humans have searched for centuries to locate the sites within each region toward which old and wounded mammals struggle, driven by some instinctual urge during their final days.

  In southern Ohio, somewhere within present-day Jackson and Pike Counties, its location lost to time, old-timers told of such a graveyard for the magnificent gray wolf.

  The earliest explorers identified this place and called it Great Buzzard’s Rock, a high, granite, flat-topped hill. Later generations knew it as Big Rock.

  It was the dying place of the wolves.

  Bones of hundreds of gray wolves lay strewn across its surface. Buzzards floated in the skies above, waiting for new arrivals.

  Until the end of the Revolutionary War, wolves in the region were of little concern to man. There were few people, and the occasional explorer shot a wolf only when it posed a threat. All that changed, however, as civilization edged westward. Pioneers began pushing into the fertile Ohio River Valley, bringing livestock and villages with them.

  Wolves were not welcomed in or around frontier settlements. They preyed on livestock as pioneers killed deer for meat, diminishing the herds that were the wolves’ primary food source. Settlers slaughtered wolves whenever and wherever they could. Every new settlement pushed the wolves farther and farther westward.

  Each wolf pack had its own leader. In about 1796, settlers in what would later become Jackson and Pike Counties when Ohio became a state began to notice that one pack of several dozen wolves in particular followed a magnificent gray wolf.

  They called him Old Raridan, the king of wolves.

  How he got his name is not known, only that this awesome beast, larger and more powerful than his comrades, often prowled in the distance after a particularly bountiful kill of unsuspecting farm animals. He knew instinctively what the hunters’ guns could do and always kept safely out of range.

  To avenge the increasingly frequent raids by Old Raridan’s pack, groups of a dozen or more hunters would set off after him, their hounds baying in pursuit. Although many wolves and hounds were slain, Raridan always eluded capture. His fatally wounded followers made their painful way to Big Rock, where they died.

  Not even the bravest man dared follow a dying wolf to that strange and haunted place. Nor would a tracking hound come within a mile or more.

  As Old Raridan’s fame grew, so did the number of hunters seeking to put an end to his ways. His time was running out.

  Every man wanted to be known as the one who killed the King of the Wolves.

  At last, only a few tough old wolves survived, among them Raridan and his mate. The bones of their followers littered Big Rock. Then, sometime in 1801 word spread through the Ohio Valley that only Raridan and his mate still lived. The rest of his pack had moved on westward. Hatred for the old wolf, fanned over many years, became a fury so intense that even godly preachers prayed for his death. People talked of little else. Even women and children took part in the feverish search for Raridan.

  Vastly outnumbered, and with the infirmities of old age, Raridan found even his skill and cunning, learned through hundreds of battles, could not save him. An army of men with dozens of hounds now stalked the woods, searching him out.

  And then it happened.

  Hunters cornered Raridan and his mate in some low hills near the Ohio River. The wolves killed several hounds, but in the process Raridan’s loyal mate, the she-wolf, was wounded. Raridan would not leave her behind. Instead, they turned in the direction of Big Rock.

  The hounds held to the trail as hours of tracking wore on. For every wound the hounds inflicted on the aged wolves, one of their number lost his life.

  Just a mile from Big Rock, the hounds encircled the pair. Raridan let out a howl that froze the marrow in the hunters’ bones and snapping and snarling rushed the dogs, slashing in fury inch by bloody inch to reach the foot of the trail leading to Big Rock.

  The fight was merciless but Raridan held on, protecting his mortally wounded mate. Then just as suddenly as the baying hounds had been in the center of the fight, they fell back.

  Suddenly a shot rang out. The she-wolf dropped, a bullet in her heart. Then a second shot sounded. Old Raridan’s right hip exploded in a sickening shower of gray fur, flesh, and bone.

  The warrior staggered toward his companion, his life ebbing from a dozen wounds.

  He raised his scarred and bloodied head, once majestic and unbowed, and surveyed the men who had destroyed his empire. His stare became a final challenge.

  “Here I am, take me!” he seemed to taunt his enemies.

  Not more than fifty paces distant, the hunters could easily have finished off their quarry. Yet not one did.

  The old wolf turned back toward the trail to his final destination.

  “Ooooooowwwwwwwhhhhhoooooo!”

  Raridan raised his voice in one last cry.

  From the top of Big Rock floated an answer, almost an echo, yet more ethereal. It seemed to give the old wolf new energy, for he gently fastened his powerful jaws around the nape of his mate’s neck and dragged her up the trail to the dying place of the wolves.

  Old Raridan is more than a folktale to many who have seen his specter prowling that ancient forest kingdom. When the moon is full, his splendid cry drifts with the wind across Big Rock, where the shadowy form of that giant creature stands defiant against the darkening sky.

  Wisconsin

  Our Three Ghosts

  Pierce County

  Doug and Annette O’Brien moved with their two children, one-year-old Nathan and eight-year-old Valerie, into a spacious, century-old house on a quiet street in Pierce County on November 1, 1985. At the time Annette was pregnant with their third child, and they thought it was the perfect house for their growing family.

  Within a few months, however, they were having serious reservations. The couple found that eerie and inexplicable events came with their dream home.

  All was quiet for about eight months until an especially hot night the following August when their idyllic life changed. Doug decided to go to bed early, leaving Annette and daughter Valerie downstairs. He had had a long, hard day at work and was unusually tired. Adjoining the couple’s upstairs master bedroom was a nursery in which four-month-old Trevor was already fast asleep.

  Doug was nearly asleep when the baby started fussing. He propped himself up on his elbows and rubbed his eyes. Something made him glance sidelong, toward the open bedroom door. A woman in a long, light-colored dress glided past, toward little Trevor’s room.
/>   The baby quieted down immediately. Doug thought the woman must have been Annette, but something did not seem right. He waited a few moments and got up. He looked in on Trevor but the baby had fallen back to sleep. There was no sign of Annette or anyone else. Downstairs, he found his wife and Valerie. Neither one had been upstairs.

  Doug and Annette were understandably upset. Who had gone into the infant’s room?

  Annette took pride in being a calm, easygoing woman. She was not nearly as alarmed by her husband’s experience as he was. He had been dreaming, she reasoned. But what if it had not been a dream? A strange woman who seemed to vanish was not something that made either one of them comfortable.

  Doug encountered a second mysterious visitor a short time later.

  This time he was sitting alone in the living room one evening watching television. A connecting door led from the living room into a downstairs back bedroom. As if out of nowhere, a little blond-headed boy was standing in the doorway. He wore knickers buckled below the knees and a blue shirt. The outfit was clean and neat, definitely not play clothes.

  He took a few steps into the room and looked at Doug.

  Doug was calmer than might be expected. “I asked him who he was and what he wanted, but he didn’t answer.”

  The child vanished as quickly as he had appeared.

  In the morning, Doug told Annette about the boy. She wished she had seen him too.

  Another time when Doug was on the couch watching television, a small, bright red ball bounced through the same doorway in which the boy had appeared, and promptly vanished. Perhaps the boy was showing a playful side?

  That first-floor back bedroom was one of the centers of the ghostly disturbances they continued to experience.

  Doug was the first to reach that conclusion when on a late afternoon he went in that bedroom for a nap and closed the door to the living room.

  “Just as I was dozing off there was that lady again,” Doug said.

  She stood beside the bed wearing a red jacket. Doug stared at her but did not say anything. He could not make out her arms or face yet he knew instinctively it was the same woman he had seen upstairs.

  Doug covered his head with a blanket and she went away.

  The family’s brush with the supernatural took an even odder turn one afternoon when an elderly woman knocked at their front door. She told them her name was Ethel and that her grandparents had once owned the O’Brien house.

  Annette and Doug invited her in. Ethel immediately said, “There’s a closet in that back bedroom off the living room.”

  Annette nodded. She said it had been turned into a small nursery and that Trevor was napping in there at the moment.

  Their visitor shook her head and paused. “My grandmother used to lock me in the closet and make me pray.”

  Doug was curious. He wondered to himself if the ghost he had seen might have been Ethel’s late grandmother.

  They learned more about the history of the house from Ethel on that day, but little else that could identify the causes of a haunting.

  Doug worked ten-hour night shifts at a company in Bloomington, Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities. When he started leaving the house at two in the afternoon and getting back home well after midnight, Annette, for the first time, became anxious and ill at ease in the house. What she feared did not come from anything mortal.

  “I had all the lights on when I went to bed. I was really terrified. But once I was in bed and my eyes were closed I was fine,” she said.

  Annette often waited up for Doug because, as she said, “just as long as somebody was downstairs before I went to bed I was all right.”

  One of the couple’s greatest concerns was that the children would be frightened or harmed. Only eight-year-old Valerie had a curious personal experience.

  She and a friend were playing in her upstairs bedroom when the door slammed shut.

  Valerie thought somebody might be hiding in the hallway and looked around. She even looked in corners where someone could hide. Nothing.

  Valerie shrugged and returned to the bedroom. Her friend Abby was not so composed. She told Valerie that she had heard something at the door after it slammed shut and the handle turned.

  The girls abandoned their toys and scrambled back down the stairs.

  A short time after that, the O’Brien children started having bad dreams—not really nightmares, but scary dreams they could not remember in the morning. Their parents knew then that they needed some help in identifying what might be going on.

  At the urging of Annette’s sister, the family contacted a Minneapolis psychic named Jacki about visiting their home. She agreed to drive over the next day. The children would not be present.

  As long as they live, Doug and Annette O’Brien will never forget Jacki’s visit.

  Jacki went room to room in search of the spirits. With her were Annette, Doug, and Annette’s sister, Susan, the one who had suggested seeking the psychic’s help.

  “She said we had three spirits—a woman, a young boy, and an old man,” Annette recalled. However, only one of their boys would see the man. Doug and Annette would not.

  The ghost child had shown himself to Jacki right away. At first she thought he was one of the family’s boys, but then he vanished.

  The woman was a nanny who would stay in the house for as long as there were children there.

  The old man was perhaps the saddest presence that Jacki detected, an alcoholic who died of malnutrition.

  The quartet headed for the back bedroom, where Doug had seen the woman in red.

  “The psychic said that a little girl was locked in the closet at one time, down on her knees reading a Bible,” Annette said. That was nearly an identical description of what their Texas visitor had told them about her own experience.

  When the small group got to the master bedroom upstairs, she said that was where the old man had died. And where he still hung out.

  “That really scared me,” Annette said.

  The bedroom was at the front of the house, above a porch. Jacki said there used to be a door from it leading out to a now-vanished balcony and a stairway to the ground. The couple knew about the door as they had replaced it with a window and put a roof over the open porch. Jacki said the old man would sneak out that door at night to go drinking.

  In the same room, Jacki seemed to solve another of the hauntings. The O’Briens’ bedroom had been Valerie’s room when she and Abby saw the door handle turn. Annette speculated that the old man was trying to get in to “shoo the kids out.”

  The psychic thought the little boy she saw sometimes played in the attic. Each time he went up there he carved his initials on an attic crossbeam. However, the O’Briens had never seen evidence of that.

  Jacki claimed the little girl in the closet wanted help for her stepbrother, who had been physically abused and denied food. He later died of his injuries and severe malnutrition. But it was all kept very quiet; even the girl did not know what he died of. He was about six or seven years old, but physically no bigger than a three-year-old. His hard, leather shoes were too small and pinched his feet.

  The ghost boy is the one that led Jacki upstairs to where the old man once lived. Jacki told the little boy it was time to leave, that it was better on the other side because there were places for him to play.

  “What’s play?” she said he asked her.

  The old man lived in the house at a different time than the child.

  “He was not a nice man,” Jacki said.

  He told her he did not like children because they made noise. She explained to him that the children lived there too and were allowed to make noise. He was not to frighten them.

  Jacki said the man was as spiteful after death as he had been in life.

  The nanny was a benevolent spirit who did not leave a very strong impression. It is possible that she was the ghost nanny Doug saw tucking in little Trevor

  Before Jacki left, the O’Brien children returned home from sc
hool. She sat them down and explained that an old man had been giving them the bad dreams, but they did not have to worry anymore. She had put a red aura of protection around each of them. Only spirits with love in their hearts could stay. And the living have superiority over any entity that has passed on. If the family tells a spirit to leave, it must.

  Once people realize that, she said, trouble with spirits usually goes away.

  Unlike some psychics, Jacki did not drive any of the ghosts out of the house.

  “I tell earthbound spirits that they have passed into the next world. They don’t have to hang around anymore. Usually they go.”

  The O’Briens were comforted by Jacki’s visit. They sincerely hoped their three ghosts would soon be gone—yet in the spirit world, as in life itself, they knew there were no guarantees.

  Everlasting

  Shorewood

  Bob Lambert really did not want to go upstairs.

  The clouds had been lowering all that humid August afternoon, and now the weather bureau had issued a severe storm warning.

  He waited. Perhaps the rain would not come. Perhaps it would skip Shorewood and go south. He sat nervously in his lower-floor apartment, occasionally glancing out the window. He just knew he would have to go upstairs. If only Ginny were here. Maybe she could not protect him, but at least she would be around in case anything should happen.

  But why should it? After all, ghosts belonged to a bygone era. No one believed in them anymore. Right? Right. But then who or what belonged to those footsteps? For a time Bob thought they could not harm him or Ginny, but now he was not so sure.

  “Come on, grow up,” he muttered to himself. “It’s silly to think that ghosts come out only during thunderstorms.”

  At the first sign of rain, Bob decided that he would close the windows in the upstairs apartment, just as he had promised the tenants he would do. And nothing would happen.