by Leslie Rule
Flash ahead half a century to 2006 and the scene changes. The gymnasium is all that is left of the school, long ago razed when the tiny town no longer had the youth to warrant it. The old walls now hold Vina Rae’s Grill ‘n’ Graze, an unpretentious café where owners Nan Wheatley and Debra Campbell serve up chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, and wedges of hot apple pie.
The long-legged boys have been usurped by hungry families; the thump of the basketball by friendly conversation and the soft clink of silverware; and the smell of rubber and sweat by brewing coffee, grilling hamburger, and burning hair.
Burning hair?
Yes, sometimes the terrible inexplicable odor overwhelms visitors. “The first time I smelled it, it made me sick,” confided Nan Wheatley, explaining that when the scent materializes, it is always confined to a very small area. “If you step away from the spot, you can’t smell it.”
It is just one of the many calling cards of the ghost. She was born Mildred Ann Newlin on Christmas Day in 1933. She grew up and got married in 1955. Nine months later, on a crisp March afternoon, small-town innocence was lost forever to Avard, Oklahoma.
Mildred was sweet and lovely with a shy smile and very petite at just five feet two inches and one hundred pounds. She was a twenty-two-year-old senior at Northwestern Oklahoma State University at Alva and happily married to twenty-six-year-old Avard High School teacher and basketball coach Richard D. Reynolds. “They were exceptional people,” said Nan, adding that everyone called Richard “Dee” and that Mildred went by “Ann.” “Dee was very close to some of my family members.”
Their future should have been bright. Ann looked forward to graduating and becoming a schoolteacher, and she and Dee dreamed of having four children. They would raise them in the land they loved. But fate had a heartless plan for them.
It was Tuesday, March 13, just after noon when Ann finished her morning classes at Alva, climbed into her 1949 Chevrolet Tudor, and began her half-hour journey toward Avard High School to meet her husband.
She never made it.
We will never know what thoughts were in her head as she drove the long dirt road toward Avard. The last thing she saw was the familiar northwestern Oklahoma prairie with its miles of flat wheat fields, and then her killer or killers.
It was a little after one p.m. when farmer Loren Goucher was riding his tractor and noticed clouds of black smoke billowing in the distance. When he investigated, he was shocked to find a car on fire on the Alva-Avard Road. The blazing automobile straddled a shallow ditch, its rear wheels embedded in the sand. The front door hung open.
Loren smelled burning flesh as he moved through the intense heat. He crept close enough to see a charred body on the front seat. He rushed to the Alva police station.
Coach Dee Reynolds soon learned the horrific news. While he was at school, his poor bride had suffered a terrible death. At first investigators thought it had been an accident. Somehow Ann had lost control of her car and hit a blackjack tree. When she tried to drive away, the car had burst into flames. Cans of brake fluid and gasoline in the trunk had accelerated the fire.
Family members confirmed that Ann did indeed have dizzy spells and could have been overtaken by one while driving. Yet there were so many odd elements to the puzzle.
Her right shoe, splattered with blood, had been found 256 feet in front of the car beside a patch of tall grass that had been mashed flat as if someone had lain there, possibly during an attack. Ann’s charred coat was discovered ten feet behind the car. A button, perhaps ripped from her blouse or an assailant’s shirt, was also found outside the car.
The Chevy had burned bumper to bumper, as if it had been doused with an accelerant. The tires had burned, and the engine compartment was scorched. The temperature had reached 1,700 degrees, hot enough to shatter the auto’s windows. It did not make sense that a spontaneous fire starting in the trunk could do so much damage. All of these facts were brought before a jury to determine whether the case warranted further investigation.
Dr. Max Shideler, who had performed the autopsy, told the jury that Ann had suffered skull fractures that could have resulted from blows to the head—or from the intense heat in the blazing car.
There had been possible sightings of another vehicle near the scene, and a second set of tire tracks suggested she may have been run off the road. Then there was the question of bullet casings found nearby.
In the end, the jury decided that a homicide had taken place.
It was difficult for Ann’s family to imagine that anyone had deliberately hurt her. Mr. Reynolds said that his pretty wife had no enemies.
It looked as if Ann was killed for the same sad reason that so many others are. She was a vulnerable female in the wrong place at the wrong time when a monster who could not control his rage happened upon her. Someone had battered Ann and then tried to incinerate all clues. All of the newlyweds’ dreams had gone up in smoke.
Detectives spent five days on campus interviewing dozens of Ann’s classmates, but no one admitted to knowing a thing about her death. Despite a long investigation, her murder has yet to be solved.
Today Nan Wheatley shakes her head as she ponders the icy cold case. “I wish that they had had the forensic technology that they do today,” she said.
When Nan and Debra opened Vina Rae’s Grill ‘n’ Graze a decade ago, the last thing they expected was to share the place with ghosts. In fact, ghosts were something they gave little thought to—until an unexpected visitor appeared.
Shortly after Vina Rae’s opened for business, Debra was surprised to see a customer seated at a table. Why didn’t I hear her come in, she wondered as she glanced at the pretty young woman in green. Normally the cowbell clanged loudly whenever someone stepped through the door.
The woman was intent on adjusting her skirt and made no eye contact with Debra. “I turned away to get my order pad and then turned back to take her order,” Debra explained. But when she turned back, she was in for a shock. Debra stared, her pen poised and her mouth agape, at the empty table. The lady in green had vanished as quickly as she had appeared.
A chill crept down her neck. “I asked Nan what Ann Reynolds looked like,” she said. The description matched, right down to the short auburn hair. And when Nan and Debra learned that Ann had been wearing green the day she was murdered, they were sure that it was she who had visited.
Fifty years ago Ann had been headed to the man she loved when evil intervened. Was she still trying to find him? Her destination on March 13, 1956, had been the high school. Had her spirit continued on, even as her body lay burning? Had she entered the school on her death day only to find that Dee could not feel her arms around him? That she was unable to wipe the tears of grief from his eyes?
The spirit of Mildred Ann Reynolds may be stuck in the old gymnasium, the place where she surely once sat in the bleachers and cheered on her husband’s team. Does she understand that it is no longer a basketball court? Is she aware that her widowed husband eventually remarried and years later died of a heart attack?
Perhaps Ann does know that time has passed, and that things have changed. Perhaps she simply wants her case solved. Perhaps she is seeking justice.
Locals claim that most folks in town know who the killer is. In fact, rumor has it that two men were involved. With dangerous killers at large, it is understandable that they are reluctant to speak of it. Does that fact frustrate Ann’s spirit?
Was it Ann who threw the sponge at Nan? “I was alone in the kitchen,” said Nan, recalling the day that a sponge sailed through the air at her. She has gotten used to the sudden knocks on the wall, the inexplicable jingle of silverware, and the shadowy figures who move through her peripheral vision. “But there was a time,” admitted Nan, “when I did not like to be alone in the building.”
She and her mother, Ramona Wheatley, were both shaken up when a spooky apparition made an appearance. Nan’s mom, now deceased, was a levelheaded woman, so when she told her daughter what
she had seen, Nan believed her.
“She hollered at me and said a headless woman came through a wall and floated into the kitchen,” remembered Nan.
Even more frightening was the night that Nan was locking the back door when unseen hands grabbed her roughly by the shoulders and threw her down the hall. She picked herself up off the floor, unhurt but stunned. “I didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time,” admitted Nan, who feared people would think she was losing her mind.
Sometimes the sound of footsteps would echo in the empty hallway, and the freezer would be mysteriously rearranged.
Later, while seeking answers to the strange goings on, Nan invited paranormal researchers and psychics to investigate. When a psychic described an angry man named Isaac who stalked the premises, Nan was stunned. The description matched the entity that she had picked up on—a gloomy aggressive old man.
“The psychic did a cleansing of the building,” said Nan. “Ann’s ghost stayed, but Isaac moved out to the vacant house across the street.”
A woman named Mary was visiting Avard for the first time and was a passenger in a car when she glanced at the dilapidated house and noticed a man sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair on the porch. “He didn’t look like he’d be too tall, maybe average height,” she said, adding that he was either bald or gray and that his face was contorted into an angry expression. “It was not evil, but hateful,” she said. “He looked like he was in his late fifties or early sixties. He wore dark pants and a light button-up shirt.”
This researcher has discovered two Isaacs did live and die in Arvard long ago. I’ve yet to learn details about their lives.
Back in the Isaacs’ time, Avard had a heftier population, but over the years it has dwindled, and today Avard is a ghost town. “We have only about twenty people living here,” said Nan.
Twenty live people—the dead ones are too many to count. “We’ve had psychics tell us we have wall-to-wall ghosts in the café,” said Nan. “They say that the café is a portal to the other side where ghosts pass through.”
Though it is an interesting idea, it cannot, of course, be confirmed. While psychics can sometimes be dead-on, they rarely have all of the answers. One that Nan consulted also tuned in to Ann Reynolds, and asked her why she had not moved on. “Ann told her she was still here because she wanted to know ‘why they have done this to me,’” said Nan.
They.
The use of a plural supports the rumor that two attackers are guilty.
The killers are old men by now. Do they still roam freely through the area? Do they feel even a twinge of remorse when they drive past the spot on the lonely road where they savagely attacked an innocent person?
Mildred Ann Reynolds was charred beyond recognition, her right leg burned off to the knee. The woman who loved children never got to teach and nurture the countless students who would surely have loved her back. Is it too much for her to ask for some kind of justice?
Chances are she will continue to appear at Vina Rae’s Grill ‘n’ Graze, toss sponges, jiggle the silverware, and rap on the walls until the case is solved.
We are rooting for you, Ann.
Only a Moment
A gentle snow fell upon Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It looked as if Ronald Tammen had stepped out of his dorm for only a moment. Despite the cold night, the 19-year-old business major had not taken his coat. He’d also left his wallet and car keys behind and the radio playing. His psychology book lay open on the desk, as if he’d been interrupted in the middle of studying. If students passing by Fisher Hall had glanced up at the window, they would have seen that the lights were burning in room 225 of the old ivy-covered building.
Ron’s roommate was not alarmed when he returned to find him gone. Other than Ron’s absence, nothing in the room was unusual. Surely he would be back in a moment. But that moment has stretched into decades. For when Ron Tammen left that room, it was April 19, 1953. He vanished like a snowflake in a flame, never to be seen again.
A handsome, muscular young man, Ron was a varsity wrestler and the residence hall adviser. The evening of his disappearance he’d played the string bass with his dance band, the Campus Owls, and had returned to his dorm about 8:30 p.m. His 1938 Chevrolet sat outside for the rest of the evening.
Who can begin to imagine the heartbreak for Ron’s family? His younger brother was also a student at Miami and must have been beside himself. His parents were frantic as they agonized over his fate, wondering if there was any truth to the speculation that he was an amnesia victim. And they surely felt a spark of hope when a woman from a nearby town came forward to say that a man who matched Ron’s description had knocked on her door in the early morning of April 20. The young man, she said, had a streak of dirt across his face and appeared dazed as he asked her for directions to the bus stop.
A tragedy for his friends and family, the disappearance became a celebrated legend for future students at Miami University who dubbed him “the Phantom of Oxford.”
While many argue that Ron probably lost his memory and is still alive today, others think he died and remains on campus as a spirit.
Fisher Hall was a creepy old place that already had a reputation for being haunted when Ron resided there. The enormous structure had been dedicated on September 3, 1856, as the Oxford Female College. Heralded as the finest college building in the West, the features included a dining room and a chapel, which seated eight hundred. There was room for two hundred students to live, and they were excited to have the luxury of hot and cold running water.
The building had many incarnations, including time as the Oxford Hotel and later as a mental asylum. When the university purchased the building in 1925, it came with a few forgotten artifacts that students stumbled upon over the years. They shuddered when they found the old straitjackets and imagined the troubled souls once confined within the brick walls.
Ron’s vanishing added to the mysterious ambience. When the leaves turned golden and began to drift from the elm trees, students were both thrilled and frightened to learn that a ghost had been seen in the formal gardens behind Fisher Hall.
When they heard the apparition singing, witnesses felt cold to the bone. Perhaps it was only another student playing a joke, but when skeptics gave chase, it eluded them, melting into the night as easily as it had appeared.
Some insisted that the figure had to be Ron’s ghost. He was, after all, a musician who expressed himself through song. Others smirked and said it was a prank.
Pranks were not unusual among the students. In fact, on the very evening that Ron vanished, he’d found his bed filled with dead fish. He was last seen when he fetched clean sheets before returning to his room. As he gathered the clean bedding, he’d mentioned that he was tired and was going to bed early.
What could have changed his plans?
Was there another practical joke the night Ron disappeared—a prank that went horribly wrong, with the popular sophomore ending up injured or worse? If a joke did indeed get out of hand, the perpetrators weren’t talking.
A few years after Ron went missing, the upper floors of Fisher Hall were deserted after they became so rundown that they were deemed unsafe, and the first floor became home to the university’s theater. The theater students insisted there was a ghost in their midst. Some were simply annoyed when items inexplicably vanished—a common occurrence in haunted places. Others were afraid to be in the building alone. Shadows darted past the windows, they said, and they were troubled by the sounds of muffled voices. No one could quite make out what was being said. Was it the Phantom of Oxford trying to tell them something?
Fisher Hall eventually fell into complete disrepair, and the once-grand building was used for storage. Those who walked by often felt eyes upon them and quickened their pace as they glanced up nervously at the black windows. Braver students sometimes broke into the haunted building, half hoping to encounter a specter. The story of the missing boy’s ghost became a favorite Halloween topic for the local media.
> Ronald’s parents died without learning the fate of their beloved son.
Fisher Hall was demolished in 1979, the fine, pink dust from the bricks floating away on the breeze with old secrets. Today, the Marcum Conference Center occupies the spot.
Ronald Henry Tammen Jr. is still missing.
For more information on Ronald Tammen and other missing people, visit the Doe Network at www.doenetwork.org.
Ghosts of Miami University
With its forested landscape and silver streams, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is known as one of the loveliest college campuses in America. Lovely and spooky. Many of the grand old buildings are shrouded in mysteries and crawling with ghosts. Some say that the restless spirits originate from a century-old tragedy in Brice Hall. The girls were in tears, and the boys shook their heads in disbelief when a favorite teacher, Professor Henry Snyder, was found dead in his Brice Hall chemistry laboratory.
Students and teachers whispered about the “suicide.” What had driven Professor Snyder to ingest a fatal dose of potassium cyanide? The September 14, 1898, death raised suspicions, however. Some wondered if his flamboyant wife, Minnie, had murdered him.
The couple was a study in contrasts. He was the typical professor, while Minnie was a sexy siren who loved to dress like a gypsy and sing on stage. That, of course, is not enough to suggest someone is a killer, but the stain of suspicion darkened when she married her husband’s lab assistant, William Pugh.
Had the seductive Mrs. Snyder lured William into the murder plot? Had he administered the poison? Twenty years later, William mysteriously vanished and was reportedly never seen again.
Did William’s ghost, realizing that he too was the victim of a black widow, return to the campus to commiserate with poor Professor Snyder’s ghost?
While she was not a killer or a victim, Helen Peabody’s ghost frightens some students the most. An outspoken critic of coeducation and the principal of the neighboring school, the Western Female Seminary, Helen was strict and formidable.
