Usually, I find myself in the skeptical camp when I read a ghost story. Maybe it’s the real deal, or maybe it’s fiction. There was something about this story that struck a chord in me. I’m not sure what it was, but after I read the last word, I thought, “Wow. That was powerful.”
One afternoon I got out of work from the hospital early. It was a beautiful spring day, so warm, smelled good outside, the sun was shining throughout the house on Cedar Avenue. I was in the newly renovated kitchen doing dishes and looking forward to the weekend ahead. The window in front of me was open and I was enjoying the sounds of neighborhood kids playing. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon. I was the only person in the house at that time, save for our six cats, who usually all slept upstairs together until night came. Suddenly, I began to hear a quiet song playing on a piano. I couldn’t recognize the specific song, it sounded as if a child was trying to pick out some simple melodies and chords. It was slow and pretty. I remember thinking how sweet it was that a neighbor child probably was just learning how to play. I put my ear to the open window, listening for the direction of the sweet, youthful melody. But I discovered the music was not coming from outside. I felt a little anxious as I walked slowly over to the basement door (which was right off the kitchen). I stood at the top of the basement steps and listened to what I didn’t really yet believe: that the sweet little tune was coming from my basement. Yet there was not supposed to be anyone home except me.
Strangely, the music kept playing for quite a while. I was way too scared to go downstairs and prove or disprove this oddity. So I rationalized and told myself, “You’re probably imagining that it’s a real song; it’s probably one of the cats walking around on the piano keys.” So I walked back into the kitchen and called for all the cats. They usually would all come to me if called. All six cats came sleepily down from the upstairs of the house - none of them had been in the basement at all! The now eerie little tune kept playing from the old, forgotten piano in the basement. I ran out to the front porch and waited for Gary (my husband at the time) to come home. He did come home about ten minutes later. I felt very unsettled. Gary reassured me, he told me I probably imagined everything, and went inside.
I checked out this book after reading Author Scares Up Iowa Ghost Stories. As it turns out, this is the latest in a series of haunted road guides by authors, Chad Lewis and Terry Fisk. Thanks to Amazon’s Search Inside feature, I was able to read a bit of this book. It’s very well laid out, giving the location of each haunt spot, as well as “ghost lore” about the place, an historic time line, and the results of their investigation.
The authors’ concise writing style make this book a very easy and compelling read. I found myself hooked after reading the story about the Holy Cross Cemetery and it’s haunted “hangman’s tree.”
Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, a surgeon who founded the Missouri Medical College, liked to perform grisly and questionable science experiments. He conducted these experiments in what is now called the Mark Twain Cave.
McDowell was trying to discover how to petrify a human body when his 14 year-old daughter died of pneumonia. Rumor has it that the doctor filled a glass-lined copper cylinder with an alcohol mixture. He put his daughter into the cylinder, and then hung it from the ceiling in a cave room.
The citizens of Hannibal were horrified. Yet some would go to the cave to drag the poor girl’s body into view so they could gawk at it. Eventually McDowell was forced to remove his daughter’s body from the cave, but her spirit still haunts the cave.
Most of this video contains footage of three young adults, bantering in Portuguese while they are trying to find some unknown location. Towards the end, they pick up a girl who appears stranded on the side of the road. She gets in the car, looking very upset. The video footage jumps and turns static whenever she looks into the camera. That and her dramatic declaration at the end gives this video away as a fake. Still it was well done.
It reminded me of a story I’d watched on some paranormal show years ago about a girl named Susan. This guy was driving somewhere late at night when he spotted a girl standing on the side of the road, appearing lost and stranded. He picked her up and drove her to her house.
When he got out of the car to escort her, he found that she had vanished. Confused, he walked up to the front door and rang the bell. A middle-aged man answered. “Do you know anyone named Susan?” the driver asked him. “I picked this girl up on Route 102, but she disappeared when I got out of the car.”
The man averted his gaze. “Yeah. I had a daughter named Susan. She died on that highway several years ago. This has happened before. She is still trying to come home.”
