Margaret Ham died in the house in 1874, and in 1889, just short of his eighty-fourth birthday, Mathias himself passed away. Of the children, all but May and Sarah had already moved away. After May’s death in the 1890s, Sarah was left alone in the old mansion.
One late night as Sarah was reading in her third-floor bedroom, she thought she heard a prowler. The pirates’ threat of years ago crossed her mind, but she was too afraid to get up to investigate. In the morning, Sarah told a neighbor that if she heard the prowler again she would put a light in the window as a call for help.
Several nights later Sarah was again reading in her room. A distinct but distant clatter came from somewhere deep within the house, probably the first floor. She put aside her book and called out, “Who’s there?” There was no answer.
This time Sarah locked her door, lit the lamp, and put it in the window, hoping her neighbor would see it. Then, taking up a gun she kept always at her bedside, she waited. All was quiet for several minutes until she heard a set of heavy footsteps in the hallway outside the bedroom. Sarah Ham fired two shots through the door and heard a cry.
Later, neighbors found a trail of blood leading from the hallway, through the house, and out into the night. They found the body of a river pirate at the water’s edge, dead from Sarah’s gunshots. Some say that the mysterious light now seen moving through the Ham mansion at night is the lamp carried by the murdered brigand searching for his assailant.
The Dubuque County Historical Society operates the Mathias Ham House as a historic home and museum. Society employees and volunteers have reported a number of peculiar incidents over the years.
For example, a window in an upper hall may be found open from time to time though it was securely locked the night before—a strong spring holds the lock in place and workers believe the window could not open accidentally, even if buffeted by gusts of wind. In that same upper hallway a light worked only part of the time.
Lights in the front rooms of the Ham House once could only be turned on and off by screwing and unscrewing a fuse. One summer night an assistant curator who was closing the museum for the night heard music coming from a pump organ when she unscrewed the fuse. When she screwed the fuse tightly back in place, the music ceased.
There is a pump organ in the house, but it is closed and never played.
On still another occasion, Dubuque police officers, conducting a routine check of the premises, noticed a light burning in the hallway of the house’s original section. They called an employee, who later told a news reporter that it was a frightening experience. After he turned off the burglar alarm, he turned on the lights. It was the first time he had been in the house alone at night. He said he felt a “presence.”
On another night, a tour guide also thought that someone or something was in the house. He spent the night there, hoping to catch a prowler. Sometime after three o’clock in the morning, he heard women’s voices in the yard outside. He looked out the windows but saw no one. Returning to the house, he heard someone walking overhead on the second floor of the original section of the house. He investigated but again found nothing.
Sometimes workers and visitors feel ill at ease especially in the older sections of the mansion. On the third floor one can feel icy breezes and strange chills as well as hear, quite clearly, noises from other parts of the house. The stairway to the cupola seems to act as an echo chamber for sounds below. The legend of a man hanging himself in that tower has never been established.
Naughty George
Des Moines
Jim and Sue Anderson lived in a rambling clapboard house in Des Moines in the 1960s. It had an upstairs sleeping porch, narrow double-hung windows, and gingerbread trim. Jim’s grandparents once owned the house; the young couple felt fortunate to be raising their family in such a spacious, comfortable residence.
But one night shortly after they moved in, their delight turned to dismay.
Jim was out late visiting a buddy. At about ten o’clock he phoned his wife to tell her he would be staying a while longer. Sue was tired and, although she usually waited up for him, she went on to bed. The children were already asleep. Sue was drifting off herself when the back door opened and her husband walked into the kitchen.
At least that is what she thought was happening.
The bedside phone rang.
Sue lifted the receiver. “Hi, honey,” her husband said. “I’m just leaving for home.”
“Wise guy,” Sue chuckled. “I just heard you come in.”
“But honey, I’m not in the house. I’ll be right there.”
Not in the house?
She eased the receiver back into its cradle, went to the bedroom door, and cracked it open. Footsteps squeaked on the freshly waxed kitchen floor. Sue tiptoed across the upstairs hallway to the children’s room, gathered up her young son and daughter in her arms, and returned to the master bedroom. She locked the door and tucked the children into bed with her.
A few minutes later, footsteps clattered up the staircase. She watched as the doorknob turned.
“Sue, open up! It’s me!”
She flung open the door and collapsed in her husband’s arms.
When the front doorbell rang, Jim ran downstairs to open the door, calling over his shoulder that he had telephoned the police before leaving his friend’s house.
Sue wrapped herself in a bathrobe and followed her husband downstairs. The officers listened to her account of the intruder then fanned out through the house. They searched from basement to attic, shifting furniture, trunks, and boxes, poking into dark corners with their flashlights. They found nothing. There was no indication the doors or windows had been tampered with.
After the officers left, Sue felt foolish; yet she knew that she had not imagined the incident. Someone had come in the back door and walked through the house.
The Andersons had nearly forgotten the incident when, a few months later, Sue was ironing in an upstairs room late one evening when something knocked at a window. She put down the iron and listened. It came again, knuckle-sharp rat-a-tat-tats on the outside of one of the windows.
Sue snapped off the light, walked to the wall of windows, and peered out, wondering all the time how taps like that could be possible on the second floor of the house.
Moonlight washed the high limbs of an old cottonwood near the window and the grove of walnut trees at the far property line. Otherwise all seemed quiet, nothing to account for what Sue heard.
She did not sleep well that night.
On another evening after dark, Sue finished washing the dinner dishes and set bags of garbage in an adjacent mudroom to be taken out the next day.
The bags were gone the next morning. The couple searched inside and out but never found their garbage.
Several times during that year the couple would come downstairs early in the morning to find lights blazing in the hallway and den, the front and back doors standing wide open. That truly frightened the couple as there was no sign of forced entry. The children were not sleepwalkers; the Andersons, not wishing to alarm them, said nothing to them about it.
Then came that day when she had to admit there was another possibility.
“It’s silly, I know,” she said. “Who’d believe stuff like that?”
The “stuff like that” was the presence of a haunting in their house, the idea that a ghost was causing all the mischief.
Her husband scoffed. He figured there was a logical explanation for everything, though he was at a loss for words in this instance.
The weeks rolled by, and the Andersons celebrated their second year in their house. One morning their small daughter announced that a man had been in her room during the night. He was standing next to her bed, smiling down at her.
She did not seem upset, so Sue explained to her that it must have been her daddy coming in to check on her.
“Oh no, it wasn’t,” insisted the child.
Although both parents were greatly distressed, they said it must h
ave been a dream and dropped the subject.
A few weeks later, Sue invited a friend, Kathy, to spend the evening. During the course of their visit, Sue mentioned the odd events of the past year.
Kathy, who was interested in the occult and had some self-professed psychic abilities, interrupted. “There’s a spirit standing in the corner of the living room.”
Sue was taken aback. She could see nothing except a small cabinet.
Kathy said the ghost had a gentle smile and would not harm the family. Sue glanced nervously at her watch. It was ten o’clock. After Kathy left an hour or two later, Sue carried the coffee cups back to the kitchen. She returned to the living room to turn off the lights. She glanced at the wall clock. It had stopped at ten.
The same clock stopped at the same hour three nights in a row; then it quit running altogether.
For nearly a year, and to Sue’s great relief, nothing more out of the ordinary took place. Perhaps it was all over.
That was not to be. The ghost paid a return visit.
It was the following fall. The Andersons were entertaining dinner guests Linda and Alan Peters. Linda and Sue lingered over coffee at the dining room table. Suddenly Linda gave a start and pointed into the adjoining living room. She said, “Look! There’s someone in white pacing back and forth.”
Again, Sue saw nothing. But then Linda leaned back in her chair and laughed.
“Of course, it’s one of the guys clowning around.”
Sue did not laugh. She knew Jim and Al were in the kitchen. Her fears returned.
Three nights later, Sue, Linda, Kathy, and another young woman had gathered at the Anderson house to work on a craft project for an upcoming charity bazaar. Midway through the evening’s work, Sue served coffee and cookies, the foursome buzzing with friendly small talk.
Linda mentioned that her white cat had run off and had been missing now for four months. The animal never strayed from home before this, so Linda and her husband could not understand its sudden disappearance. They had searched and run advertisements in the newspaper, all without success. The cat had vanished.
When the women finished their evening’s work and prepared to leave, Sue turned on the porch light. A white cat was curled up on the steps. Linda was astonished—it was her cat.
The Andersons were as mystified as Linda. However, they sensed that their mischievous ghost was somehow involved.
By now, Sue was desperate for answers. She suggested getting a Ouija Board. Her husband agreed. Perhaps they could learn the identity of their visitor and find out what he (or she) wanted.
The couple sat face to face in their living room, the board across their knees. When Sue asked about the ghost, the planchette spun around on the board, spelling out G-E-O-R-G-E. In questioning that followed, they found out that George had lived on this land in the early 1800s, that he did not want to be here, but that he would not harm them.
Sue checked property records at the Polk County Court House but deed transfers prior to 1866 were not available. She ultimately failed to verify the Ouija Board’s message.
The Andersons said the ghost continued to be periodically active. Jim often awakened in the middle of the night to see a man he now knew to be George, the ghost, standing beside the bed, staring down at him. One night, Jim got up to use the bathroom. As he returned to the bedroom, George stood with his back against the hallway wall a few feet away, staring at him. Jim took a deep breath, carefully edged past the figure, and climbed back in bed.
Desperado
Winterset
Each year on the second weekend of October, the town of Winterset, forty-five minutes southeast of Des Moines, attracts thousands of visitors to the Madison County Covered Bridge Festival. Guests have come from every state and many foreign countries, drawn there to photograph or paint the half-dozen century-old covered bridges in the county, wander among scores of crafts booths, listen to country music, and watch or participate in a Civil War battle reenactment.
For several decades the romantic novel The Bridges of Madison County by the late Robert James Waller and later the popular Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep film based on the book have made this idyllic patch of Iowa ground a national gathering place for people who want to savor the sights and sounds of what they believe to be a vanishing American landscape. Now, a highly successful Broadway musical keeps alive the bittersweet love story of globe-trotting photographer Robert Kincaid and the lonely farm wife Francesca Johnson. Cast members from the musical have performed at the Winterset celebration.
Winterset is also the birthplace of movie star John Wayne. The small, frame home in which he was born in 1907 is open year-round and is the only museum in the world to feature memorabilia from the actor’s childhood and movie days.
But before there were literary characters there was the bridge, the Roseman Covered Bridge, the very special one that Robert Kincaid was seeking to photograph when he asked Francesca Johnson for directions, and the one on which she pinned a note asking him to dinner.
Five miles southwest of Pammel State Park, the Roseman Bridge’s fame long predates Waller’s use of it as the centerpiece in his best-selling novel. It is famous for an entirely different reason.
For well over a century the Roseman has been known as Iowa’s most famous haunted bridge.
The story begins on a moonless night before the turn of the last century when the alarm spread through Winterset that a convict had escaped from the county jail there.
Even before sunrise, two posses formed, the better to spread out for a search. They strapped pistols to their waists, grabbed their rifles, and mounted up. The leaders of each band had mapped out their own routes and agreed to rendezvous at the Roseman Bridge.
They were off to give chase. Hours later, shortly before daybreak, as the posses approached the bridge from opposite directions, a cry went up from some of the men that they had seen someone crawl along the Middle River embankment before running onto the covered bridge.
The posse members took cover and prepared to go in after their quarry. The desperado heard shouts for him to surrender. He knew he was trapped.
Or was he?
In a frantic attempt to escape, he climbed the heavy oak support timbers and broke through a weathered section of the roof. The last anyone saw of him was of his legs disappearing through the hole.
What happened next is not known for certain, but deputies believe the man they were pursuing eluded capture by somehow making his way across the roof and then down into the swirling currents of the Middle River. He may have been swept away in the swift water or hidden somewhere in the wooded countryside until the posses dispersed.
Whatever took place, neither the suspect nor his remains were ever found.
Yet something of his presence seems to remain.
Fishermen report hearing jolly laughter from up along the bridge’s roofline and footfalls across the roof on misty summer evenings. Although the “escape hole” was sealed up long ago, visitors still notice the repaired section through which the outlaw slipped.
Another more gruesome legend connected to the Roseman Bridge is equally difficult to verify, but that does not seem to lessen its popularity.
The story is told that a young man in the region made the mistake of falling in love with the daughter of a mean and dangerous man. The old man did not want the boy anywhere near his sweet, young daughter, and so he planted evidence in the boy’s possessions that would make it look like he had stolen from the man. He had not, of course, but that did not stop a mob from forming, which then dragged the unfortunate suitor to Roseman Bridge. He was hanged from a truss in the middle of the bridge and his body left there overnight. It mysteriously disappeared early the next day.
Some visitors notice a distinct cold spot in the center of the bridge about where the man was allegedly hanged. Dogs with their hackles raised sometimes howl and refuse to go all the way across.
During those Covered Bridge Festival weekends each October, experienced guides
take visitors on a narrated tour of all the Madison County bridges. There is always a stop at the Roseman Bridge. Encounters with the ghosts of dead bandits, thwarted suitors, or fictional lovers are not on the advertised itinerary.
Kansas
Old Deg
Emporia
S. C. Dixon should have known something was not quite right when he went to work in the old street-level photography studio at one end of Emporia’s Fox Granada Theatre building in 1974. Dixon had hired on with Udene Burnell, an elderly woman who had bought the business from its founder years before, in 1931. She was now getting ready to sell it herself. Dixon was an eager young man who found the selling price a real bargain for a college student like himself eager to start out in his own business. Udene Burnell stayed on for several months after he bought the studio to train him in photography and business practices. She put all that business acumen into the deal for no extra charge.
All in all it was a very good deal indeed: shop, inventory, customers, and business consulting. But maybe it was such a good buy because of something more, something Dixon could never have imagined. S. C. Dixon discovered the premises came with the ghost of its first owner, D. D. “Old Deg” Degler. He was part of the package.
To say that Degler might have been a sort of supernatural piece of the inventory is understandable. Photographing the people and places of Emporia and eastern Kansas had been his life beginning back in the 1920s. He also was apparently something of an eccentric, Dixon said, a showman of sorts. At one time he owned seven photography studios around Kansas. As an itinerant, traveling photographer, Degler had to hustle up business on his own—from weddings to school graduations, family reunions to business meetings. Many “shoots” were scheduled at one of his photo studios. The man hustled.
S. C. Dixon suspected that there was something Udene Burnell had not told him about the business. For instance, if she and Dixon were in the downstairs darkroom processing film and heard noises coming from upstairs or smelled pipe tobacco smoke, she would speculate that it was Deg checking them out.
Haunted Heartland Page 12