In Iowa, the Macks discovered what they called “witches shoes” in their attic, which they described as narrow, old, ankle-height, black, leather shoes with sharply pointed toes. Pieces of old newspapers had been stuffed inside them to keep their shape. They were so tiny that the Macks’ young girls could not get them on.
Their Eveleth attic did not conceal old shoes, but one day Tim Mack did find one of his guns lying on the attic floor. It was the top rifle from his gun rack, which he kept in the attic. Neither Jan nor the girls ever touched the guns, of course, and there was no way it could have fallen to where Tim found it.
Their Minnesota and Iowa homes may have also shared hauntings, Tim said. The family believed a friendly spirit lived in their Iowa home. On that first day in Eveleth when the light came quickly on above the stairway, they wondered if the ghost had not perhaps traveled with them.
Jan smiled. “Who knows?” she said. “There are experiences we can’t always explain.”
The following February the family moved to a manufactured home outside Eveleth. They wanted more space for their growing family. They were much happier after they had moved from the apartment. And, they noted, nothing seemed to have moved with them.
Of their short stay in that Eveleth apartment, Tim pointed out that there was not a single, frightening moment but more of a sense that “something” they could not see kept them company, just as it did in Webster City.
He echoes his wife’s sentiments. “I’ve always felt that there is another world, some other plane. There are things that I don’t think anyone could ever explain.”
Tim and Jan Mack eventually moved on to southern Minnesota, where they owned several weekly newspapers. Publishing small-town newspapers kept them busy, but they often looked back on their time in Eveleth.
Jan Mack sighed and looked around her husband’s cluttered office. “Sometimes I wish we had a friendly spirit around here to help out with things.”
But they said they had no reoccurrence of hauntings; their friendly Eveleth spirit, if that is indeed what it was, evidently decided to stay Up North.
Tim Mack grins. “Fishing for walleyes, no doubt.”
The Specter Priest
Winona
August 27, 1915. Patrick R. Heffron, bishop of the Winona diocese, was celebrating Mass in the empty chapel of St. Mary’s College in Winona, Minnesota. Dust motes danced in a shaft of gray light from a high window. Dawn was the bishop’s favorite hour—the day was new and fresh and full of promise. Yet on this day the bishop felt apprehensive. Perhaps it was the heat, already oppressive; his vestments hung heavy upon his shoulders and sweat beaded his forehead.
Bishop Heffron had just raised the chalice when he heard a door latch click behind him. No one ever entered the chapel at this hour. Had a restless student or nun come to join him? He listened for footsteps. There were none. Strange. He spun around and saw Father Lesches, one of the college tutors, dressed in a Prince Albert suit, standing against the back wall. A revolver was in his hand. He raised it and aimed at the bishop.
The first shot struck the bishop in the left thigh. The second tore into the right side of his chest and penetrated his lung. A third bullet shattered the top of the altar.
Bishop Heffron slumped against the altar, a pool of blood spreading beneath his feet. A blood-stained Mass card lay nearby.
The assailant fled, the bishop staggering after him until he collapsed in the chapel doorway. Father Thomas Narmoyle, who was crossing the lawn, rushed to the bishop’s side.
Ten minutes later, the Winona police arrested Father Laurence Michael Lesches for assault in the first degree. The priest, located in his room, did not resist arrest. He said he shot Bishop Heffron because the bishop had called him unfit for the religious life and better suited to work on a farm. The revolver lay in an open suitcase and a shotgun was found in the priest’s trunk.
At the hospital, officers questioned Bishop Heffron. It was common knowledge that although the bishop and the priest had known each other for seventeen years, they had never gotten along. Bishop Heffron, a visionary committed to education, had single-handedly raised the funds to establish St. Mary’s College. He was respected and generally well liked but dealt ruthlessly with associates who flouted his orders or failed, in some way, to meet his standards.
Father Laurence Michael Lesches never met those standards. An arrogant, abrasive man in whom the arts of diplomacy and negotiation were wholly lacking, he had few friends.
Bishop Heffron, in recounting his last meeting with Father Lesches, told the investigators that the priest had pleaded again for a parish of his own, saying that at age fifty-five he should have the security of settling in one place instead of being transferred from one parish to another.
“But I told him that he was too emotionally unstable to handle such an assignment,” explained the bishop. “I have believed that for years and again I suggested that he consider farm work, which would not require close, personal relationships.”
On December 1, 1915, Winona judge George W. Granger called his court to order. The proceedings of the State of Minnesota v. L. M. Lesches had begun.
The trial lasted two days.
Bishop Heffron, recovered from his wounds, was the state’s chief witness. He testified that Father Lesches was mentally disturbed, unable to distinguish between right and wrong at the moment of the shooting, and unable to judge the effect of his act.
Other witnesses supported the bishop’s testimony. Father Thomas Narmoyle testified that he saw Father Lesches running from the chapel on the morning of August 27 with Bishop Heffron staggering after him. The pistol was entered as evidence in the case.
Court-appointed defense attorneys also pleaded their client’s disturbed mental condition. And Dr. Arthur Sweeny, the priest’s personal physician and final witness for the defense, stated that Father Lesches was a paranoiac and a potentially dangerous man to be at large.
The jury returned its verdict in less than an hour: acquittal on grounds of insanity, with the recommendation that the defendant be committed to a mental institution.
Father Lesches was transported to the State Hospital for the Dangerously Insane in St. Peter. Embittered by his confinement, he nevertheless began to trust his physicians and to cooperate with them in his care.
Several years later, the doctors pronounced the priest in sound mental and physical health and recommended his release. But Bishop Francis W. Kelley, successor to Bishop Heffron, refused to sign the necessary papers.
Father Lesches languished in the state hospital and died there of a heart condition on January 10, 1943. He was eighty-four years old and had been hospitalized for twenty-nine years. His remains were returned to Winona and buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery, two and a half miles from the campus.
Twelve years before Father Lesches’s death, his presence on the campus was recalled by a strange event.
On May 15, 1931, a nun entered the room of Father Edward W. Lynch in order to clean it. She found the priest sprawled across the bed—dead. The bed and the body simulated a cross, the bed forming the vertical part and the body the horizontal beam. The corpse, lying face upward, was charred all over. The priest’s Bible was also burned. Nothing else in the room had caught fire, not even the bedsheets.
The Winona coroner determined that the priest had died early that morning. Father Lynch had been lying in bed reading. Apparently he reached up to turn off his faulty bed light and ten volts of electricity in the light killed him instantly. But experts said the voltage was not enough to completely char the body.
Father Lynch was a close friend of Bishop Heffron and an enemy of Father Lesches. The two priests had lived together in St. Mary’s Hall. They had had numerous arguments, and on one occasion, Father Lesches predicted Father Lynch would go to hell because of his interest in athletics.
Close examination of Father Lynch’s charred Bible revealed a single passage that was not burned: “And the Lord shall come again to the sounding of trump
ets.” This was a verse that Father Lesches had once repeated to Father Lynch.
Had Father Lesches put a curse on his enemy because he was the bishop’s friend? The priest’s death remains mysterious and unexplained.
In that same year, a priest living on the campus died in a fire. And three other priests were killed in an airplane crash.
In 1921 a new dormitory on St. Mary’s campus was named Heffron Hall to honor Bishop Patrick R. Heffron. The bishop died of cancer six years later.
Since shortly after Father Lesches’s death in 1943, students living in Heffron Hall have reported strange, late-night footsteps and rappings, unusual drafts, and cold spots on the third floor. Papers lift from the hall bulletin board when no breeze is stirring, and students sometimes suffer identical nightmares on the same night.
One night in 1945, Mike O’Malley, a third-floor resident, was walking along the dimly lit corridor to his room. Hearing footsteps behind him, he turned around.
No one was there. He hurried to his room, pushed open the door, and slammed it shut. The footsteps stopped outside the door. Someone knocked. Mike opened the door. A dark-cloaked figure stood there, his face hidden by shadows.
The student thought it was a resident priest. “What do you want, Father?”
The only response was a deep groan. And then three words: “I want you.”
Mike slugged the figure in the jaw. He broke every bone in his hand. His roommate, who claimed to have seen the visitor’s face, said it was made of clay.
School disciplinary records noted that a student had broken his hand in a fight in the cafeteria. But no one on campus was known to have suffered a broken jaw.
More than twenty years later, a student on the fourth floor of Heffron Hall started to walk down the staircase to the third floor but felt restrained by an invisible force.
Once several staff members of Nexus, a weekly student publication at St. Mary’s, launched an investigation into the purported incidents at Heffron Hall. Photographers, researchers, and witnesses were brought in to work under the direction of Robert Kairis, an instructor of history and advisor to the Nexus staff.
The team spent two nights on the third floor of the hall, using high-speed cameras with infrared film to record changes in temperature, equipment to measure changes in heat and pressure, and tape recorders, in the company of Kairis and other faculty members.
Just before two o’clock each morning, the instruments showed a drop of ten to fifteen degrees in the seven-hundred-foot-long corridor; the temperature dropped perceptibly—every one hundred feet. Natural causes, such as open doors and windows, were ruled out.
Cold spots are known to occur in structures purportedly occupied or visited by ghosts. Does this prove Heffron Hall is haunted? Which of the priests could be haunting the building?
It is often believed that the spirits of persons who have led troubled lives cannot rest. Of the three priests—Bishop Heffron, Father Lynch, and Father Lesches—only the latter suffered a life of bitter frustration.
In addition, the footsteps were not heard until after Father Lesches’s death.
He died between one thirty and two o’clock in the morning, about the time the temperature in Heffron Hall starts to drop. He always used a black, gold-headed cane when he was out walking, which could explain the rappings students have heard.
The legends that have grown up around the ghosts of Heffron Hall are nearly impossible to verify; indeed, the bulk appear to have little if any basis in fact. Yet they continue to circulate on campus. Each has enough touch of the authentic to appreciate why they will not fade away anytime soon.
Mrs. Moriarity Comes Calling
St. Paul
Dick Gibbons sat back in the comfortable armchair of his small study off the living room in his tidy St. Paul home and picked up the novel he was reading. An English teacher by profession, Dick thought that here among his book collection was the perfect place to spend time with the fictional characters he tried to bring to life in the classroom. This room, this private place of his own, was one of the unique features that first persuaded Dick and his wife, Valjean, to buy the well-kept, two-story, brick house on Goodrich Avenue a few months earlier.
He liked nothing better than to settle into his favorite chair and read, as on this particular spring evening. His yellow Labrador was snoring contentedly on the floor beside him. Unexpectedly, since there was no sound save for the occasional car passing on the street outside, the dog raised her head and whined. Dick glanced down and saw her staring at something in the living room that adjoined the study. When she growled again, Dick put down the book and led her into the next room.
Dick remembers well what he saw there.
“The rocking chair was going back and forth as if someone were having a good time. I suddenly felt clammy and very nervous, like all the blood was rushing to my head.”
Dick did not trust his eyes at first. The light from his reading lamp in the library barely penetrated the darkened living room. He reached around the corner and switched on the overhead chandelier. The chair was still moving. He looked at his watch and timed the chair’s movements. It rocked for another one minute and fifteen seconds and then abruptly stopped.
Dick had no idea how long it had been moving before he noticed it. He took the dog by the collar and tried to lead her to the chair, but she dug her claws into the carpeting, stiffened her legs, and stayed right where she was. She never took her eyes from the rocker.
A few seconds later, the dog’s gaze moved across the room as if following something with her eyes. Then she bolted from Dick’s grasp and trotted into the dining room and on toward the kitchen. At the foot of a stairway leading to the second floor, she stopped, sniffed, and looked up. Dick followed her gaze up the stairs but could make out nothing unusual.
That eerie experience marked Dick Gibbons’s first brush with the supernatural. He later confided, “The rocking chair episode changed me from a mocking skeptic to a believer.”
Dick’s wife, Valjean, would also change her views. One afternoon six weeks after her husband’s strange night, Valjean was home alone, finishing a painting project. She went down into the cellar to fetch her can of paint. The lid was stuck fast. She pried the top all the way around but could not loosen it.
Finally, she decided to get a bigger screwdriver from a toolbox in the kitchen. When she got back to the cellar the lid from the paint can was gone. The can itself had not been moved. She never found the lid.
In late summer of that same year, Valjean again found herself at home by herself when a crash of breaking glass from the old cellar sent her running down there. Two stacks of storm windows were piled on the floor. Dick had propped the windows against a wall at the beginning of the summer. Now they had fallen—in the opposite direction from the way they were stacked. The window glass was cracked in only two of them.
Dick and Valjean were not the only ones who found there was something odd about the house. They had a difficult time finding babysitters. None of the available teens on the block ever seemed to be available.
Dick Gibbons suspected it was because they thought their house was haunted.
The couple started to research the home’s history, hoping to find a clue to the mysterious events. A family named Moriarity had built the house during World War I and it had remained in the family until the Gibbonses bought it. Neighbors said old Mrs. Moriarity lived alone for some time before moving to a nursing home. Apparently she claimed to have awakened one night to find a man staring down at her. She thought it was a ghost. Skeptics claimed the elderly woman had either dreamed or imagined the incident. A few people said a burglar had broken in.
The Gibbonses never found out just who their uninvited guest was. They concluded it must have been a member of the Moriarity family who resented “outsiders” in the house. Or perhaps Mrs. Moriarity just wanted to see what kind of people had bought her house.
In any event, if the ghost was indeed a member of the Moriarity fami
ly, it must have been satisfied—the peculiar incidents ended as quickly as they had begun.
The Invisible Homesteader
Monticello
On storm-filled nights when the wind was high, Bob Jameson roamed the darkened rooms of his Monticello farmhouse.
“C’mon, Tobias,” he shouted when no other living soul seemed to be present. “Scare the hell out of me!”
But Tobias took no orders from the living. He was a ghost. That is what Bob and his wife, Marion, came to believe. And so did the townspeople. Tobias Gilmore Mealey, familiarly known as T. G., built the Jamesons’ house in 1855. Bob and Marion said he never left the premises.
The Jamesons never saw Tobias exactly, but they heard him on plenty of occasions. “He’s a pleasant old fellow,” observed Marion, not the least bit dismayed at his antics. “He was here first.”
Bob and Marion Jameson bought their house in 1965 and for ten years witnessed a number of odd incidents—footsteps pacing the upstairs rooms when they were empty, beds shaking by themselves, lights turning on by unseen hands, loud knocks and persistent raps shaking doors and windows.
The white frame Mealey house straddled a hilltop at the end of a winding road off East Broadway in the little Mississippi River town of Monticello. There, Tobias, an early city father, and his wife, Catherine, raised their five children.
The old Mealey place was in a shambles when the Jamesons first saw it. Vacant for years, it was ravaged by vandals and neglect. Poison ivy vines grew everywhere; in the winter, ice formed on the basement floor; and skunk families took up residence each fall. Yet beneath the dilapidation, Bob and Marion sensed the charm of a comfortable old house and began its restoration.
The couple, longtime Minneapolis antique dealers, moved to Monticello after losing their Twin Cities home to an urban renewal project. Bob accepted a position as librarian at the Veterans Administration hospital in nearby St. Cloud, while Marion became the Wright County historian. The Jamesons moved their antique business with them and amusingly dubbed their new home “Chaos Castle.”
Haunted Heartland Page 21