When the Ghost Screams

by Leslie Rule

  Emily was a quiet girl and a good student, embroiled in the drama of the typical teenager. She had quarreled with her boyfriend on Friday, October 17, but did not sit home crying that night. She joined her friends for pizza, advising her parents not to expect her home till midnight.

  At some point that evening, she decided to visit her boyfriend and asked a friend to drop her off near his home. He and his parents, however, reported that she never arrived.

  A witness spotted a young girl matching Emily’s description walking on a deserted street in the early morning hours of Saturday. Someone else in the area heard moaning in the alley behind their house and later discovered a bloody dollar bill and a wig. Though police suspected that the moaning was connected to Emily, the clues made little sense.

  Emily was found strangled in a field on Saturday afternoon.

  “The case has many loose ends,” said Richard. “It was never solved.”

  Poor Emily still wanders in the field where her body was found. Today, Richard Crowe explained, it is the site of the new Morton College, built in the 1970s.

  “The new college was not yet finished when her ghost was spotted,” he said.

  A man was working on the roof when he was startled to see a teenager in white walking along the edge. He called to her, and she stepped out into the air and vanished. “When he ran to the edge and looked down, there was no one there,” said Richard.

  Since that day, the troubled spirit occasionally appears on the roof. She is also known to play with the elevator, slam doors, and toss stones.

  If Emily had not been murdered, she would be fifty-five years old and probably a grandmother by now. But the breath was cruelly snatched from her lungs by a monster. Maybe her killer is still alive and feels no guilt, and that is why the spirit of Emily cannot rest.

  “Perhaps the solution to her murder will free her,” said Richard.

  We don’t know if the detectives harvested and saved DNA from the homicide. If they did, recent scientific breakthroughs could soon put detectives on the heels of the killer. His days may be numbered, and Emily could finally graduate to a peaceful plane.

  Ghosts in the News

  Monster in Our Midst

  THE SITE OF A HORRIFIC unsolved murder in Keddie, California, is believed to be haunted, according to a June 10, 2001, article in the San Francisco Gate.

  Keddie Resort, founded in 1910, was once a placid vacation spot where visitors could rent one of thirty-three rustic cabins or a room in the lodge, reported writer Kevin Fagan. People drove hundreds of miles to the northern Sierra Mountains resort to explore the pristine wooded trails and dine at the Keddie Lodge Restaurant, which was packed nightly as customers lined up to eat wild game and sip fine wine.

  Everything changed on April 11, 1981, when four people were brutally tortured and murdered in Cabin 28. Thirty-six-year-old Glenna Sharp; her son, fifteen-year-old John Sharp; and his friend seventeen-year-old Dana Wingate were bound and killed.

  Sheila Sharp, fourteen, had spent the night at a friend’s, and the poor girl discovered her loved ones in the carnage. Her two younger brothers and their friend who was spending the night were unharmed, but her thirteen-year-old sister, Tina, was missing. Tina’s skull was discovered three years later by a bottle digger.

  With the public too frightened to visit, the resort “rotted into a refuge for squatters and hobos,” wrote Kevin Fagan. He also reported that the campground was being restored and would soon reopen. The “Murder House,” however, was a dark reminder.

  Its windows covered with plywood, and its doors nailed shut, it was a site so filled with evil that even seasoned detectives did not like to step inside. The many curious neighborhood kids and homeless people seeking shelter who have broken into Cabin 28 have all ended up fleeing in terror.

  While some locals were skeptical of the idea that the place is haunted, others told Fagan that they had seen eerie floating figures; had heard footsteps, doors slamming, and moans in the empty house; and had witnessed objects that inexplicably materialized there.

  Frustrated detectives continue to work the very sad cold case that left so many mourning and so few clues.

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  Within the Shadows

  The old beggar woman sometimes drew pitiful stares from the passersby. Other times, people gazed at her with self-righteous scorn. Their eyes said that they thought she was as low as a piece of manure stuck to the bottom of their shoes. They could not see that the ragged woman was more like they were than they could have imagined; that she had been born to a respectable family and had once dreamed of being a wife and mother.

  They did not want to recognize the human bond. The shabby figure was not only a shameful sight, but she would soon become as all who are born will eventually be: dead.

  Maybe something in her eyes made them shiver as they quickened their stride to pass her on the cobblestone street. If they looked too long, they might just recognize the fatal likeness. One day they, too, would be united with her in death.

  There is something about Morrill Hall that makes the skin creep. Perhaps it is the fact that it is one of oldest buildings on the University of Maryland campus and exudes the spooky ambience typical of historic structures. Or maybe it is the ghosts that peek out of the windows at night.

  Students have reported sudden flashes of light in the dark windows, followed by the appearance of an apparition. Framed in the window, the face gazes out. As one brave student approached the window, the image quickly faded.

  Built in 1898, Morrill Hall was the only structure to survive with all its walls intact when a Thanksgiving Day fire roared through the campus in 1912.

  In recent years, workers were installing an air conditioner in Morrill Hall when an overpowering burning odor pervaded the place. Firefighters were called to investigate and concluded that when the drills bored into the walls, they had released vestiges of fumes and ashes from the long-ago blaze.

  Those who have experienced phenomena there wonder what else was released.

  In October 2004 interviews with the student newspaper, the Diamond Back, university staff with offices in Morrill Hall offered varied perspectives on the ghost tales associated with the building. While Charles Cadwell told reporter Caitlin Evans that the odd noises heard there were only squirrels and the wind, June Tuman argued, “There were certain sounds upstairs that sounded like more than the wind and more than squirrels. …”

  June Tuman admitted that she no longer heard the distinctive footsteps emanating from overhead, because she no longer stayed late. She did not, however, clarify if her schedule change was due to fear or convenience.

  A popular Halloween subject among student reporters, Morrill Hall has been written about frequently. And many of the young writers point out a possible connection between the ghosts and a grisly discovery there. Nearly a century ago, the building was used by medical students who dissected cadavers. Everyone was shocked when, years later, someone found human remains there. Workers discovered the parts, long forgotten beneath a sink.

  Do the ghosts on campus belong to those who were so carelessly discarded by sloppy medical students years ago?

  Maybe.

  This writer suspects at least one of the ghosts belongs to a troubled woman who ghost investigators have not yet named. They are likely not even aware of her, for her appalling story unfolded before most of our grandparents were born. She, too, has the roots of her torment planted in the old medical school.

  Emily Brown was born around 1826 and grew up to be a genius with the sewing needle. The daughter of a hotel owner in Easton, Maryland, her young life was comfortable and probably happy. Somehow, the decades slipped by, and she did not fulfill the destiny of women in that era. She never married. She never had a child.

  The middle-aged spinster sought comfort in opium and alcohol. She roomed with a family on Pig Alley in Baltimore and was known on the street as “Beggar Brown.”

  On the morning of December 10, 1886, she ate breakfast wi
th another boarder in the home. No one knows if Emily noticed Anderson Perry scrutinizing her from across the table. No one knows if she felt his eyes, summing her up, calculating the fortune he hoped she would bring him.

  Anderson was a custodian at the nearby University of Maryland’s School of Medicine. He had a get-rich scheme. Students of the medical school needed cadavers to dissect. They needed them so badly that the school paid fifteen dollars for each body brought to them.

  That sounded good to John Thomas Ross and Albert Hawkins. At Anderson’s urging, they slipped into the Pig Alley house and attacked sixty-year-old Emily Brown. They struck her over the head with a brick and stabbed her in the chest. She was packed into a sack, stuffed in a wheelbarrow, and taken straight to the door of the school’s dissection room. Anderson Perry was waiting there, and the three congratulated themselves as they split the cash.

  Five dollars for a day’s work was good pay in 1886. Unfortunately for the killers, the brutal manner of their victim’s death raised suspicions, and the police were called.

  Baltimore citizens were shocked by the headline in the Baltimore Sun, the next day: Burking in Baltimore. The article spoke of the practice, which originated with serial killer William Burke in the 1820s. The onetime Irish grave robber saw a chance for fast cash by murdering people instead of unearthing those who had died of natural causes. He killed approximately thirty people in Edinburgh, Scotland, and sold them for dissection.

  Some folks in Baltimore were so rattled by the “Baltimore Burking” that they refused to go near the medical school for fear they would be killed for dissection. The case accelerated the passing of laws banning payment for cadavers.

  As for the killers, Anderson Perry and Albert Hawkins escaped prosecution. John Thomas Ross was convicted. He was hanged in the summer of 1887.

  In a kind of poetic justice, many years later, Anderson Perry’s body was found among the dissection cadavers after a campus fire. Though he had apparently died of natural causes, he was penniless.

  It may be the ghost of Emily Brown who students have spied peeking from the windows of empty buildings at night. To Emily, it may still be 1886, and she could be baffled by the changing terrain. Her soul might seek refuge in the campus’s oldest structures, as she searches for something familiar.

  Poor Emily will never find her way back to Pig Alley, for the old bumpy street is long gone, replaced by a smooth wide road that runs past the ballpark.

  While Emily is a definite candidate for a University of Maryland ghost, others whose bodies were dissected there may also be bound to the campus. Maybe the smiling child in the big bonnet and the yellow dress served medical science there.

  Or maybe she was a farm girl who lived and died in the area before the school was established.

  The grinning apparition has been witnessed by folks in the campus’s Rossborough Inn. One employee who worked in the 1798 brick building saw the little specter after a gust blew the window open. He peered out and saw the disembodied face smiling at him. When she next appeared, some time later, he could also see her yellow dress and apron.

  Because he had kept the vision to himself, he knew he hadn’t been seeing things when another employee validated his sighting. He confided that he had seen a ghost and also described a smiling girl in a yellow dress.

  Marie Mount is another spirit believed to be tied to the school. The first dean of home economics was said to be so attached to the college that she wished to stay forever.

  Students in the Marie Mount Hall have reported the materialization of her spirit. Others attribute the inexplicable sound of the piano playing to her phantom fingers dancing over the ivories. It happens, they say, on stormy days. When the sky is knitted with thick gray clouds, rain slashes the windows, and the rumble of thunder rolls over the roof, Marie Mount makes music.

  Does the ghost of Marie Mount haunt the University of Maryland campus? (1932 yearbook)

  While her life did not end violently, there are, sadly, no shortages of tragic deaths at the old campus, and therefore, no shortage of ghosts. Perhaps closest to the campus heart, is the ghost of another woman who was the university’s very own. Nearly half a century has past since her unjust death. The students still talk about her, and it is common knowledge that she inhabits the sorority house she helped establish.

  When you gaze at the friendly face of Alma Preinkert in the university’s old yearbooks, the innocence is striking. Her expression is friendly and expectant, as if she believes the future is full of good things.

  The longtime registrar at the University of Maryland was popular with the students. Indeed, she must have empathized with them, as she, too, had attended the university, where she earned a master’s degree.

  The old photos show no sign of a premonition of doom. And that is probably best. Even when she did sense danger near, there was nothing she could do about it. Or was there?

  If Alma Preinkert could say one thing to students today, it may very well be,” Trust your gut. If you have a feeling that something is not right, listen to your instincts before it is too late.”

  Indeed, countless women with close brushes with killers have confided that they avoided tragedy, because they trusted their first inkling that something was not right.

  On the last night of her life, Alma knew something was not right.

  Alma Preinkert smiles from the yearbook of the University of Maryland. (1932 yearbook)

  It was February 28, 1954, and she and her sister, Margaret Heine, had played bridge with friends and returned to their adjacent houses in Washington, D.C., at about one a.m. Alma, fifty-eight, told Margaret of her premonition. They said goodnight, and Alma went into the house she shared with her other sister, Alvina.

  Did Alma wonder if it was not safe to stay in her home that night, or did she dismiss her uneasy feelings as she slipped beneath her blankets?

  We will never know, for as she slumbered, evil lurked outside her home. A burglar found a ladder in a nearby yard, placed it against Alma’s yellow clapboard house, and climbed to her second-story window.

  Only an hour had passed since Alma had shared her premonition with her sister. Now, she awoke to see a man rummaging through her dresser drawers. Caught in the act, he stabbed the terrified woman. The sounds of her screams brought Alvina running to help, and she, too, was knifed. Alvina survived but Alma died.

  Police soon swarmed the house and found just one small clue. It was a gold tie clasp, discovered in Alma’s room.

  Detectives canvassed the neighborhood, interviewing over five hundred people. Neighbors who had heard the frantic screams admitted that they had not rushed to help, because they figured the commotion was “just an alley fight.”

  Classes were suspended for Alma’s funeral. Students crowded the Memorial Chapel to mourn “Miss Preink,” the woman who had always found time to listen. Her funeral was so packed that some students were forced to stand outside in a rainstorm as they paid their respects.

  Alma’s killer has yet to be named. Her unsolved murder is just one more in a staggering stack of cold cases that result in earthbound souls. And it is Alma, students whisper, who is responsible for the perplexing things that happen in a particular sorority house.

  Alma had helped to establish the Maryland chapter of the Kappa Delta Sorority on campus. It’s only natural that she has an attachment to the place, say some girls who have resided there. She is a friendly spirit, and most residents enjoy the novelty of living in a haunted house.

  When an item is mysteriously misplaced, Alma is playfully scolded. The creaking floors, the sudden chills, and the darting shadows are all attributed to her.

  And maybe it was Alma who invited some old friends over for a party one summer day when the sorority house was closed. Witnesses swore they saw girls in white dresses dancing on the porch when the house was deserted.

  If the theory that spirits can take the form of themselves at any age is true, than Alma may have been among the frolicking girls. She could have
materialized as she was in an innocent time, when she, too, was a student with stars in her eyes. While her fate was nothing to celebrate, there was nothing to stop her from celebrating the past.

  Big Moose Murder

  Ever since she was a little girl, Lynda Lee Macken was fascinated by the subject of ghosts. “But I never ever wanted to see one,” said the Forked River, New Jersey, author who admitted that the idea terrified her.

  By the time she had reached thirty without a single sighting, she figured that she would never see a ghost. And she certainly was not looking for one on the dark night she unwittingly visited a murder site and a ghost found her.

  The leading cause of death for pregnant women is not a medical ailment. It is not childbirth, and it is not an accident. It is murder, usually committed by the victim’s boyfriend or husband.

  When Grace Brown found herself unwed and with child, it was a disgraceful situation. In today’s American culture, folks barely blink an eye when an unwed woman gives birth. But Grace became pregnant in 1906, when women didn’t vote, didn’t wear slacks, and certainly did not have babies before marriage without causing a stir.

  Men in that era may have felt even more trapped by an unwanted pregnancy than they do today. Chances are, quite a few of them got away with murder. Chester Gillette was not one of them.

  Chester Gillette met Grace Brown at his uncle’s skirt factory in Cortland, New York. It was 1905, and he found himself attracted to the pretty farm girl. The coworkers dated on the sly, and before long she had unwelcome news for him. She was carrying his baby.

  Did he promise to marry her?

  The letters she sent him, pleading with him to be true to his word, indicated that he had. We can only imagine the hope she felt when it looked as if they were going to be wed, and together boarded a train headed for the Adirondacks, the pristine mountainous region in northern New York. As the rolling green hills flashed past the windows, did Grace and Chester talk about the future, perhaps discussing names for the baby?