Ghost Whispers Read online

  GHOST WHISPERS

  Tales from Haunted Midway

  A Collection of Illinois Ghost Stories from Rockford & Surrounding Regions

  William Gorman

  Ghost Whispers

  All Rights Reserved © 2005

  by William Gorman

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying,

  recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher or author.

  Helm Publishing

  To obtain permission, address: Helm Publishing 3923 Seward Ave. Rockford, IL 61108 815-398-4660 www.publishersdrive.com

  ISBN 0-9769193-2-X Printed in the United States of America dedication

  For all my true friends and family; you know who you are. For all of the animals I’ve loved and lost through the years, all the trees I climbed in my youth. You made me who I am, shaped me into the person and the writer before you now. And for all my kindred spirits out there; I’ll miss you when this life is over. Hopefully we’ll find each other again, somewhere beyond the veil in the next one….

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  1. The Cistern Ghost..............................................1

  2. Sleep.................................................................11

  3. The Drowning of Nellie Dunton......................18

  4. Bones in a Box.................................................26

  5. Fated Remains..................................................34

  6. The Terrible Legacy of Marah Penfield ..........41

  7. The Swimming Hole........................................49

  8. Darkwood: Uncle Jolo’s Casket ......................58

  9. The Saltbox Place ............................................69

  10. The Ghost of Beulah the Meridian Witch......78

  11. Pitter-Patter...................................................90

  12. Kinderhook’s Haunted Farmhouse................96

  13. An Evening Stroll ........................................103

  14. The Events on Blood’s Point Road..............130

  15. Emma ...........................................................144 Afterword While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

  —Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822)

  Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)

  Preface

  I n your hands you hold a bit of a curiosity, a personal offering from me to you. Ever since I can remember, and probably even before that, I’ve been fascinated by the voices of the past. Folk tales and legends have always drawn me, rich in their language, mysterious in their telling and retelling. At a very young age I came to appreciate the familiar, rhythmic relating of forgotten lore, of childhood fear. Of ghost stories. Contemporary ones as well as the more traditional variety.

  The Midwest is alive today still with such tales. It always has been: spectral lost souls sorrowing forsaken down dimly lit Victorian corridors, portals flickering unseen between worlds, iridescent fog creeping eerily through the lacy darkness of crumbling Illinois cemeteries. Where does one begin? We could start I suppose with our locale for tonight, the city of Rockford itself and her nearby environs, a place which was first called Midway back in 1834 by a Connecticut land speculator named Germanicus Kent (although rumor has it that it was actually Mrs. Kent’s suggestion, the former Miss Arabella Amiss) who found that the village boundaries lay roughly midway the distance between Chicago and Galena. A place teeming from the very outset with an assortment of distinctive characters, of scoundrels and saints, and with its own fair share of the eccentric and the tragic; of melancholy and of mirth, reflected over the many changing years through a prism of distant beliefs and inherent superstition. A place of forgotten lore, of childhood fear. Of ghost stories. At first, my idea for this collection wasn’t greeted with much enthusiasm. Few people it seemed were interested anymore in tales regarding the macabre likes of things such as burial ground legacies or long-dead visitors coming back to roam the night, especially those with local ties, dredged up from such shadowy and witching-hour origins. Nevertheless, it was a collection I felt deserved to be harvested. In fact, I was somewhat surprised that one hadn’t already been compiled. Then slowly, almost grudgingly, stories began to surface during my research, first out of the area’s newspaper archives, then later on from individual accounts and other oral source histories. Apparently there was still some viable necessity for the relating of ghostlore after all, even in this detached, often anxious age of consumer technology and heightened security we share together.

  Yet my purpose tonight is not to debate the issue. I seek simply to entertain. To give pause, yes; to drain away, however briefly, the safe warmth of conviction and to create uneasy chills, most definitely. But mainly to weave a few compelling yarns which with hope will engage the imagination for a sitting or two.

  The following stories come from a variety of people and places, persons just like yourself who reside in sleepy, practical neighborhoods like your own, scattered all throughout the Rock River Valley and over most of north-central Illinois. It is they to whom this book belongs, the ones that cautiously offered up their tales, the ones who christened their own bit of legacy and in doing so helped contribute, if only a jot, to the historic and the folkloric character of this place once upon a time known as Midway. The township was later renamed Rockford by Dr. Josiah C. Goodhue (because of our mighty river’s splendid, rock-bottom ford) but is also widely heralded as the Forest City due to its majestic abundance of trees, and has since settled into the esteem of being third largest city in Illinois. At its roots, however, there remains today an underlying mist of consciousness from that first little village of thriving yet superstitious immigrants so long ago; echoes of the stories their fathers brought with them, of the songs their mothers sang to them at bedtime. Sure, the impulsive Dr. Goodhue was once accused of desecrating the final resting spot of American Indian chief Big Thunder and making off with the corpse’s skull. And true, somewhat peculiarly, the good doctor did later meet his own demise by falling down a well on New Year’s Eve. But this only adds to the town’s charm and light, don’t you think? And goes toward bolstering my earlier assertion.

  Even before there was a Midway, there were already countless spooks haunting the landscape here.

  Some of these stories I’ve heard before, on the front porch of a 120-year-old farmhouse in my youth. Some of them are new to me. But I can still remember the treasures bestowed on those warmest of summer eves, spirited yarns told with relish by the gathering of elders, me among the helpless lumped mesmerized at their feet. Come a bit closer and you’ll hear them, too, like subtle whispers from a faraway past.

  William Gorman Rockford, Illinois 13 October 2001

  The vacant Cistern Ghost house, lurking beneath its hundred-year-old maple trees.

  The Cistern Ghost

  A t one time in Winnebago County, almost every homestead boasted its own water well somewhere on the property, for keeping fresh rainwater close at hand. Today, though, most of these old ‘cisterns’ as they were called have all but disappeared, either filled in or built right over, their likes no longer needed in this comfortable, modernized world of ours.

  In the spring of 1970, a family from North Carolina purchased an acre or so of Rockford land and moved into a small two-story house located here. Their nine-year-old daughter Naomi did not take to the place immediately, still lonesome for the school friends she’d left behind in the southeast.
The girl—terribly shy to begin with—withdrew from everyone that rainy first summer, keeping mostly to herself throughout the warm months of June and July.

  Then, one night in early August, the singing began.

  It seemed to come from the second-floor attic, and Naomi listened with eyes wide, lying completely frozen in her narrow bed. It sounded like a woman’s voice singing a lullaby somewhere above her, only in another language, one which Naomi could not understand. She said nothing to her parents the next day, perhaps doubting her own senses, perhaps hoping it would stop and somehow go away. But it did not go away. Instead, the eerie singing continued the following evening, and each evening thereafter, until finally, just when Naomi thought she might be dreaming the entire thing, her mother crept into her bedroom one stormy night with a flashlight and whispered, “Is that you singing, Naomi? Do you have the radio on?”

  “No, mother,” Naomi told her, eyes shifting to the ceiling of her room. “It’s up there. Can you hear it, too?”

  Together, they steeled themselves and ascended the creaky attic stairs to investigate, while the rest of the household slept. All they found were cobwebs and some of their unpacked boxes from the move; a thrumming silence greeted them when they reached the top, only the sound of rain falling on the slanted roofs. Truly perplexed, her mother led Naomi carefully back down and tucked her into bed, telling her daughter not to worry. She even left a small table lamp on as a night-light for her. But after midnight the storm grew worse, and when the wind shrieked and the thunder and lightning came, the table lamp began flickering erratically off and on. Naomi sat up in bed, terrified for a moment, and slowly a scream began bubbling in her throat.

  Through the curtains of her window she saw a figure outside in the rain, standing near the cistern out in the yard alongside of their house. It was a woman, and when the lightning flashed again Naomi could see her long flowing skirts and the knitted shawl she wore. Her head seemed bowed, as if looking to the ground. In crossed, bloodless arms she clutched what looked like a small harp to her chest. And just like that, she was gone….

  Well, the sighting of this apparition Naomi also kept to herself. What did parents know of such awful things? They would never believe her. For even though her mother heard the strange singing, too, her father and brother had merely laughed when told about the happenings of the evening before. And so, many things went undiscussed the remainder of that summer, especially the thing seen lingering over the old concrete cistern lid out in the storm that night. Naomi started her classes in the fall at Wight Elementary School, which wasn’t very far from her home. The other children seemed all right, for the most part, and there was a corner mom-andpop candy store just across the street from the school; collectively, things weren’t too bad. The little store was owned by an elderly couple named Klontz, and soon Naomi made a point of stopping there every day after the 3:15 bell—after the other kids had all scurried off on their various ways—to spend some of her extra nickels and pennies on malted milk balls and sugarstick candy.

  “You become quite the regular, eh, little Miss No-mee?” said Mrs. Klontz one bright October day, her accent thick and slow like syrup. “You know what that means, don’t you, child?” Naomi shook her head: “No, what?”

  “It means we give you now the same treatment we give all our regulars.” The old woman paused here, looking serious. “We aggravate you, that is, every chance we get!” Together, her husband and she burst into laughter, though Naomi didn’t get the joke. She browsed a bit longer, chewing her lower lip in deep concentration of what her selections might be. Then Mr. Klontz, feather duster in hand, said to her, “Your family, they buy the house on the hillside, true? The Maffioli house, not far from here?” “Who?” He was eyeing her closely, she noticed. “Tell me, child, how are you? Is everything all right up there?”

  She stared at him, frowning slightly. “Yes. Why would—?”

  “No reasons, no reasons,” the old man insisted. But he leaned down, as if to study her face. “Hmm, your eyes, they seem…how you say?…Puffiness, yes. Tell me, hmm, do you sleep well at night? Up there, I mean?”

  And at that, Naomi felt herself go rigid. She swallowed, not knowing what to say. Mrs. Klontz barked something in German at her husband, something sharp and not without warning. He responded back with an appeal of his own, and suddenly the interior of the tiny store became very hushed. After a few seconds, the quiet was at last ended. “Go on, then,” sighed Mrs. Klontz tiredly. “Go

  on and speak if you must, this ghastly thing.” In the minutes that followed, old Mr. Klontz told young Miss Naomi about the Maffioli couple who’d settled here into the Rock River Valley from some funny-sounding place over in Italy and had built their little dream home, the home where she herself now stayed, how they had lived there during the turn of the century and how they always yearned to start a family of their own. Finally, he explained, the newlyweds were blessed upon and soon pretty Corine Maffioli had given birth to a healthy darkhaired girl. Her husband Edmund made a cradle for the baby with his two able hands, and Corine would play the harp for her nearly every night, singing her off to sleep in one of the upstairs rooms. They loved each other very much, and there was nothing they would not do for their only child.

  But then, one night in early August, Corine’s little daughter was abducted. The young mother supposedly became so frantic that she went out of her mind with terror, and though search parties were quickly formed, nothing was ever found. Mr. and Mrs. Klontz remembered this vividly, because they were both still fairly young themselves, living in this same neighborhood at the time of the disappearance.

  “It was rumored that before it happened, she found a hollow space at the center of a loaf of bread she’d baked,” said Mrs. Klontz here, “and that from this omen she knew someone would soon die.”

  Corine eventually gave up hope and took to sitting in the attic all alone, strumming her harp and singing lullabies in Italian to an empty cradle, a cradle which was never again to be occupied. After more than an entire year of this maddening grief, Edmund took the wooden cradle and in a fit threw it down the cistern well, praying for closure of some kind and for an end to their suffering. The next day, Corine Maffioli threw herself from an upstairs window of their house on the hillside, ending her young, unfortunate life.

  Since then, Mr. Klontz carefully revealed, no one has stayed on very long at the old two-story home. Tenants have come and have briskly gone, complaining of weird noises and other things ‘going bumping in the night’, as he phrased it. He told Naomi that he wasn’t trying to scare her, but asked if she herself had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary lately, or anyone else in her family perhaps, considering most of the occurrences seemed to come during the summer and autumn seasons. Naomi lied and said no, everything was just fine, and Mrs. Klontz nodded purposefully as she removed her apron. She presented the girl a jar of chokecherry jelly as a gift for her parents and a bag of assorted candy Kits for herself and her brother, telling her not to worry in the least, that even if she did ever see something out of the ordinary up there, it wasn’t anything to be afraid of.

  “Sometimes out of the ordinary isn’t so bad, eh, little Miss No-mee?” the old woman encouraged. “Nothing frightening to it at all, really. You remember that, child, and come back soon so we have somebody to aggravate, eh?” And with a gentle caress of her cheek, Mrs. Klontz smiled and sent her on her way.

  Hardly knowing what to make of this, Naomi kept the amazing story under her hat. Could such a thing actually be true? And even if it wasn’t, how had they known about the mysterious disturbances up at the house? She pondered these questions well into the days which followed, while October leaves began to fall all around. Late one afternoon, just before dusk, Naomi’s father was out in the yard raking. The rest of the family sat watching television in the living room as he worked quietly away in the shadows of the fading twilight. Naomi felt relaxed for the first time in weeks; the mournful singing coming from the attic had
diminished a bit within the recent past. Outside, her father decided now that he’d make good use of the old abandoned cistern and throw all the leaves he dared down into it, filling it in. He raked them near as he could into a big pile, then he struggled and strained to slide the heavy concrete lid off to one side. Just then, the lights began flickering inside the small house. The television went off, then everything went off. Naomi’s mother promptly lit votive candles for them to see by.

  When Naomi’s father had finally gotten the massive square lid removed, he paused a moment, leaning on the handle of his rake to catch his breath. Behind him, a lamp crackled in the window as the power surged back up again, buzzing the bulb off and on. And indoors, through an ornate archway leading into a darkened kitchen where the door to the attic stood strangely open, Naomi suddenly saw the luminous form of a woman. The sorrowful figure, which seemed to be composed of tiny particles—it was possible to gaze through it— flowed mutely into the living room and beside Naomi’s chair. The girl sat staring in awe, remembering what Mrs. Klontz had said and trying not to show her fear. Meanwhile her father had begun disposing of the leaves. He hesitated, however, having spotted something peculiar in the blotchy gloom. Using his rake to root around with, he discovered part of an object protruding from the refuse down inside the well. Naomi remained motionless as the Italian bride reached one pale hand out reverently and brushed her bare arm with a curious, icy touch. Under its shawl Naomi saw it mouthing what looked like the words, “Cold, so cold…”, and she herself could not help but shiver. Then her mother at last walked back into the room and screamed out loud in the eerie lightshow. At this piercing sound the gauzy, ghostly creature visibly flinched, jerked both arms upwards and immediately exploded into a thousand sparklike fragments which then just winked out and disappeared.

  At that moment, outside in the yard, Naomi’s father had unearthed what turned out to be a child’s wooden cradle, discarded long ago and buried deep within the dark cistern.