All the old haunts

Tahlequah has no shortage of ghost stories, and area historians took time to scare up a few – just in time for Halloween.

By BETTY SMITH

TAHLEQUAH DAILY PRESS — With its rich heritage as one of Oklahoma's oldest settlements, Tahlequah is a prime spot for believers in the paranormal to look for occult phenomena.

Many believe they have experienced them, whether in old buildings such as Seminary Hall or the Murrell Home, or even outdoors. As the days grow shorter and the leaves fall, thoughts of spirits surge.

Halloween is the modern adaptation of Samhain, an ancient holiday during which the fabric between the world of the living and other worlds was thinnest, and it was possible to make contact with the spirit of those who have gone before.

Cherokee artist Virginia Stroud said she has experienced such phenomena on more than one occasion, and even photographed orbs that represent spirits while in NSU's Seminary Hall. Stroud used to live on Seminary, across from the old W.W. Hastings Indian Hospital (now the Northeastern State University College of Optometry).

"I came out about 6 one morning and there were flatbed wagons out there on the grass, before the apartments were built," she said. There were military tents set up, people coming in and going out."

Later she connected the sight to a smallpox epidemic that occurred years ago.

"They were burning something. At first I thought it was leaves, but it was sheets," she said.

Her house on Seminary produced its share of spooky sounds.

"You would hear things knock around in the bathroom upstairs; you would walk into figures," she said.

Stroud has been commissioned to do some paintings for the new Cherokee Nation clinic in Muskogee, and she went to Seminary Hall to take photos for research.

"I went over during the day. I caught some orbs in the daytime," she said.

Intrigued, she returned to Seminary Hall for one of the nighttime ghost tours, armed with her digital camera.

"They were around outside the building, standing on the landing, standing close to people," she said.

The orbs were visible in some photos and disappeared in others.

"The second floor had a lot of them," Stroud said. "It was really pretty scary."

After the tour, Stroud and three other women walked around outside the building.

"One girl just stopped in her tracks and turned around. She said, 'Did you see them? There were two there at the window, just staring at us. They weren't doing anything, just following us,'" Stroud recalled.

The women kept close together as they returned to their cars.

People who take the Seminary Hall ghost tour hear the story of Florence Wilson, longtime principal of the Cherokee Female Academy. Wilson had hoped to be married, and some people say they've seen a woman, clad in a long, white wedding gown, staring out the windows of the stair landing and smiling.

But Florence's beau, Pleasant Buchanan, never arrived, and she devoted much of the rest of her life to the school and to her girls there.

Girls from the wealthier families occupied the more spacious rooms on the second floor, while poorer girls from rural areas lived on the third floor. The infirmary also was on the third floor, and a number of students died there during epidemics of diphtheria and other ailments.

Seminary Hall is even haunted by food. Some people say they've smelled food baking on the eastern wing of the first floor, where the kitchen was.

The Murrell Home, the most elaborate antebellum home in Cherokee County, naturally has its share of ghost stories.

"I'm not going to tell them to you, though," Site Superintendent Shirley Pettengill said. "You'll have to wait for the ghost stories."

People attending that event will be greeted by candles in jack-o'-lanterns carved that Thursday by Girl Scouts. They'll hear from storytellers such as Al Herrin, Martha Ray and Beth Herrington.

Pettengill has never had any supernatural experiences while in the Murrell Home.

"I have had something weird happen this past month, but you're going to have to wait until the ghost stories to hear about it," she said. "I'm the world's original skeptic. Probably a ghost would have to come up and sit in my lap. But I have had people tell me they've felt things."

People attending the ghost story events will be treated to tales from six storytellers in different rooms on the first and second floors.

Herrington, Tahlequah's best-known historian, will tell different tales each evening. One will feature yarns about Murrell Home ghosts. The other evening she'll focus on the "Jack stories," an oral tradition in mountainous areas of the South, focusing, of course, on a character named Jack.

"They're not really ghost-ghost stories, but they're pretty scary," she said.

Many ghost stories revolve around the Civil War era.

Herrington was one of the people who spearheaded the drive to save the Thompson House, Tahlequah's grand dame at College Avenue and Choctaw Street.

"I've never heard that the Thompson House had a ghost, but I've had people ask me that," she said.

But she has heard of ghosts at the old Central Elementary School.

"The basement is said to be haunted," she said. "I've had teachers tell me they've experienced things."

Herrington, a retired teacher, never taught at Central, but she did teach at other city schools. And she knows where some, at least, of the bodies are buried.

The grave of a child lies north of Central. Herrington said the child's family lived in the area nearby and apparently buried the child on their property. But other children were also buried on the school grounds, she said. During the 1860s, the Central campus was the site of a Baptist mission school. Children stayed at the school year-round, returning home only in the summer. Children who died during the winter were buried on the grounds.

Central isn't the only school with skeletons under its playground. Sequoyah Elementary School shares that distinction. Tahlequah's original cemetery was on that site, and bodies were exhumed and moved up the hill to the cemetery's current location.

But not all the bodies made the trip.

"When they tore the old 1906 building down, I was teaching at Sequoyah," Herrington said. "There were bones found, and they threw them into the foundation. If anything was going to roam, it could do it there."

She believes other bones were not found when they moved the bodies, and are still there.

Herrington lives in a century-old house opposite the school, and she's never seen anything on the playground except lively children.

"I'm a practical person. I've never felt a spirit manifest itself to me," she said.

Another former cemetery, albeit with no known reported hauntings, was across from Sequoyah High School on the site currently occupied by storage buildings. In that graveyard rested people who died at the tribal insane asylum, an eleemosynary (dependent on charity) institution for the elderly and disabled, and orphanage. A few years ago, a monument was placed at that site in their memory.

Of course, ghosts that transcend the boundaries of time can't be expected to observe city limits.

Herrington said her ghost stories at the Murrell Home will feature one about a spirit who allegedly wanders around the stream between the Murrell Home and Rose Cottage, home of Chief John Ross.

And, according to legend, No Head Hollow along the Illinois River derived its name from the story of the widow of a Confederate soldier. While wandering along Goat's Bluff in a vain search for her husband, she was attacked by assailants, who cut off her head. The head fell into the river below the bluff.

Until its demolition several years ago, the McSpadden house on Bluff Avenue was one of Tahlequah's most often-mentioned reputed haunted sites. Before standing vacant, its windows and doors gaping, it was occupied by students for a number of years. Many of the students told of seeing an old man standing atop the staircase.

Jim McSpadden, a descendant of the family who built the house, said he sometimes spent the night with his cousins in the house when he was young. He never saw the old man.

But the kids never went downstairs. It was spooky, said to be haunted, and the spiders were undeniably real.



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