Following Florence

The Haunted Seminary Hall tour at Northeastern State University features tales of its longtime principal, Florence Wilson.

By BETTY RIDGE

On a crisp, clear October night, in the dark of the moon, the imagination takes flight.

Under the stately trees, a light flickers. Footsteps shuffle through newly-fallen leaves. A voice whispers, “Sssshhhh!”

More than a century ago, Florence Wilson gazed from her Seminary Hall window down the hill to the young town of Tahlequah, pondering the future of the young women she mentored and nurtured within the stalwart walls of the Cherokee Female Seminary.

Perhaps she still does.

Or so some like to think. Many of the people taking the “Haunted Seminary Hall” tours Friday and Saturday nights certainly were open to the idea.

And Bryan Jones, a graduate student in English, was all too eager to oblige as, carrying a lantern, he led the first tour Friday evening.

“This was the institute and the home for the Cherokee girls’ school, before it became NSU,” he said, standing on the porch of the historic structure.

Opened in 1889, it replaced the first Cherokee Female Seminary, built in Park Hill in 1851 as the first institution of higher education for women west of the Mississippi River. That building burned on Easter Sunday in 1887.

Any discussion of the history of Seminary Hall, and the Female Seminary, has to include its longtime principal Florence Wilson. She lived and worked in Seminary Hall for much of her life.

“The building looks mostly the same. The archway is original, the doors are original,” Jones said. “On the side of the building you can see some strange things.”

While many of the architectural details are not visible in the dark, Jones pointed out traces of where a porch used to be, and a longer window near the west side of the front facade. That used to be a doorway to the chapel, a space now occupied by the writing lab.

Then, there are some strange things that couldn’t be seen as he spoke.

“People have seen a ball of light criss-crossing the building late at night in a fairly logical pattern,” he said.

Like many of the odd tales surrounding Seminary Hall, this one has been attributed to Wilson.

“She used to patrol the halls late at night, carrying a lantern, making sure none of the girls were getting out and nobody was getting in,” Jones said.

Wilson suffered more than one tragedy in her life, but dedicated herself to the education of young Cherokee women. While attending Cane Hill College, she fell in love with Pleasant Buchanan, a math professor. They became engaged, but the Civil War intervened. He enlisted in the Confederate Army, taking many of his students with him. He died at the Battle of Prairie Grove in northwest Arkansas, crushing Wilson’s hopes of marriage.

According to legend, she never considered seriously another suitor. There are tales of girls sneaking into her room to find her unused and yellowed wedding gown, carefully folded, in her trunk.

“She definitely left her mark on this building,” Jones told his audience. “She was supposed to be president for life, but it would have taken an act of Congress to make that happen.”

Under the term of President Grover Cleveland, her job as principal ended, and she moved to Arkansas, where she died in November 1907. Oklahoma’s statehood set the stage for Seminary Hall to be transferred from the now-disbanded Cherokee Nation to the state, where it became the foundation for what is today NSU.

“She died in the month and year of statehood. When she died, the old Cherokee Female Seminary died with her,” Jones said.

Standing in the Seminary Hall lobby, he showed visitors a portrait of Wilson, with the stern expression common to many Victorian women when they were photographed. Jones described her appearance as someone owl-like, and said she was reported as being stern, but not unkind.

Many people think ghosts haunt cemeteries or the place where they died. But Jones had an explanation of why there are so many stories linking Seminary Hall apparitions to Wilson.

“Ghosts are like a fingerprint left behind in time on some important place in their lives,” he said.

Sightings of Wilson haven’t been reported in nearby Wilson Hall. People think she may be checking out the building named in her honor, to see if it meets with her approval.

Other strange incidents focus on the old chapel area. Now the writing lab, it is meticulously kept locked, and only the staff members using it have keys. But frequently the door is found unlocked, even wide open. That could be Florence opening the door early in the morning so the girls could attend chapel, their first even of the day.

Once, a man and woman were studying late at night in the lab.

“They heard a woman’s voice in the middle of the room saying ‘What are you doing here?’ They turned around, and nobody was there,” Jones said.

Shaking their heads, they continued working.

“They heard it again, this time louder,” Jones said.

At that point, the pair decided to abandon their studies for the evening — at least in Seminary Hall.

On the first floor, the northern end of the east side served as the cafeteria and kitchen area.

Jones said the area is honeycombed by tunnels leading to Beta Field. Food supplies were kept cool in the tunnels, and brought up to the kitchen.

“The far end was the only place where men were allowed to work in the building,” he said. “A man’s place was in the kitchen.”

Tour member Joyce Larchey liked that idea.

She said her father had worked in Seminary Hall, as a janitor. Of course, by that time, men were allowed all over the building, even on the second and third floors that were strictly forbidden to them in Wilson’s day.

“I’ve never been in here before, but my dad used to work here,” she said.

The dining area, too, is reputedly haunted.

“Most of the apparitions people have here are auditory — whispers, laughter, a ball bouncing,” Jones said. “There’s also an olfactory haunting.”

That haunting isn’t the pleasant smells of cooking reported in other old places, such as the smell of frying bacon some people have sensed in the kitchen of the Murrell Home.

He explained that teachers and students in the classrooms in that wing have reported a horrible smell that appears suddenly, and disappears equally rapidly.

There’s a theory for that one, too. And, as can be expected, it’s also linked to Wilson. She used to dose her girls with a tonic of sulfur and molasses daily as they entered the dining hall. While modern medicine knows of no medicinal use for such a concoction, it did leak from the pores and cause the poor girls to emit an unpleasant odor.

“I think that was her goal — a sort of early birth control,” Jones said.

As the tour continued, he spun other tales of the lives of the girls. The wealthy ones lived in relative opulence for their day on the second floor, while poorer girls lived on the third floor — still with more opulence than they were accustomed to in the cabins they came from.

Tour members progressed through the sounds of the old building. Their footsteps made the floors creak as they walked along the area of the third floor that formerly housed the infirmary.

“People ask me, has anyone ever died in this building?” Jones said at the beginning of the tour. “Yes, they have. But for that you’ll have to wait until we get to the third floor.”

And there are many more tales. But for those, you’ll have to take the tour yourself and hear them firsthand.