Haunted Kansas

Amazon.com Price: $15.95 (as of 02/05/2019 12:10 PST- Details)

Description

Who’s that? Is someone there? A whisper of air brushes your cheek. Then all is still. Maybe it was once just the wind. Or maybe it wasn’t. . . .

Maybe you’ve just been visited by the late Ida Day lurking in the basement of Hutchinson’s public library or the widow Tarot staring forlornly from an upstairs window at Fort Scott, or the phantom Earl floating in the back of the scenes in Concordia’s Brown Grand Theater. And maybe the horrific Albino Woman actually does haunt Topeka, turning romantic nights into nightmares. . . . maybe.

Pursuing the stories in the back of these and other spectral manifestations, Lisa Hefner Heitz has traveled the state on the lookout for its ghostly folklore. What she has unearthed is a fascinating blend of oral histories, contemporary eye-witness accounts, and local legends. Creepy and chilling, now and again humorous, and all the time engaging, her book features tales about ghosts, poltergeists, spook lights, and a host of other restless spirits that haunt Kansas.

Heitz’s spine-tingling collection of stories raps and taps and moans and groans through a wealth of descriptions of infamous Kansas phantoms, in addition to disconcerting personal experiences related by former skeptics. Many of these ghosts, she shows, are notoriously linked to specific structures or locations, whether it is an eighteenth-century mansion in Atchison or a deep—some have claimed bottomless—pool near Ashland.

The evanescent apparitions of these tales have frightened and at times amused Kansans right through the state’s long history. Yet this is the first book to capture for posterity the lively antics of the state’s ghostly denizens. But even so preserving a colorful and imaginative, if intangible, side of the state’s popular heritage, Heitz supplies ghost-storytellers with ample hair-raising material for, well, eternity. Maybe that person breathing softly in the back of you has another such story to share. Oh, no one’s there? Perhaps it actually was once just the breeze off the prairie.

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