Haunted Lawrence

tours.)

INTRODUCTION

Located just forty miles west of Kansas City along the banks of the Kaw River* is the city of Lawrence. Today a moderately sized college town, Lawrence has a rich history that stretches all the way back to 1854, when it was but a small outpost established by abolitionists from Massachusetts. Founded on the eve of the Bleeding Kansas period (stretching roughly from 1855 until 1861), the city played an integral part in the Free State movement and has held a major place in Kansas history ever since. But while the city’s past is well known and often recounted by the locals, what many people do not realize is that there is also a paranormal side to Lawrence.

To anyone well versed in the history of Lawrence, this might come as no surprise. The storytellers say that violent and traumatic events are why the spirits of the dead persist in the mortal world, and Lawrence has experienced its fair share of violence and trauma. As a result, there are stories that today are whispered from one resident to another contending that Lawrence is practically teeming with ghosts. In this book, I have thus made it my mission to understand where these stories came from and how they developed over time.

But to better understand the purported ghosts of Lawrence, it would do well for one to learn more about the city’s origin. On May 30, 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed into law by President Franklin Pierce, opening up Kansas to settlement; the act also let the settlers themselves vote on the legality of slavery in the new territory. As a result, in the summer of 1854, the decidedly antislavery New England Emigrant Aid Company (based out of Boston, Massachusetts) sent Dr. Charles Robinson and Charles Branscomb west to find a location for a potential city. This group was hoping to establish a town for like-minded settlers, thereby helping to ensure Kansas’s admittance into the Union as a Free State. Robinson and Branscomb soon discovered the area situated between the Kaw and Wakarusa Rivers, and the two agreed that it would be an ideal site for a settlement.

The first group of settlers, consisting of twenty-nine men, left Massachusetts on July 17, 1854, and arrived at the chosen site on August 1; a second group of sixty-seven settlers arrived on September 9. Almost a month later, on October 6, the city was officially founded and dubbed Lawrence City after one of the New England Emigrant Aid Company’s most important patrons, Amos Lawrence. Because most of the original settlers were from Massachusetts, the state’s name was given to Lawrence’s main street, and to this day, Massachusetts Street (often referred to simply as Mass) is one of the city’s most important roads.

Soon after its founding, Lawrence quickly became a bastion for the Kansas Free State movement. This was something of an issue, as just five miles west of Lawrence lay Lecompton, the then-territorial capital of Kansas and a proslavery bastion. Tensions quickly grew and eventually erupted into a full-on conflict: the Wakarusa War. This event was instigated by the death of a Free-Stater named Charles Dow, who was killed by a proslavery individual named Franklin N. Coleman on November 21, 1855. Soon thereafter, pro- and antislavery forces amassed, which resulted in Douglas County sheriff Sam Jones and a group of Missourians invading the state and attacking Lawrence. Thanks largely to the efforts of John Brown and James Lane, however, Jones and his men were unable to do little more than fruitlessly lay siege to the city. The conflict officially ended on December 9, 1855, with only one casualty.

But that was not the end of the violence. The following year, after Jones was wounded by a Free-Stater, he and a group of eight hundred men descended on Lawrence once again, this time ransacking much of the city. This attack resulted in the destruction of the two Free State newspapers located in the city—the Herald of Freedom and the Free State—as well as the Free State Hotel. Despite this disaster, the city rebuilt and grew, eventually becoming the Douglas County seat.

For many years, the city prospered, until August 21, 1863. It was on this day that one of the most traumatic events in Lawrence history took place: the sack of the city by Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill.* During their attack, Quantrill and a group of raiders massacred 164 male civilians and razed the city. The atrocities committed by Quantrill and his men are almost too horrible to speak of—for instance, the group is said both to have murdered a man in the arms of his wife, as well as a man holding an infant. Most of those killed were unarmed noncombatants, and many were under the age of eighteen.

An artist’s depiction of early Lawrence. Courtesy of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

While the repercussions of Quantrill’s Raid would be felt in the city for many decades, Lawrence once again would not go gentle into that good night. Immediately after the sack, the citizens of Lawrence rebuilt the city, constructing many of their new buildings and homes out of more durable material, like concrete and brick. A good number of the buildings that were erected during this period still stand, especially in the downtown area.

An artist’s depiction of Quantrill’s Raid. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In the mid- to latter part of the 1800s, Lawrence became the home of two universities. The first, the University of Kansas (KU), was founded in 1866. While only fifty-five students attended the school during its first year, the university currently boasts a student population of over twenty-eight thousand. The school is well known for its academics, as well as its athletics, with its basketball program being particularly respected. KU’s mascot is the Jayhawk, a fictional bird that was named in honor of Free State guerrilla fighters (Jayhawkers) who fought off proslavery Missourians (Bushwhackers) before and during the Civil War.

The second university is Haskell Indian Nations University, which was founded in 1884. What some do not realize is that Haskell did not begin as a university but rather as a boarding school, intended to educate indigenous children about Western culture. Eventually, this mission was scrapped, and today the school serves members of federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States. This one-of-a-kind institute currently educates around one thousand individuals each semester.

Nowadays, Lawrence is a thriving city and home to almost ninety-five thousand people. In addition to its excellent institutions of higher learning, the city features a prosperous downtown shopping district, located along Massachusetts Street. From idiosyncratic boutiques to multilevel department stores, most of the shops in this area are independently owned, reflecting the ideals of unconventionality and fierce self-determination—ideals that the citizens of Lawrence have embraced ever since the city was founded those many years ago.

But the city’s modern and somewhat unassuming appearance belies what hides just beneath the surface: the ghosts of the past. And I mean this not in the metaphorical sense, but rather in the literal.

Lawrence has a vibrant tradition of stories involving noisy ghosts, haunted buildings and schools possessed by strange forces. Personally, I have always been fascinated by these sorts of tales, but it was not until I pursued my undergraduate degree at the University of Kansas that my interest became more than a hobby. During my time at KU, I lived in Stephenson Scholarship Hall, where I met a group of like-minded individuals, who shared my interest in the supernatural. Together, we co-founded and organized the Stephenson Hall Paranormal Investigation Team (SHPIT), which traveled around Lawrence on weekends and holidays, investigating purportedly haunted locations. We were young and inexperienced and our methods were rather ad hoc, but my time in the group was nonetheless transformative. In fact, it was during my years with this group that I developed the idea for this book, and many of the following chapters are based, at least in part, on my experiences with SHPIT.

Despite my interest in the paranormal, I have always vacillated between being a believer and a skeptic. Like fictional FBI agent Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny) from the Fox television series The X-Files, I want to believe. However, much like Mulder’s level-headed partner Dana Scully (played by Gillian Anderson), I also want hard, indisputable proof before I declare anything true. In this book, I have tried to land somewhere in the middle of the Mulder-Scully continuum. I have reported the many stories as they were told to me (ghosts and all), but I have also searched through historical documents, books and newspaper articles to corroborate and substantiate these spooky tales. And while my research has revealed that a few of the legends popular in the Lawrence area are unfounded, many of the ghost stories contained in this book are not so easily dismissed.

At this point, I feel it is important to emphasize that with this book, I am not trying to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts. Such an endeavor is patently impossible, given that if ghosts do indeed exist, they make themselves known to our sensory organs only occasionally and not consistently. This means that there is no reliable method to scientifically test for ghosts and the paranormal. Instead, the purpose of this book is to preserve local folklore and mythology for posterity.

But why waste time on ghost stories of all topics? After all, these tales are often seen as highly inconsequential: many of the more rationally minded judge them to be campy, excessively unrealistic and designed only to scare children. However, I believe that those who think this way are missing the larger point. Even if ghosts do not exist, ghost stories are important because they keep local history alive and allow it to be passed down from generation to generation in a fun and exciting way. Without the allure of ghosts, it is possible that many stories (including several of the historical incidents recounted in this book) would be lost forever.

Finally, a word of caution. Many of the locations described in this book are located on private property. This means that if you want to investigate a site in question, you must obtain permission from the land or homeowners. Remember: trespassing is not only immoral, it is also illegal.

* Also known as the Kansas River.

* This event is locally referred to as Quantrill’s Raid, whereas in other areas it is often called the Lawrence Massacre. This book will use the former identifier (and slight variations thereof) throughout.

1

THE LOST HAUNTED HOUSES

OF LAWRENCE

It does not seem controversial to say that the haunted house is the quintessential ghostly locale. Tales of abandoned abodes possessed by the souls of previous occupants have long fascinated those interested in the possibility of life after death, from the ancient Romans to the Victorian English. The citizens of Lawrence are not exempt.

In the past, there have been numerous reports of haunted houses in the city. Unfortunately, many of these structures are either no longer in existence or their addresses were not recorded, making them all but impossible to locate. Luckily, a few of these haunted houses caused enough interest in the town