The haunting tales of Cape Girardeau

A haunted dorm room, an old woman dressed in period clothing, a ghostly crowd moving through a cemetery.

These aren’t things from horror films, but stories people have told over the years about haunted locations around campus and Cape Girardeau.

Professor of History Joel Rhodes has been actively pursuing ghostly stories since 2010 but has been interested in the subject since the 1970s when he was a kid watching Scooby-Doo.

He is the author of “Haunted Cape Girardeau: Where the River Turns a Thousand Chilling Tales,” published in 2013. He has also collaborated with KRCU to produce two radio programs, “The Ghost of Cape Girardeau” and “The Ghost of the Mississippi.”

Rhodes said there are many stories about locations on-campus but there are a few that he believes more than others.

__ROSE THEATRE:__

“There are three versions of [the rumor of ghosts], and two stories of a woman named Mary,” Rhodes said. “One is a little girl who is rather mischievous, and then there is an older woman that people have seen that is a darker, more threatening, more wrath-like character.”

Before the River Campus was built in 2013, the theatre department operated out of Rose Theatre.

Rhodes associated a mysterious bloodstain in the theatre with with the older woman, Mary. Legend has it she was married to a French fur trapper and eventually killed both her husband and herself. It is said the blood soaked into their cabin floor and is permanently imprinted on the floor of the theatre.

“A lot of people over the years have claimed to see Mary back up there by the bloodstain, dressed in period clothing. [For] those folks who were able to ignore her, she would generally go away,” Rhodes said. “In some cases, when they were startled by [seeing the spirit] or mentioned her by name, she would rattle the pipes or there would be cold spots in the theatre.”

Rhodes said no one ever feels threatened by the little girl named Mary, but instead she is more playful than anything else.

The third ghost he mentioned is an old man who sits in seat D28. Nobody has ever been able to explain why he has only been seen in that seat for decades.

“When there were still plays there, the theatre students would always keep that seat open for him; they’d never sell that ticket,” Rhodes said. “He is fine until you look at him, and he gets a disgruntled look on his face before disappearing.”

__CHENEY HALL:__

The spirit rumored to haunt the now-inactive dorm tends to be tied to room 301. In the 1970s, it is said a woman died by suicide in that room during finals week, but there is no documented proof of such event.

Rhodes told the story of a young man whose girlfriend lived Cheney Hall, in room 301. He and the roommate didn’t get along, and when she went away for the weekend, he decided to stay with his girlfriend. In the middle of the night, legends has it a woman was seen sitting in the room, and the man assumed it was the roommate who had come home. He got the sense she was judging him, so he got up very quickly and left.

“The next morning, his girlfriend asked why he left so abruptly in the middle of the night, and he said, ‘Well your roommate got home, so I didn’t want to cause a big scene’ and she said ‘my roommate’s not coming home till Monday.’”

__RIVER CAMPUS:__

Rhodes said that prior to the Civil War, a groundskeeper of the seminary – now home to the River Campus – was killed when a tree fell on his shack during a tornado in 1850.

He said there are tales about seminarians seeing him walking around and working on stuff, but those stories stopped until construction on River Campus begun, in 2013.

“The workers used to talk about seeing Old Henry, and I think that’s become part of the folklore down at the River Campus,” Rhodes said. “For whatever reason, spirits seem to be drawn toward theatre.”

__ALPHA KAPPA PSI FRATERNITY HOUSE:__

What once was a fraternity house at 730 North Pacific St. now sits a meditation garden. Rhodes said the house use to belong to the Oliver Family who donated the house to campus after the patriarch passed away.

“The guys who lived in that house had a number of stories of happenings that they couldn’t explain,” Rhodes said. “There were noises up in the attic like pacing. There was one room in the house you would hear like, low, muffled moans. People who kept a messy work area, their stuff would either be thrown to the floor or be neatly stacked. There is also a part of the house where they could never keep the windows shut.”

Rhodes said the house and fraternity became known for the spooky stories. In the early ’80s, the unexplained happenings were so frequent, the men who lived in the house decided to do some research.

They learned R.B. Oliver Jr. was ill in the house for some time before he died from a brain hemorrhage.

The tenants learned he was a lawyer, so they began calling him ‘The Judge.’ The fraternity men thought it was cool until they began to see Oliver. When someone would come home to an empty house, they would find him sitting there in the living room or footsteps upstairs.

When paranormal investigators visited Southeast in the 1980s, the fraternity men seized the opportunity for answers.

“In the early ’80s, Ed and Lorriane Warren were here on campus giving a talk, and the members of the fraternity asked if [Lorraine] would walk through the house, which she did,” Rhodes said. “After about an hour, she concluded that there was a spirit which she also called him the judge, which really freaked them out.”

She told them it wasn’t good for either the fraternity guys or ‘The Judge’ to be there. Within a couple of months, the university moved the guys out, and tore down the house without an explanation, and built the garden.

**

__SHERWOOD-MINTON HOUSE:__

There are stories and books about a tunnel connecting the Sherwood-Minton House, located at the corner of Washington Avenue and North Middle Street, and the Old Lorimier Cemetery.

“The Minton House is probably the queen mother of haunted houses in Cape,” Rhodes said.

The house was built in the 1850s and served as a cholera hospital during the Civil War, and it is said the tunnel was used to remove the dead soldiers under the cover of night according to Rhodes.

Over the years, people have claimed seeing ghostly soldiers walking toward the house from the cemetery according to Rhodes.

Rhodes said a room in the house, called the “slave room,” has been known to not keep anything hanging on the wall. The story is a minister operated part of the underground railroad, and a young girl hiding in that room was caught by slave catchers. She was hiding in a wardrobe, and one of the men saw her dress sticking out through a mirror and it is said she cursed the room.

__OLD LORIMIER CEMETERY:__

Rhodes said it is thought the cemetery is built on an old Indian burial ground. Louis Lorimier – founder of Cape Girardeau and one of the first European settlers – wanted his Native American wife, Charlotte, to be buried with her people.

Rhodes mentioned that she is the first confirmed burial in the cemetery.

“The thing that is really creepy about Old Lorimier Cemetery is that the size of it today is only a fraction of how big it actually is,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes said when Fountain Street was paved in the 1920s, it went right through the cemetery, building neighborhoods on top of unmarked graves. Causing many stories to stretch into the nearby neighborhood

Legend has it a mass grave sits in the southeast area of the cemetery for people who died in riverboats. Rhodes said people have talked for years about a ghostly procession of people walking toward the river.

Rhodes said that a psychic was in the area several years ago and visited the banks of the Mississippi River. By Rhodes’ account, the psychic asked whether anyone could see the

“hundreds of people floating in the river, about chest deep and they are all looking toward Cape Girardeau.”

"'They aren't saying anything,"' Rhodes recalled the psychic saying. "'Just looking.'"

Rhodes described the memory as "pretty creepy" and suggested a possible connection to the Old Lorimier Cemetery.

People talk about being taped, touched or having their hair pulled in the cemetery for hundreds of years. Rhodes said he even had a woman come up and tell him this at one of his recent talk.

Rhodes said several years ago, a mother and daughter duo went to the cemetery with their recording devices. They picked up a man’s voice which they could not make out except for the words, “river” or “water,” which he kept repeating. They wondered if it was his surname or the possibility that he was one of the people buried in the unmarked grave.

“After they recorded several instances of him,” Rhodes said. “They asked if there were others who would like to make contact and very clearly on the tape you could hear “we all,” and another time when they returned, they heard “why come back.”