When the Ghost Screams
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The Ice Files
When it comes to haunting, there seems to be no statute of limitations. A crime may have occurred a hundred years ago in a particular place, but the environment seems to cling to the bad energy as if it were yesterday.
Maybe a detective believed he was “hot on the heels” of a criminal a century ago, only to become discouraged as the trail went cold. With the case unsolved for decades, the detective and even the criminal eventually die, leaving only a cold file stashed in a forgotten filing cabinet.
And, finally, all who remembered the crime are gone, and the case has turned to ice. These ice files might freeze right into obscurity if not for the phenomena connected with them.
Hauntings prompt ghost detectives to crack through the veneer of the past, to dig up archives to help us understand. Again and again, we find that extremely haunted places tend to be the sites of past violence. And the most active sites are often the scenes of unsolved homicides. It is as if the dead victims are waiting for justice.
It does not seem to matter how much time has passed. The murdered don’t seem to know or care that they’ve been relegated to the ice files.
Here are a few stories of spirits who move in the cold realm of cases unsolved.
Lady in Green
It is March 1956 in Avard, Oklahoma. The high school gymnasium resonates with the sights, sounds, and scents typical of school gyms across America. Gangly teenage boys with crew cuts zip across the basketball court, their shouts punctuating the rhythmic bounce of the ball. The sharp scent of rubber and sweat permeate the air.
Flash ahead half a century to 2006 and the scene changes. The gymnasium is all that is left of the school, long ago razed when the tiny town no longer had the youth to warrant it. The old walls now hold Vina Rae’s Grill ‘n’ Graze, an unpretentious café where owners Nan Wheatley and Debra Campbell serve up chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, and wedges of hot apple pie.
The long-legged boys have been usurped by hungry families; the thump of the basketball by friendly conversation and the soft clink of silverware; and the smell of rubber and sweat by brewing coffee, grilling hamburger, and burning hair.
Burning hair?
Yes, sometimes the terrible inexplicable odor overwhelms visitors. “The first time I smelled it, it made me sick,” confided Nan Wheatley, explaining that when the scent materializes, it is always confined to a very small area. “If you step away from the spot, you can’t smell it.”
It is just one of the many calling cards of the ghost. She was born Mildred Ann Newlin on Christmas Day in 1933. She grew up and got married in 1955. Nine months later, on a crisp March afternoon, small-town innocence was lost forever to Avard, Oklahoma.
Mildred was sweet and lovely with a shy smile and very petite at just five feet two inches and one hundred pounds. She was a twenty-two-year-old senior at Northwestern Oklahoma State University at Alva and happily married to twenty-six-year-old Avard High School teacher and basketball coach Richard D. Reynolds. “They were exceptional people,” said Nan, adding that everyone called Richard “Dee” and that Mildred went by “Ann.” “Dee was very close to some of my family members.”
Their future should have been bright. Ann looked forward to graduating and becoming a schoolteacher, and she and Dee dreamed of having four children. They would raise them in the land they loved. But fate had a heartless plan for them.
It was Tuesday, March 13, just after noon when Ann finished her morning classes at Alva, climbed into her 1949 Chevrolet Tudor, and began her half-hour journey toward Avard High School to meet her husband.
She never made it.
We will never know what thoughts were in her head as she drove the long dirt road toward Avard. The last thing she saw was the familiar northwestern Oklahoma prairie with its miles of flat wheat fields, and then her killer or killers.
It was a little after one p.m. when farmer Loren Goucher was riding his tractor and noticed clouds of black smoke billowing in the distance. When he investigated, he was shocked to find a car on fire on the Alva-Avard Road. The blazing automobile straddled a shallow ditch, its rear wheels embedded in the sand. The front door hung open.
Loren smelled burning flesh as he moved through the intense heat. He crept close enough to see a charred body on the front seat. He rushed to the Alva police station.
Coach Dee Reynolds soon learned the horrific news. While he was at school, his poor bride had suffered a terrible death. At first investigators thought it had been an accident. Somehow Ann had lost control of her car and hit a blackjack tree. When she tried to drive away, the car had burst into flames. Cans of brake fluid and gasoline in the trunk had accelerated the fire.