When the Ghost Screams(26)

The following are examples of people with no hope, who are now truly stuck in a hopeless place.





In Uniform


The theatergoers at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, had had enough.

How could they enjoy the movie when the usher kept walking in front of them?

Finally, one woman got up from her seat and went out to the lobby. There, she found the head usher and complained about the disruptive usher. He listened as she described the teenager who kept blocking her view. A chill went through him.

Her description certainly matched one of their employees. But he no longer worked at the theater. He was dead, buried in his usher’s uniform, weeks before. The eighteen-year-old had shot himself in the head.

It was early spring 1967, and the ghost sightings were both frightening and sad. Some of the boy’s coworkers wished they had been kinder to him. They hadn’t realized how lonely he was.

The kid with the English accent had seemed out of place with others his age. Gawky and shy, he did not make friends easily. Few went out of their way to include him.

According to Minneapolis residents, the ghost of the lonely boy was seen long after his death, usually patrolling row 18. It had been one of his regularly assigned areas.

Eventually, the theater was “cleansed,” and no sightings of the ghostly usher have been reported since.

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GUTHRIE THEATER

725 Vineland Place

Minneapolis, MN 55403

(612) 311-2224





Still Pining


The Carneal House Inn in Covington, Kentucky, is home to the melancholy spirit of a woman scorned. Constructed in 1820 in the center of the city’s historic Riverside district, the huge, antebellum-style house was originally named Southgate House.

Legend has it that Marquis de Lafayette attended a party there and was unresponsive to the batting eyes of a young lady who fell for him. Rejected and distraught, she took her own life in an upstairs bedroom.

Visitors to the bed and breakfast have glimpsed the spirit of a woman in a gray silk dress. She has been witnessed floating down the carved wooden staircase and seen pacing on the second-story balcony. When the rocking chair rocks on its own, many believe her ghost is present.

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THE CARNEAL HOUSE INN

405 E. Second Street

Covington, KY 41011

(606) 431-6130





Troubled Waters


The remnants of a century-old railroad bridge straddle White Lick Creek in Danville, Indiana. The mournful howling heard here is believed by many to be the disturbed spirit of a young woman who met her fate on a bleak night.

According to one version of the legend, she was a young mother with a babe in arms whose family had turned her away. In her day, unwed mothers were shunned. The girl did not know where to turn. She found herself alone and began to wander along the railroad track. As she stumbled over the bridge, she hugged her baby close, wondering how in the world she would support the infant.

Her choices grew even grimmer when she heard the train barreling toward her. There was no time to run. She could stay and be plowed down by the train, or jump off of the bridge to almost certain death. She leapt from the bridge, but it was not the end, for her confused spirit still clings to the concrete structure.

Yet another story says that the ghostly screams belong to a worker who fell into the wet cement during construction of the bridge. His body has been entombed there ever since.

Skeptics say the sound of the screams is nothing more than the wind whistling through the arches of the bridge, but others insist it is the cries of a frightened woman.


Vestiges of the Danville Interurban Bridge are located at the north end of Ellis Park.





Bridge to Death


Earthbound spirits roam the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, according to students of the University of Minnesota. Four traffic lanes wide with an enclosed heated walkway, the double-decker bridge spans the Mississippi River. It connects the east and west banks of the Minneapolis campus, and, for some, life to death.

Sadly, this bridge is the site where so many depressed people have jumped to their doom that it has been deemed “one of the most popular suicide spots in the city.”

On a Friday morning in 1972, acclaimed poet and University of Minnesota professor John Berryman climbed over the railing of the bridge and leapt into the cold, calculating arms of the Grim Reaper.

The Pulitzer Prize—winning poet had wrestled with alcoholism for the previous six months, and in the end, a bottle of whiskey won the match. Not quite sixty years old, the sensitive soul whose words had moved so many simply could not take the pain of his life any longer. The irony is that, now, he may be trapped in that agony.

Some who linger on the bridge say they have heard the sound of footsteps moving toward them when no living person is in sight. The phantom pacing is attributed to the dead poet and others who died there.