Historic Haunted America by Michael Norman

The ghost of Resurrection Mary roaming Archer Avenue in southwest suburban Chicago is an example of that, a fleeting figure in a white party dress who is so well known she has had a song written about her. Sometimes the ghost or haunted place has become at least locally famous, embedded in local lore. Those were the people willing to share their contemporary experiences. This book explores a world unknown to most of us, yet quite obvious to others. From a haunted mansion in Ohio to a college office in Nebraska lost in time, and from a peculiar incident at a highway intersection in Minnesota to ancient specters that wander the Ozark hills, incidents of the supernatural in the Midwest might occur anywhere-urban or rural, based on what I have found over the years. Many of the people and episodes within these pages appear out of step with the world around them, with what we believe to be reality. Over five years of research and writing went into the original Haunted Heartland. But whether called folklore, psychic experiences, or something else, we wanted to find out just how prevalent ghost stories might be. Some of the stories fit within the parameters of folklore while others involved experiences from contemporary individuals who said they had seen a ghost or had another kind of paranormal encounter.

It, too, was a first-time collection of regionally based stories of the supernatural that had arisen not from an author’s imagination but rather from purportedly true events involving ghosts and hauntings, possessions and exorcisms, bobbing mystery lights, and more. Haunted Heartland brought together stories from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin. After its publication, we expanded our research into ghost stories and legends in the rest of the Midwest. Haunted Heartland was a follow-up of sorts to our Haunted Wisconsin, the first book devoted solely to ghost stories from that state. (Note: My friend and colleague Beth Scott passed away in 1994.)

Now, more than thirty years later, I find myself revisiting those ideas and more as I prepare this second, revised edition. With those quotations from a seventeenth-century scientist/philosopher, a notable author of fantasy and science fiction, and a pioneering psychiatrist, my late coauthor Beth Scott and I began the preface to the original 1985 edition of Haunted Heartland. We have surmounted those modes of thought but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. We-or our primitive forefathers-once believed that the return of the dead, unseen forces, and secret injurious powers were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. Incomprehensible? But because you cannot understand a thing, it does not cease to exist.

Historic Haunted America by Michael Norman