Your True Tales
December 2006 - Page 8
Spectre in Springdale
by Curt Mongold
When I was a child, my seven brothers and sisters and I lived in an old renovated school house in the unincorporated area called Springdale, Kansas. Many times throughout the years, my siblings and I shared the experience of seeing the ghost of the school teacher who once spent so much time there.
The experience I share now occurred in the winter of 1973-4. My brother Gerry and I were outside in the front yard building a snow fort one evening, and as the last glow of twilight faded, the moon rose, giving us just enough light to see by. As we were finishing our fort, I happened to see a movement next to the house out of the corner of my eye. As I turned, I saw a hazy figure floating out of my bedroom window! Unable to speak, I nudged my brother, who turned and gasped audibly when he also saw the hazy, almost glowing apparition crossing the front yard not more than 20 feet away! Neither of us had the courage to move as the spectral entity made it's way slowly across the yard, across the street and about 50 feet into the adjacent field before turning and heading east.
It was vaguely human shaped, but had no feet and did not touch the ground as it moved. It seemed to have long white hair flowing in back in the glow of the moonlight. When it finally disappeared from our view, we looked at each other in disbelief, then ran as fast as we could into the house to tell our parents. They reacted with the typical skepticism parents have for ghost stories from their children, and as time passed, the incident was no longer talked about.
It was only years later, while researching the history of our house that we learned that the original school house had a back door, right where my bedroom window was. We also found through our investigations that 100 years earlier, the road in front of our house had been surveyed 50 feet north of its present location, exactly where the apparition traveled that night! Old farmers in the area spoke of an "old maid" school teacher that lived just east of the school, and to this day, irises bloom in a spot in the woods about 50 feet north of the road.
You may not believe, but this is not the only time my bothers and sisters saw the old school marm, and it certainly isn't the scariest! My older brother Donald was sleeping on the couch, home on leave from the Army, but that's another story....
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