Lisa Hefner Heitz

Picked up in Kansas a few years ago. There are lots of regional ghost story books out there; mostly compilations by credulous local historians or journalists; Haunted Kansas author Lisa Hefner Heitz takes an interesting approach – that of a folklorist. This allows her to subtly debunk (by tracking down and demonstrating the roots of the stories) without alienating the potential audience of believers. I was surprised to find how many of the hauntings had a very recent origin; for example, the Albino Woman of Topeka, a ghost who wanders Riverside Cemetery with her equally ghostly dog, can be traced back to an actual albino woman who lived and worked in Topeka in the 1930s. She has since metamorphosed into a whole regiment of specters, ranging from a benign spirit who wanders among the tombstones carrying a toy poodle, through an unquiet corpse whose (albino) hands reach out of her grave to drag down anyone unlucky enough to walk over it, to a highly unpleasant creature who (accompanied by a pit bull; presumably more effective at this sort of thing than a toy poodle) materializes outside cars parked in the local Lovers Lane and rips the head off the male half of the couple. (“Other than that, dear, how was your date?”) This leads to another of Heitz’s themes; many of the stories seemed designed to discourage teenagers from parking in remote locations and necking in the back seat of a car. I wonder whether they might have the opposite effect; the potential of encountering the decapitating Albino Woman or the cannibalistic Hamburger Man might add an additional frisson to adolescent groping.


Another theme is the recasting of widespread folklore as a local legend. The New Mexican La Llorona, a spirit of various attributes who roams around wailing after her lost children, has been transformed in the Kansas to Theorosa, who lurks under or around a bridge over Jester Creek in Valley Center, Kansas, supposedly searching for her drowned children. (Interestingly, Theorosa is most likely to appear to Valley Center High School students who have parked near the bridge for impromptu nighttime biology lessons). In 1996, students in an English class at Valley Center High collected over thirty versions of the Theorosa story. (In an example of ghostly cross-fertilization, the Albino Woman mentioned above also sometimes materializes under a bridge. Perhaps Theorosa gets a night off every once and a while).


A few of the stories are genuinely mystifying – not that Ms. Heitz (or I) believe in ghosts but that there’s no obvious rational explanation for the phenomenon. The ghost of Julie, a young prostitute who used to work out of room 20 in a hotel in Wichita, has appeared to several people as an apparition described as a “floating pile of baby blue handkerchiefs”. I can think of lots of ways to explain the traditional transparent ghostly shapes, but an optical illusion that would appear as a pile of floating blue handkerchiefs is beyond me.


Interesting in its way; doubtless if I ever visit Kansas again I will check out some of the haunted locales. Especially if I can come up with a back seat necking partner.… (meer)