The story of Ella Myers – Oklahoma Territory’s First Ghost
From Haunted Guthrie, Oklahoma
http://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Guthrie-Oklahoma-America/dp/1467118060
In the April 8, 1896, edition of the Guthrie Daily Leader, a young woman received a humble, three-line obituary: “Ella Myers, inmate of Ella Huston’s place on the Santa Fe right of way, was found dead in bed Sunday morning. Her death was due to an overdose of cocaine.”
More in the Leader fills in the gaps. Ella Myers “cyprian” (the Victorian way of avoiding the word “prostitute” in polite print) was in the employ of Ella Huston, who owned a shack with a few rooms on the west side of town near the Santa Fe railroad. Locals and those stopping by on the train knew it to be a place for a cheap thrill. Like many madams, Ella Huston kept girls in their line of work through various means of control. According to rumor, young Ella Myers was addicted to cocaine, which was quite legal in 1896 but also a very expensive habit. Few would have seen the overdose as much more than a pitiable tragedy.
In addition to her obituary, the Leader asks, “Was She Buried Alive?” A following article refers to Ella Myers’s passing as a “strange and sudden death.” Some say that a quick autopsy by the city coroner proved the cocaine overdose, but the article maintained that “No one knows positively what caused the woman’s death and no inquest was held over the remains.” Instead, “Within a few hours after the woman’s supposed death, the body was thrown into a box.” She was then buried in the pauper’s cemetery not far from the railroad crossing.
Despite the assurances from Commissioner Stapleton that the girl was clearly dead and the hastiness was only in the best interest of civic health, the Leader argued that “Two reputable physicians asserted yesterday that the girl was buried alive.” It demanded, “A speedy investigation is needed here,” but the cry fell on deaf ears.
The mystery of the actual events of the fateful night of Miss Myers’s passing only grew. Ella Huston quickly left the house and locked it up. She disappeared from the newspaper’s narrative, along with James Whitman, “the man who was with the Myers girl the night she is supposed to have died [that] has not been seen since the burial.” Whispers around town suggested foul play, and some even believed Whitman was the scapegoat for a more prominent official.
Even though the shack stood empty, strange things began to happen there. At night, the sound of wailing came, sometimes softly, sometimes so loudly that it could be heard down the block. The Leader says some “twenty-five to thirty persons” came out of curiosity to see what was making such noise. Various phantoms, disembodied howls, and even floating objects infested the shack. One of the few named visitors, Kickapoo Charley, looked in on the night of Thursday, April 16th, and “saw an apparition.” The shock proved so much he fainted. Days later in the paper, it noted he “has been ill ever since.”
One Guthrian, man-about-town George Hardie, was skeptical about the whole thing. He determined that the story was “a supreme josh” and meant to find out how the pranksters were pulling their joke. On Friday, April 17th, he approached the house at night during the prime time for activity, planning to catch someone in the act of noise-making.
According to the Guthrie Daily Leader, Hardie “found the front door locked. Going to the back door, it was found locked and bolted.” He went back around to the front door, tried to open it again, and soon gave up. The house was secured, just as everyone had said.
Hardie had just turned away when suddenly a mournful wail began. It tore through the quiet night and “assailed his ears.” What had been a lonely, locked shack had suddenly filled with eerie activity.
A moment after the moan sounded, the front door “slowly swung open.”
This was a point where most men would have turned in the investigation and congratulated pranksters from afar, but Hardie was resilient, “although badly rattled” according to the Leader. He crept into the house and explored until he came to Ella’s room, where the bed she had died in still sat. Hardie went inside.
There, out of the darkness, something “struck four sharp raps on the head.” Recoiling, Hardie couldn’t find anyone standing beside him. The darkness gave way to a bright light, “resembling a calcium ray,” that flashed across the ceiling. Out of it, a “blood-red hand clutching a bottle” descended into the room. The vision and the attack were ample evidence for Hardie to give up his belief in pranksters. He rushed out of the shack and humbly confessed his entire experience to the newspaper.
The supernatural noise only grew as the week wore on. The Leader noted that many of the “shacks in the vicinity of the haunted dwelling have been vacated.” Other neighbors, however, had nowhere to go, and so they stayed and witnessed the howling grow louder and more terrifying night by night in the cyprian’s shack.
By April 19, the story was front-page material: “The ghost of Ella Myers continues to walk with uncanny tread at the erstwhile dive at the Santa Fe right-of-way.” The article details a frightening picture. At midnight on the 18th, the two doors of the little shack burst open, all at once and without any sign of human hands. Neighbors startled by the noise went to investigate, finding “a figure, clad in white” at the windows. Although she was seen as a ghostly woman, the spectators could describe little more than her standing. The sounds that accompanied the strange appearance, however, were vivid.
Groans rattled the night, just as they had for more than a week. Among the howling noise this time, a “plaintive wail” called out the same clear words, “Don’t give me any morphine, I am sick.”
The ghostly line came three times that night, and everyone agreed what they said. Were these the final words of a poor addict? Some thought that it was a last-ditch effort to use the opiate to prevent Ella’s death from cocaine overdose. Others nodded along with more sinister rumors that the morphine was the actual cause of death, and someone gave it to her as part of covering up their misdeeds.
With such ghostly turmoil plaguing the town, citizens began demanding answers. Something was keeping Ella Myers from resting in peace, and the strongest voice of opinion turned on the burial practices at the cemetery. The Leader itself asked, “Is her body buried upside-down?” Such an indecent burial would surely cause a spirit to roam. More and more insisted that opening the hurriedly buried body would reveal the truth.
Guthrie police, however, were uneasy about opening the grave. They worried that whoever opened the coffin would find the body “distorted and twisted,” following the belief that she was, perhaps, buried alive. They also voiced concern that the African-American gravekeeper and her family who operated the cemetery would become personally haunted by the increasingly violent ghost.
The matter was finally settled when Ella’s half-brother, H.M. Myers, arrived from Kansas. He had learned of Ella’s death through the Leader’s interstate reprints and arrived on the train to her rescue. As next of kin, he was allowed to exhume the body on April 23. Nerves throughout the town were settled when the box was found without any telltale scratch marks of live burial. Myers took her out of the town and had her reburied in Mulhall Cemetery.
The shack went quiet. Ella seemed pacified now that her body had been taken out of the pauper’s cemetery. Many Guthrians took that as the source Ella’s stirring: the grave was simply unfit for her. A Leader editorial agreed, “A man who would place a dead body in that soggy plat of ground is devoid of all the merciful, humane feelings which go to make up a man… About twice a year the river rises and overflows the graves—and we drink the water.”
Yet the Leader posed a different suggestion: “the girl was not only buried alive… in the rough box face downward, but since the recent comment regarding her burial, interested parties secretly disinterred the remains and placed them in their natural position.” The spirit came to rest because whatever wrongs had been done to the body were righted, even if those who did it were quiet about it. Perhaps a little decent treatment was all that Ella wanted.
