Haunted Heartland

HAUNTED HEARTLAND
True Ghost Stories from the American Midwest
Beth Scott and Michael Norman
c 1986

The only reason I am writing this up is because I made mention of this book yesterday. I personally have not read this, nor did I even buy it. This was one of my wife's books from before we got together. Before I had convinced her to just donate books she didn't want to the library, she used to throw them away, or burn them... I always tried my best to rescue them, even old westerns or romances that she would get from her great aunts or grandparents. This just happened to be one of the books I rescued.

The book does what it claims: it collects ghost stories from different states within the area. States covered are Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Honestly, I cannot see why some of these states are labeled under midwestern, as these are all central states (half being north central), but that's neither here nor there.

One thing I like about this book is that it holds information that you can't find on the internet. Scratch that, you can find it, but because browser engines are geared to present the more popular results, it tends to ignore others... and the longer that goes on, the more buried some of these stories are.

For instance, in this book there is an account of a lynching in Menominee MI, having occurred on September 26 1881. The victims, murderers themselves (the McDonald boys) were busted out of jail, stabbed, hung, and dragged through the streets where their corpses were stomped on by the townspeople (including children). THEN the bodies were brought into a local brothel where the women were forced to lay next to the corpses. When that was done, the mob burned the brothel down, rehung the bodies, and set them on fire. A local priest cursed the mob, to which many of the mob did in fact die unusual deaths.

I've been researching things for a few months, never even heard of this. Once I found the right keywords, things fell into place.

I'm sure this is a nice book to read, I just haven't, not cover-to-cover.