Haunted Jefferson City: Ghosts of Missouri’s State Capital will test your credulity. But there are a few bits worth savoring on a dark and foggy night—like the story of Mary Becker Greene, the first woman licensed to pilot a steamboat. Author Janice Treemear describes Captain Mary dancing with her Delta Queen passengers and regaling them with wild tales of river life. After she died, her ghost set sail; one photographer went into the riverboat’s saloon to shoot and swore he saw her “alive in the picture frame,” turning to face him.
Then there’s the tale of Sam Nightingale, better known as Guinea Sam, a voodoo doctor from Africa who was brought to Booneville, just west of Jeff City, in 1856. “It is said,” Treemear writes, “that he disappeared in a blue cloud of smoke after being defeated in a ‘conjuration’ contest with a voodoo doctor from St. Louis.”
Interestingly, the capitol itself doesn’t offer many tales; you’d think, with all the filibusters and fights, energy would linger, but maybe it jumps on the train as soon as the session’s over, like everybody else.
The old Missouri State Penitentiary is another story; with what those walls have seen, even Stephen Hawking might be tempted to posit ghosts. Rumors that the old building is a UFO base sorely tempt Treemear, but the real haunting was the moans and cries of prisoners in the hospital ward, audible through the windows all night long, in the years before air-conditioning. That’s too empirical to qualify, though, so Treemear dredges up modern-day investigators who claim they’ve taken “photographs of eerie faces in long empty cells.”
She also ventures to Columbia College, where a young woman jumped from the third story of Williams Hall after her fiance was killed by Union soldiers not far from the college. Her ghost is called the “Gray Lady,” and “she is said to do small favors for students, such as opening windows on hot days,” or even finishing their ironing for them. And at Central Methodist University in Fayette, the fifth floor of Howard Payne Hall is locked off limits. Treemear says it’s because in the 1940s, a young music student hung herself in her dorm room before spring finals. Now, in the week before spring finals, stressed-out students hear her practicing her cello.
