Dr. Michael Henry, who runs St. Charles Ghost Tours on Main Street, owns a white Toyota van that he has modified with S-shaped landau bars to look like a hearse. A skeleton sits shotgun, seatbelt buckled. His vanity plate reads “6Six6.” With his white beard, glasses, and red jacket, Henry bears a resemblance to Santa Claus, but he tells our tour group he’d rather be Krampus, the demon monster who punishes bad boys and girls at Christmastime. Speaking of, he has noticed Halloween’s increasing popularity over the years and thinks it now rivals the December holiday. Which is good for business. He estimates he has given tours to 30,000 people. But despite his running the ghost tour for 16 years, Henry is still not sure what he believes when it comes to the paranormal. “There’s something there,” he says. “You can’t reject it. People who reject it are just as bad as the ones who believe everything.”
I join a group of about 30 skeptics and believers one Friday night for a ghost tour led by Henry. It’s a chilly evening, the first real taste of autumn—and conditions would be perfectly spooky if it weren’t for the Oktoberfest party that’s raging one street over. Men are walking around in lederhosen and holding beer steins, and I can hear a band in Frontier Park covering The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).” Tonight, we will be walking far less than that—about a mile—but the tour is so packed with Henry’s research on St. Charles history that for two hours, we’ll wander down Main Street and talk about things such as forgotten cemeteries in front of darling boutiques (bootiques?).
Henry issues a safety warning—“You’ve seen the way people drive. Be careful. If you get killed, I’m not adding you to the tour.”—and then gives a brief history of the town. St. Charles was founded by Louis Blanchette in 1769. It’s considered one of the oldest cities in Missouri. And, Henry tells our group, “for most of its history, St. Charles could have walked out of any bad Western movie—shootings in the street and prostitution. I’m sure there are thousands of people who had perfectly mundane lives. But those are not the kind of lives that create ghosts.”
“You’ve seen the way people drive. Be careful. If you get killed, I’m not adding you to the tour.”
Take the specters that supposedly haunt the site of the old gallows, one of our first stops. The gallows were located behind the Old Post Office, now a coworking space. Henry says that this is a location where many people on the tour report smelling “funeral flowers,” a floral but slightly rotten scent. It sort of smells like that now, I observe, excited. A woman tells me that it’s marijuana.
The last two men to be executed here, in 1904, Henry says, were convicted on circumstantial evidence. The sheriff, who acted as executioner, died a few months later. Do we want to see where he lived? Henry leads us to the old sheriff’s apartment, just down the street, next to a cute bookshop. To the left is a gated alley. Henry shines a blacklight flashlight onto the wall, where the sheriff allegedly died of a gunshot wound. It lights up like a glowstick. Could it really be blood?
Perhaps, but I haven’t felt any shifts in energy, I haven’t smelled the funeral flowers, and if I’d wanted to look at stains, I could have stayed home and done my laundry. I keep getting distracted by the fancy soap stores. I want to buy a soy candle. Henry encounters plenty of people like me. “I’m getting cynical here, but there are a lot of people hanging out there these days, and the last time they listened to a live lecture might have been high school,” he says. “I do get a percentage of people who think it’s boring, but the past few years, I’m getting groups who are really interested in this. It’s completely different than the ones who want to see kids in bad makeup jumping out from behind bushes.”
Suddenly, a man in a golf cart streaks down the street and mocks us by letting out an evil mwahahaha. I wonder: Are we, the people who are wandering around Main Street St. Charles (mostly) sober, who are not dancing in traditional German clothes to a cover of blink-182’s “All the Small Things”—are we the silly ones?
The creepiest and coolest site is still to come—and it is near Grandma’s Cookies. Surrounding a replica of the French-style vertical-log St. Charles Borromeo Church is the original Borromeo graveyard, which the city used as a burial site from 1790–1853. By 1850, people figured out that it was sort of inconvenient to have a humongous graveyard right in the middle of town. The dead were exhumed and transferred to the current Borromeo Cemetery, near Blanchette Park. But the gravediggers must have missed some people in the potter’s field, because in 1982, when a crew was doing excavation to build a retaining wall, they opened up four graves. Henry estimates that anywhere between 100–150 people are still buried here. Because of erosion, he says, the bodies might be only a foot underground. The other day, Henry was out here and found something interesting. He clicks on his flashlight and reveals a human tooth inside a tiny glass bottle.
At this location, Henry says, tourists sometimes see the Lady in White. He might have a personal connection to this ghost. He can’t prove it, but Henry suspects that one of his ancestors, Hiram Berry, fathered this woman’s baby, and after she died, likely of cholera, Berry skipped town before the woman’s husband could catch him. He has a letter from Berry, dated September 11, 1822, that details his plan to leave St. Charles. Henry says the unnamed woman was likely buried here and sometimes appears near the church.
We set out to look for the Lady in White, but it seems she, too, is at Oktoberfest. Jake Maechling, one person in our group, walks the cemetery grounds. He’s tried to take voice recordings at all the spooky sites tonight, asking simple questions such as, Are you buried here? Did somebody disturb your final resting place? What’s your name? “They say that ghosts use the energy from around you to make words, but you can’t hear it with your normal ears,” he says. However, if you record yourself asking questions, you might hear them talking to you when you play it back. Believers call this the electronic voice phenomenon.
I ask Henry if the Lady in White appears at any certain time of year—her wedding anniversary, her baby’s birthday, or the anniversary of her death? There’s no pattern, he says. “I find that after people are dead, they’re just as reliable as while they were alive. You can’t count on them for anything.”
FYI: Henry’s ghost tours run year-round. Learn more at stcharlesghosts.com.
