Discovering the Paranormal in the Rural Midwest

I had no idea the Southeast Missouri hometown I left at 20, and recently returned to, is a hotbed of paranormal and extraterrestrial activity. Midwesterners are pragmatic, no-nonsense people. We're practical, down-to-earth farmers and traders not inclined toward fantasy. Yet in 2022, Heartland residents and beyond gathered here in Cape Girardeau for the Midwest Conference on the Unknown to talk about UFOs, cryptids and hauntings. 

Why here, I wondered. My search for the answer revealed a world of hobbyists and folklore that I never knew existed. All around me, people have been hunting for Bigfoot or Mothman, watching for UFOs, giving haunted history tours and sleuthing through old buildings to detect ghosts. In fact, all I had to do was mention the paranormal while getting my hair cut and the conversation took off. Everyone in the small shop named haunted buildings or shared their eerie ghost experiences. 

"I'd love to go cryptid hunting," my stylist said with a shy smile. "I enjoy being out in nature and it would just be fun to add that to it. Imagine what it would be like if they really did exist." 

Imagining, having fun and asking questions is what brought together groups that usually don't mix for the Conference on the Unknown. Cryptid hunters typically don't watch for flying machines and ghost hunters aren't searching for monsters. Yet the common theme is mystery, the unexplained. 

"It's a time to open your mind up a little bit and use your imagination," said Joel Rhodes, Southeast Missouri State University history professor and author of "Haunted Cape Girardeau" in a local TV interview about the conference. "This is a great opportunity to just sit back and explore some of these thought-provoking and intriguing possibilities. When we've investigated hauntings, most of the time there's a rational explanation but there's that few, maybe five or ten percent that there's just no explanation for." 

Whether hauntings are literal ghosts, imprints on the land or folklore spun from intense, unsettling events, Cape Girardeau's past supplies a lot of material. In its frontier days, it was a wild Mississippi river town of traders, trappers and fortune-seekers. Its buildings, cemeteries and countryside have witnessed steamboat explosions, Civil War skirmishes, mass burials, slave auctions, murder-suicides, seminary accidents and lovers' leaps. Rhodes says unexplained lights and voices on the river go all way back to native people and the French and Spanish. 

I realize Southeast Missouri's mix of Midwest and Southern culture too could make people more open to mysterious happenings. During the Civil War, even though Missouri was a slave state, technically it stayed in the Union. Cape Girardeau's location on a high hill overlooking the river made it a strategic stronghold defended by forts, yet southern sympathizers lived next door. Some of our local hauntings come from this dangerous, tumultuous time. 

Rhodes calls one of those "the queen mother of Cape Girardeau's haunted houses." The Sherwood-Minton House, a two-story stucco Greek Revival mansion, was built with slave labor. During the war, Union officers commandeered it for their headquarters, later turning it into a hospital to handle a smallpox epidemic. Rumor has it that a secret tunnel runs from the house to nearby Old Lorimier Cemetery — the City's oldest graveyard at river's edge. Some say the tunnel served the Underground Railroad, or it was a way to secretly transport dead soldiers for burial. When the war ended, the house remained vacant and deteriorating for years, then sold many times in quick succession. Possibly because of the spirits that thrive there. 

People have heard soldiers' spurs jangling as heavy footsteps climbed an interior staircase. Mirrors, pictures and shelves slide off the walls of an upstairs bedroom where it's said a young runaway was trapped by slave catchers before she could make it to the tunnel. No one's found that passageway, but it's tantalizing to think that sandstone blocks behind the basement walls seal the entrance. The whimpering and moaning some hear could be the suffering of smallpox victims or enslaved people who, while hiding in the tunnel, got locked inside. 

But a recent owner of the home claimed its spirits are benevolent. She once woke to "translucent doctors keeping vigil over her bedside." In another instance, a construction worker on a ladder leaning against the roof began falling. As the ladder tipped backwards, the spirits righted it, saving him from death on the street below. 

Most everyone here knows about the Victorian-age Glenn House. Now a museum, it's even been featured on "Ghost Hunters" and "Unsolved Mysteries." Built for a prominent banker who later went bankrupt, the dwelling's ghosts spring from family tragedy. Half of the couple's six children died in the house as toddlers. The home's next owner suffered a stroke in the 1930s.

Some say he was deranged and accidentally pushed a little girl down the stairs, breaking her neck. Visitors occasionally hear children's sobbing and laughter. Sober board members' meetings have been interrupted by invisible footsteps. Docents decorating for Christmas have found wreaths moved to different rooms and presents under the tree rearranged or unwrapped. 

Of course, we'd have UFO sightings, but ours might have been the first. Legend has it that, in 1941, a UFO crashed in a field southwest of Cape Girardeau. As locals in the know point out, that was before the famed Roswell, New Mexico crash in 1947. A minister called to the scene to pray for plane crash victims told his family he saw a rounded silver disc broken open, metal shards scattered in a fire-charred field, and three creatures, about 4 feet tall with big eyes and a slit for a mouth whose skin or clothing looked like wrinkled aluminum foil.

Two were already dead. The military took all the evidence and told him he never saw what he saw. Despite searches of the area long after the minister's death, including by a retired Navy counter-intelligence officer, no material evidence has been found and the military has no records of a crash. 

After Roswell, UFO sightings spread around the nation. But it was the 1973 strange lights in the sky over Piedmont, a town about 75 miles away at the edge of the Ozarks, that turned a Southeast Missouri State University physics professor into Cape Girardeau's UFO expert. Sightseers sat on hilltops, parked along country roads and visited a reported hotspot — a landfill -— watching the sky for a chance to view the light show that popped in and out all summer.

Physicist Harley Rutledge repeatedly travelled to the scene with researchers and equipment trying to identify the lights' source. After publishing a book about his findings, "Project Identification: The First Scientific Field Study of UFO Phenomena," Rutledge continued investigating, eventually making 174 sightings himself. 

Paranormal travel writer Michael Huntington wanted to work with Rutledge and UFO culture so he moved south from St. Louis to Cape Girardeau in the early 1990s. Now, with 45 years of UFO interest, he says there's a folklore aspect to sightings. "People probably saw something here," says Huntington as he walked with a reporter on a gravel road between two flat fields. "There were plane crashes here during that time period and that could have become the basis for folklore. Or it could have been as people described it, the classic crashed saucer. But the place has that lore now." 

Even today new legends are being created and old stories revived and revised. In 2020, Mothman sightings happened not far from my house. According to Huntington, two older women driving toward a heavily travelled intersection in August reported seeing a big being flapping its wings. Then in October, a family driving in the same area said they saw a man-sized bat-like creature flying over the trees. These sightings "gave birth to the story of the Cape Girardeau Mothman," says Huntington. 

Really, I thought. That location doesn't look like any place special. I mean, it's not the Boogie Woods — a thick oak forest and bog said to be the home of a huge, hairy bipedal beast that so scared hunters they wouldn't even return to retrieve their deer stand. The Paranormal Task Force took a ghost hunting class on a tour there and reported lots of spooky activity.   

People hunt for ghosts or monsters, watch for UFOs or give haunted history tours for lots of reasons. Some do it just for fun or the thrill of the chase. Some want to keep the past or mysteries alive, to connect to something larger than themselves. Others are searching for evidence — that we're not alone in the universe, that life after death exists, that the natural world still holds surprises. 

I'm delighted to discover that the strange is an accepted part of life here. Haunted tours — I wouldn't want to do one at night. Will I go searching for monsters or UFOs? Nope, but I find it oddly comforting that some people do. 

Christina Leimer is an independent writer and researcher. She can be reached through her website, ChristinaLeimer.com. Read More