The ghost of Nebraska Wesleyan University

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The ghost of Nebraska Wesleyan University
March 5, 2009
Patricia Ress
Examiner.com

Thirty-two years ago I sat at my desk in a newsroom of a Lincoln,Nebraska paper wondering what I could write about for Halloween. One of the older ladies who worked in the layout room just smiled and remarked,"there's always the ghost of Nebraska Wesleyan..." While it sounded like she had heard about it before-and often, her remark aroused my curiousity and I did a little investigating about an event that happened back in the late 1950s. Upon calling the college, I discovered that there was still a professor on faculty that had been teaching when the incident occured. His name was Dr David Mickey-the same last name as my advanced reporting professor at the University of Iowa-and this is the story he told me.

On a beautiful spring morning, the librarian for the music library reported for work as usual. As she placed her key in the lock and entered the area for which she was responsible in her duties, she noticed that there was something, indeed, strange about the atmosphere around her. It was then that the profile of an elderly lady dressed in rather old-fashioned clothing caught her eye! Wondering how the woman could have gotten into the library and who she might be, the silouette then suddenly disappeared from sight. But not before the librarian got a good look at her. She wore her hair pulled back into a bun and a shawl over her shoulders. Her dress was longer-rather like what women wore back in the 1930s and she was rumaging through sheets of music. The librarian called out "hello?" but the woman walked away and then seemed to evaporate into thin air. A bit shaken by what she had just seen, she then headed for her desk which was in front of a large plate-glass window. As she approached the desk, she looked out the window and the entire landscape had changed! She saw old cars, flower beds that hadn't been there the day before, trees,etc. About then she began to freak out. And understandably so! At that point she went running out into the hall absolutely terrified by what was unfolding before her!

After being calmed down by other faculty members, the librarian was shown an old school yearbook. One lady-a member of the music faculty-the librarian immediately recognized as the woman she had seen in the library. She was then informed that this lady had, indeed, been a music instructor at the college-only back in the early 1930s. She had been found dead at her desk with her clock at exactly at 9AM and her office had been directly across from the library! Now this is getting a bit scarey, but there was more! She was shown a photo of the outside landscapenear the library window as it was back in the early 1930s and it was exactly what she had seen at her own desk only a short time earlier!

So what did we have here? A ghostly visitor? A time-warp of sorts where a departed spirit returned to find someone or something out of a previous life? A vision or apparition? Or maybe an odd combination of all of these? The librarian was questioned by a plethora of parapsychologists, psychiatrists, paranormal researchers, and yet no one answer has ever been found to account for what happened that strange morning 51 years ago. It remains one of the biggest mysteries of paranormal Nebraska.