Ghost Stories from Owl City

By Helen Casebier

From the Topeka Capital, 1928

Hidden back among the timbered hills of Jefferson county, where the only sound to break the stillness of the long black nights is the interminable hooting of the owls which inhabit the trees, is a hamlet named Owl City, so named because of this colony of owls.

Owl City was never anything but a section house and a tool house of a little branch line of the Leavenworth and Topeka railroad,* where a one-horse engine dubbed “Old Jerky” went chugging up and down the hills twice a day. Now there is nothing but a tool house. But the section house was surrounded by a group of farms once inhabited by as queer a folk as ever saw day, old timers of the county affirm. They were real backwoodsmen just like the Southern mountaineers. The curly beards of the men straggled over the collars of their blue gingham shirts, while their razors rested peacefully all winter in the back of the kitchen cupboards, to be brought out each year when the snow left the ground, for the annual spring shave. Superstitious, too, they were and suspicious, and when one neighbor’s cattle got mixed up with another’s cattle there were fierce quarrels. Sometimes the quarreling parties went to law, but more often one of the men hauled out the family rifle and went gunning for his neighbor.

"Old Jerky" at Ozawkie

The woods were thick over the hills, with big old oaks and black walnut trees, and heavy underbrush. The nights were most dismal, with only the black of the trees and the melancholy sounds, as from one hill would come the mournful cry of a screech-owl and an answering screech from a neighboring hill. The woods were a good place for ghosts, these superstitious people believed. Queer things were apt to happen.

Often in the winter nights a group of them would gather about the big log fire in one of their homes. Inevitably the talk turned to ghosts, how eerie, monotonous footsteps followed old Jim Thompson home the other evening, and how strange lights were seen by Fanny Bouyer as she went through the woods. As the tales grew more gruesome and voices dropped lower and lower, eyes turned reluctantly from the fire to the black of the night outside.

Finally they all became so scared at the tales they told, that the guests refused to go home but stayed at the house all night. The next morning when it grew plenty light, their courage returned, and they banished the ghosts and trudged bravely home.

Some of the people have been dead now for many years, but their peculiarities are remembered by the people in Jefferson county, and many can tell tales of the “old maids,” and McTurk, the miser, of “Honest Jim” Thompson, who never swore and never got drunk, and of crazy Fanny Bouyer, who prowled the woods at night and peered in people’s windows.

 

Everybody knew the old maids, Tilly and Libby Ashton. They might have been good-looking, but none could say for sure. They dressed in women’s clothes, but the clothes were of the roughest and coarsest materials. Their lanky hair streamed from beneath the men’s caps they wore pulled down over their eyes.

The two women lived on a farm on the edge of the clearing. They had money, people believed, but they built themselves a hut in the woods, made of odds and ends of lumber, with a brush-shed tacked on to it. They probably almost froze in winter, for their house was flimsy and their stove small, but year after year they lived there, allowing no man on the place, and doing all their own work.

Tilly was the older one and the more determined, and could swear as well as any man. When there was any discussion about whose cattle was whose, she held her own in the argument.

They raised fine cattle and thoroughbred horses, and they kept many dogs on the place. People would often see them lumbering along in an old wagon, followed by a dozen horses and surrounded by a barking, yapping pack of dogs.

Then one winter Tilly caught cold and the cold went into pneumonia. She steadily refused to call a doctor. Some of the neighboring women came in to help her. She lay in the flimsy little hut on a bed of tarpaulin and gunny-sacking.

Finally they all perceived she was dying, and someone called a doctor. He came out, looked her over and wanted to give her medicine, but Tilly said, “I fought a good fight, but I know I’m dying, and I’ll be damned if I’ll take any of your medicine. There’s going to be no bill against my property when I’m dead.”

She died the next day. After a decent interval of mourning, Libby took some of the money, bought some pretty new clothes, washed her face and combed her hair, and the neighbors discovered to their surprise that she had chestnut hair, a white skin and red cheeks.

Then she went away to Illinois, and rumors soon floated back to the inhabitants of Owl City that she was married. She was never heard of again.

Illustration of Megascops asio (syn. Otus asio)
by John James Audubon

 “McTurk, the miser,” — his full name was John McTurk — was another mystery to the curious people of the community. Old McTurk lived alone in a one-room shack, his food year in and year out consisting of crackers and bacon. No women were allowed to come near the place.

He was a short stout man, badly stooped, and wore bedraggled clothes. His face was always covered with a stubby beard. He shaved oftener than did the other worthies of the neighborhood, but probably he shaved, they thought, with a butcher knife or a piece of window glass. His face looked that way.

He must have been rich. They knew he was, for his shack was set in the midst of a large and fertile farm in the Delaware river valley. He loaned money to all the farmers in the country and usually had several thousand dollars loaned out at one time. But no one knew where he kept his money. He did not bank it. It wasn’t around the shack. They decided he must bury it.

When the Delaware river rose one year and overflowed the country, old McTurk hovered watchfully around a big cottonwood tree near the river bank. He lingered there until the river went down again. People saw him guarding it and told each other, “That’s where old McTurk keeps his money.”

He died not long after that, died of exposure to the cold. Men took care of him during his illness, for he still would allow no woman near. Soon after his death, two men in the community, who had been struggling to make a living, became suddenly and mysteriously prosperous. People shook their heads and said of them, “They found old John McTurk’s money.”

The Leavenworth and Topeka railroad’s bridge over the
Delaware River near Ozawkie required constant upkeep.

*The Leavenworth and Topeka railroad ran from Leavenworth through central Jefferson County to Meriden Junction, where its tracks connected with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. Under slightly different names, it operated from 1881 to 1931. For its history, see The People’s Railroad by I.E. Quastler.

The exact location of Owl City is unknown. Perhaps the hints in this article will help those who wish to solve the mystery.

This story appeared in “Yesteryears” in April 1989.