Stephens College, 'Blind' Boone featured in this ghost story anthology
A pair of ill-fated lovers haunting Stephens College and the lingering strains of John William "Blind" Boone's music are among the ghost stories featured in a recent book that aims to take young readers on something resembling a haunted road trip across Middle America.
"The Ghostly Tales of the Midwest" by author Diane Telgen is among the titles in the deep and wide "Spooky America" series aimed at readers in grades three through seven.
Other chapters take place in locales such as Hamilton, Ohio; Crown Point, Indiana; and Bloomington and Normal, Illinois.
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Two 'spooky' tales at Stephens College
Telgen's chapter "Spooky Spirits of Stephens College" tells two tales related to Columbia's historic women's college. The first features a doomed pair: a Confederate soldier and Stephens student Sarah June Wheeler pursuing romance in the "Union stronghold" of Columbia, as the story begins.
After the soldier was killed, at least according to legend, and Wheeler followed him in death, the pair supposedly showed up around campus. According to testimony from the early 1970s, they confirmed rumors of their own paranormal activity to a reporter, a teacher and several students seeking their presence in Senior Hall.
Telgen then shifts gears, focusing a second story on the early 20th-century Broadway star Maude Adams, who later taught at Stephens. Known for "her difficult classes" and "demand(ing) excellence," Adams had a tell: tapping her feet when she was dissatisfied with her students' work, Telgen writes.
A student who visited campus a decade or so after Adams' death recalled hearing a familiar sound, Telgen writes.
"Suddenly, across the floor, I heard those distinct footsteps — tap, tap, tap — and then heard Miss Adams's voice," the former student testified to Telgen.
Coming to something like her senses, the student divined that Adams' ghost was "teaching a class. That same repetition of nonsense syllables we always did," Telgen writes.
"Adams's ghost doesn't just appear to her former students, however," Telgen writes by way of conclusion. "Young women who never worked with her swear that you can hear her recite her favorite roles in the college theater. Sometimes it's her favorite works by William Shakespeare. But most of the time it's the French play Chanticler."
Did 'Blind' Boone make music from beyond the grave?
One of mid-Missouri's true music legends, the late ragtime pianist "Blind" Boone shows up in Telgen's second Columbia chapter.
Detailing Boone's life, then reaching his death in 1927, Telgen travels one step further. She recounts one woman's report of hearing Boone's ghost play his former piano in what is now Douglass High School circa 1960.
"Maybe you think someone else could have been playing Boone's music," Telgen writes. "But he never made an audio recording. He only published a few of his compositions, as either sheet music or rolls for a player piano."
And Boone's signature piece "Marshfield Tornado" is a complicated work, one that would elude most pianists, she writes. "Only Boone's ghost could have played that unusual piece!" she adds.
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Telgen also relays the story of "Boone's spirit music" at an unnamed downtown theater, whose description resembles the Missouri Theatre. From the theater's balcony, interested parties made recordings of ragtime music on the house organ at a moment when "the theater's organ was missing all its internal parts," the book notes.
"If blindness and prejudice couldn't stop 'Blind' Boone from making music, do you think death could?" Telgen writes.
Wherever readers draw the line between the natural and supernatural is up to them, of course. But Telgen's work offers helpful historical context for each setting as well as entertaining, easy-to-read narratives that young ghost-hunters should finish with ease.
Learn more about the book, and find others in the series, via its publisher Arcadia Children's Press at https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: How Stephens College and 'Blind' Boone show up in new ghost story book
