Sights, sounds haunt family’s Alta Vista farm house

by T.L. Huffman

A white form floating at the foot of a bed, footsteps walking down a hall, doors slamming, a cold touch, a feeling of being watched….

Sounds like a tale straight out of a horror movie, right? Well, it’s not.

Bonnie G. Uthe, formerly of the Alta Vista area, grew up hearing about just such strange disturbances at the family farm.

Bonnie heard the stories from her grandmother, Ola M. Brown. Ola and her husband, Earle, owned the farm located in Jefferson Township, north and east of Alta Vista.

Ola has been gone now for 20 years. The haunted happenings occurred over 50 years ago. Back then there were no paranormal researchers to document ghostly footage using hi-tech tools, like video cameras, EMF meters, thermal scanners, audio recorders and motion sensors.

But that didn’t make the occurrences any less real to the ones who experienced it.

“Grandma firmly believed in this ghost,” says Bonnie. “She studied books about ghostly forms and signs and the noises they make. She read everything she could find at the libraries trying to figure it out. And Ola wasn’t the kind to be imaginative. There was definitely something there. Grandmother wasn’t scared of him. She heard him a lot.”

The ghost was known as “Jim” and “Smithy.”

“They thought he had hung himself in an upstairs room,” says Bonnie. “Or he was killed on the railroad tracks. The railroad ran by their place. Nobody ever knew for sure what happened to him.”

Bonnie recalls an often repeated story. Grandma Ola heard someone walking downstairs one night.

“The footsteps went through the living room and the kitchen. She heard the screen door shut. Thinking the steps sounded like her son, Donald Brown, she waited. And waited. He didn’t come back. She thought he must sick. She decided to go and check. She went through the living room and kitchen. She pushed on the screen door. It was locked.”

Bonnie says the next morning, while Ola and Earle were outside milking the cows, Ola asked her husband if he’d been awake and heard the steps.

“He said ‘yep.’ She asked him if he knew that she went to the screen door and came back to bed. And he said, ‘yep.’ So he heard somebody walking and never said so that night.”

According to Bonnie the footsteps always followed the same pattern. They started in the same upstairs room and then went downstairs.

Ola and Earle were not the only ones to hear strange noises in the farm house. Bonnie’s uncle is Lewis Maddox. He just turned 80. He was much younger back then and always teasing and poking fun at people who said they’d heard Smithy walking. But, Bonnie says, that all changed…

“Grandma told me one morning Uncle Lewis came downstairs white as a sheet. He’d heard Smithy walking.”

Ola’s younger sisters, Betty and Francis, (Bonnie’s aunts) loved staying at the big, old, two-story farmhouse when they were young girls growing up. The girls were about eight or ten years old.

“We were there at grandma’s,” recalls Betty Taylor Murphy Rice, who now lives near California, Mo. “We’d had a big dinner and there was lots of company in the house. We stayed in the same bedroom with Bonnie’s grandma and grandpa. We thought they could protect us. Ola had told us the house was haunted. She was always telling us stories. But she was never scared; she just laughed about it. It never did hurt her. My sister was sleeping on the outside of the bed. I was in the middle. I happened to wake up. I don’t know why. There, at the side of the bed was a white form of a person. I couldn’t tell you whether it was a man or a woman. I woke up Francis, but Francis didn’t get all the way awake. She raised her hand and it fell out of the bed and went right through that person. It scared me to death. I woke up grandma. I believe she called him Jim. She said, ‘Oh, Jim, go away now, leave them alone.’ He did. That’s all I remember of it.”

Did the experience make Betty a believer in ghosts?

“It sure did. But I only saw him that one time. A tall, ghostly white form. I don’t believe Francis ever woke up enough to see it.”

Bonnie G. Uthe (daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Donald L. Brown of Pattonsburg) and her cousin Gary W. Maddox (son of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Maddox of Gravois Mills) were the last children born in the house.

The family moved out of the house shortly after.