THE SAND HILLS GHOST

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 38, 17 September 1892, Page 935

THE SAND HILLS GHOST

i\ Weird Tale of Life in Nebraska. To the north of that most desolate and cheerless region of the midwest, the Nebraska range of sand hills, there is a stretch of low land upon which people struggle for a living with rather indifferent success. Their enemies are drought and sand. The former is the leading feature of nearly every summer, and the latter is blown and drifted down from the hills, fine and white as flour, by every malicious breeze. In one section of this dreary waste there are several families of Bohemians engaged, year after year, in the tilling of their sandy acres. They are very ignorant people, quite unimaginative, and with no thorough understanding of anything on earth but hard work, and one would think that when dead they would appreciate their rest too much to dream of visiting the earth again as ghosts. And yet a strange tale is told of one of their number, a woman. who died and walked the sands again with a well defined purpose. In January, 1888, Nebraska was visited by a blizzard of such violence that the venerable oldest inhabitant could remember no storms to compare with it; a great many people were lost in the whirling snow, to be found dead days afterward. In the sand hill country the storm was of surpassing fury, and numerous deaths occurred. One of the Bohemian farmers was safely housed with the family during the tempest, when his wife expressed a belief that the stable door had been left open and that the horses would perish. With more courage than discretion she announced her intention of going forth to remedy the evil, and she went; she was never seen alive again.

SEEING THE GHOST. When the storm was over search was made for her, but without avail; no trace of the unfortunate woman could be found. The husband roamed the country in a demented sort of way for weeks, and the snows melted and spring came and her disappearance was as much a mystery as ever. It was in the spring that strange stories began to circulate among the farmers concerning a giiost that roamed the desolate hills in the night—the ghost of a woman in sable garb that glided as silently as the moonlight from one white hillock to another, looking neither to the right nor left and always pursuing the same course and vanishing as completely and inexplicably when a certain hollow was reached as ever phantom disappeared. Several had seen the specter and baa followed it for a time, but their courage gave out, and not one had ever explored that sand girt hollow where it vanished, and no wonder, for in the moonlight or in >he darkness there is nothing in nature more weird, more ghastly and dreary than that great range of sand a hundred miles long and five or six wide, where even a snake cannot live. And so the ghost enjoyed its rambles unmolested through the summer,and when the winter came people said they had seen it gliding softly and sinuously over the unbroken snow, and there were men who said that it was the wraith of the poor Bohemian woman who had been lost a year before. Another spring came, and a couple of venturesome young men were riding over the white hills in the moonlight looking with dreadful expectancy for that dark shape that was not of this world, and they did not look in vain.

Down over the ghastly, glittering surface the thing came, steadily and silently, gliding over the floury sand into which human feet would sink so deep, and the ponies the young men rode reared and snorted and plunged in terror, and the riders tremblingly dismounted, determined to solve the mystery, though with fear in their hearts. The spectral woman passed within a few feet of them, and they could see her pale face and the unnatural glow of her great eyes. She paid no heed to them nor to the terrified horses, but moved on while the men followed; over knolls and through little valleys she glided, in the same direction as others had seen her go. and after a time she reached the hollow where she was said to vanish, and her followers, frightened and weary, were near her. In the center of the hollow she stopped, stood silent and motionless for a moment, and then —she was not there, nor in sight. The men walked to the spot where she had stood, and the object of the phantom woman’s wandering, if not the mystery of it, was revealed to them, for at their feet, partially covered with sand, were the bones of a human being, and the remnants of a dress, which were afterward identified as having belonged to the Bohemian woman. She had roamed in the storm fourteen miles from her home to die in the drifting snow and perhaps to fill the maw of the hungry, wandering coyote. The bleached bones were buried on the following day, and “the ghost of the sand hills” was seen no more. Walt Mason. A cat that was warming itself under the stove in Mrs. Kate McGinty’s residence, near Bethlehem. Pa., suddenly caught tire. With a screech it bounded out of the house and rushed into a hole under a big haystack near by. In a few minutes the entire stack, containing twenty tons of hay, was all aflame and was soon in ashes. The latest fish story comes from Pitts burg. The fish is about eighteen inches long, and its head, about as large as a marble, is in the cent re of its laxly. Instead of having fins it has ten long tails. There arc hermits in China who tear out their eyes in order, they say, that by closing the two gates of love they may open the thousand gat of wisdom.