In the late 1790s, the Harpe brothers, Micajah, known as Big Harpe and his brother, Wiley, known as Little Harpe left a bloody trail of at least 28 people in Tennessee, Kentucky and southern Illinois.

After the especially brutal murders of Major William Love, Moses Stegall’s wife and baby, the Harpes were hunted down by a posse of men lead by Moses Stegall. In the ensuing chase, Little Harpe escaped but Big Harpe was shot and captured. Big Harpe was shot thru the body and was losing a lot of blood. As he was lying helpless on the ground, Moses Stegall took a knife and severed Big Harpes head from his body. Stegall took the head and placed it in the fork of a nearby tree. The location of this revolting, and gruesome head was near Highland Lick in Henderson County, Kentucky. Today it is known as Harpes Head Road.

Little Harpe hid out in an area known as Natchez and took up with another highwayman known as Mason. There was a large reward offered for the head of Mason. One dark night when all the other bandits were away getting drunk, Little Harpe took the opportunity and killed Mason. After killing Mason, Little Harpe cut off his head and placed it in a bag. He took the head to Natchez to claim the reward money, but was recognized for who he was. The sheriff arrested him on the spot. After a quick trial, Little Harpe was condemned to death and then hanged.

Copyright 2013 Black Oak Media, Inc. You do not have permission to copy this post.

DT Rose is a 22-year-old model from Peoria, Illinois. She met our friend and photographer Willy Adkins and I in DeKalb over the weekend to shoot a series of photos that will take this website to the next level. DT Rose will be appearing in many of our featured category images, as well as our site header, Facebook page, YouTube channel, and other social media platforms.

She will also be appearing at several (yet to be determined) future events.

I have to give DT credit for her patience and eagerness to get the shots just right. It isn’t easy to wordlessly convey the emotions and expressions needed for our featured category images, but she kept at it through take after take.

Our photographer, Willy Adkins, is president of Spook Show Entertainment. Among his many talents, he produces independent horror films and was recently the man behind the Chicago Horror Film Festival, as well as the Laugh or Die Comedy Fest. In 2011 he produced and directed the short horror film Headline News, which was based on a short story of mine called “Coed Terror in the Ivory Tower of Doom.”

I will be posting video from the photo shoot later this week. Keep coming back for updates! And while you’re here, leave a comment thanking DT Rose for helping to liven up our website and for giving you one more reason to keep coming back for more legends & lore of Illinois!

“The fascination with the spirit world seems to intrigue many individuals. I’ve always held an interest since I was a child, though many would believe children are making these stories up in their mind. There have been far too many coincidences with children and their so-called invisible friends. Yet, these strange sightings, strange smells, strange lights, and unusual events seem to keep happening throughout time. Could these events be explained in some way? …Researchers and investigators have been asking these questions for decades.”

- Jim Graczyk, Field Guide to Illinois Hauntings

Originally published in 2012 in the Astoria South Fulton Argus, reprinted with permission from the author.

Read Part 1 here.

At the apex of the hailstorm, residents reported a cyclone cloud passed. After the hail stopped, the super cell lashed the town with high winds and a deluge of rain that topped four inches. Residents who had lived in Vermont during the previous sixty years recounted that, “the hailstones were the largest they had ever remembered seeing and that the rain fell as fast as ever known in the community. Fields were turned into lakes and streets flooded from curb to curb.” Walking on the bed of hailstones was like trying to walk on ball bearings.

Site of 1924 McCormick’s Trestle. These are the concrete pillars that were put in at a later date. The east side of the roadbed has washed out considerably since the line was abandoned in the early 1980s.

The clouds broke apart and weak sunlight reflected off a winter scene in June. At the end of West 7th Street, Bret Thomas recovered a flat hailstone that was two and one-half inches across. Mrs. Delilah Chipman discovered in her yard a flat hailstone seven and one-half inches in circumference.

Three miles southwest of Vermont, the near-tornado’s hail and rain clogged the McCormick Trestle’s drainage paths, culverts and grates. A flash flood swirled down Sugar Creek and scoured the foundations away from the pilings supporting the trestle. The timber trestle groaned and swayed under the onslaught. Long transverse cracks opened in the massive timbers capable of handling loads of 1,700 lbs. per square inch.

The crew of #193 finished their switching chores at 5:00 P.M. and were ready to depart for Rushville. Vermont was junction point for the C.B. & Q’s Buda-Rushville Branch and the Beardstown Division’s St. Louis Subdivision. The storm had caused a cluster of weather-delayed trains from three directions to converge on Vermont. Harried dispatchers in Galesburg and Beardstown worked to untangle the snarl of traffic. 2nd trick train order operator Perry Fordyce copied the train orders for #193’s crew and handed them up. At 5:57 P.M. engineer Manvels whistled off for Rushville.

Beneath a tall black plume of smoke Mogul 2-6-0 #1126 pulled its 710-ton train out of Vermont. Zimmerman had a red-hot fire, but the steam pressure was a little low. He grabbed his slash bar, opened the firebox door and gave the ashes a healthy spreading. The train clattered over the wooden bridge, which spanned the wagon road at the south edge of Vermont. The train rounded a curve and pounded downhill towards the McCormick trestle over Sugar Creek.

Zimmerman had just tossed several scoops of coal into the firebox as the train bore down on the trestle. Manvels leaned out of the cab and saw that the normally low and placid Sugar Creek was now a muddy torrent. He saw no obvious dangers. Manvels yelled across the cab and asked Zimmerman how things looked on his side. Zimmerman leaned out also and saw nothing out of the ordinary. He gave Manvels a highball. At 6:05 P.M. the locomotive rumbled across the trestle and reached the southwest bank. A gut-smashing backwards tug severed the trainline air hoses and threw the train into emergency.

Manvels and Zimmerman’s souls died when the tender upended and plunged like a cannon ball into the chasm opened by the collapsing trestle. The engine swayed but before the tender coupling broke, the plunging and twisting tender overturned the locomotive. Engineer Manvels was crushed beneath the twenty-ton locomotive. Bill Zimmerman careened off the boilerhead and back deck. Zimmerman came to rest with his hips smashed under a corner of roof of the cab and with a mangled arm managed to pull down on the whistle cord. The scalded head brakeman was tossed clear and knocked senseless.

Rushville Line North and remains of McCormick’s Trestle

Word of the tragedy reached the Vermont Depot at 6:30P.M. Dr. Lloyd V. Boyton and undertaker Jerry Sears were whisked by a special train to the accident scene. Section Foreman Madtson and his gang began digging to free Zimmerman and find Manvels.

Boyton and Sears did their best to relieve Zimmerman’s sufferings. Zimmerman asked that Madtson be brought to him. Zimmerman in “pretty strong” language berated
Madtson for not inspecting the trestle after the heavy storm. A special train transported Zimmerman and Dr.Boyton to the St. Francis Hospital in Macomb. Zimmerman died at 11:05 P.M. It was midnight before the body of Manvels was recovered and brought to the Sear’s Funeral Parlor in Vermont.

An inquest into the death of W. Manvels was conducted at noon on the following day.
A wreck train equipped with a 250-ton steam derrick arrived in Vermont from Galesburg. Sixty-three-year-old Vermont, Illinois native Abraham Lincoln Mercer, Foreman of the forty-man Vermont B&B Gang #1 worked feverishly to erect a temporary trestle across Sugar Creek so that the derrick could reach the overturned locomotive. Mercer had the new trestle completed by 10 P.M. Friday, June 6. The line to Rushville reopened for normal traffic on Saturday, June 7.

In a haze of grief, Ewa Zimmerman buried Bill at Quincy on Sunday, June 8, 1924. Manvels was buried in Galesburg.

The Burlington railroad line that was originally laid through the Flatwoods area in 1869 was abandoned in the early 1980s. Concrete culverts and sawn off wooden bridge footings and the raised berm of the old roadbed still remain. All the people and machines of June 1924 are gone, but their ghosts do not sleep.

Some night when the moon is full and an Indian summer breeze is ghosting from the southwest and lifting the spider silks from the woven grids of a farm fence, retrace #193’s triangle of tragedy from East Kost Road to the Brockley farm and thence to the old Lybarger’s homestead. Perhaps the flashes of moonlight skitting through the Cottonwoods and White Oaks might be from the single eye of engine #1183. Stop and listen, perhaps you will hear welling up from the hallows of Sugar Creek and rotting pilings of the McCormick Trestle, the mournful whistle of the train that never arrived.

John Bybee retired in 2008 after 36 years with the BNSF Railroad at Beardstown, IL.  In the summer of 1975, he was the unofficial fireman on BN train #15832, engine SD-9, #6180, and traversed several times the rail route from Vermont to Rushville taken by the doomed Ghost Train #193 in 1924.

Originally published in 2012 in the Astoria South Fulton Argus, reprinted with permission from the author.

Engine of Train #193 wrecked.

In South Fulton County, Illinois, if one drives south of Vermont and heads west on County Highway 35 and glides past the David and Norma Brockley farm and then hooks a left onto the narrow gravel North Flatwoods Road—one has arrived at the mortal origins of the ghost story of C.B. & Q. train #193.

The Lester and Florance Lybarger farm home once stood on the brow of the fallow field to the immediate west of the small cluster of weathered outbuildings. At suppertime on June 5, 1924, nine-year-old Velma M. Lybarger was startled by the sudden soul-rendering shriek of a locomotive’s whistle. Living only about two miles from the railroad line from Vermont to Rushville, the residents of the Flatwoods Community were used to everyday train sounds. Velma recalled in later years, this whistle was different. It was a constant eerie moan and fell in pitch as the minutes went by.

Lester Lawrence and Florance Edith Lybarger gathered up their children; James Roland, Velma Maxine, Vera Evelyn, Lester Lewis and Melvin Freeman and headed southeast towards the presumed source of the dying whistle—the McCormick Trestle over Sugar Creek…

2:30 P.M. Thursday, June 5, 1924. A dozen dusty miles south of Macomb, Illinois, Vermont route salesman Bill Jenkins’ secondhand Model T Ford lurched over the pocked and pitted dirt road, which led south to the Bellingham Road.

At the rural Bellingham junction, Bill pulled into the gravel drive of the “Shopps” gas station. Bill stopped his car opposite the single gas pump and noted a hand written cardboard sign flopping in the stale south breeze. “Gas—Five Gallons for a dollar,” the sign advertised. Bill got out, raised the front seat cushion, grabbed the wooden yardstick located beneath the seat and inserted the stick into the ten-gallon tank under the seat. Sales had been slow all week and he had more sales calls to make before he returned to his family fifteen miles to the east.

Bill said to the sweaty attendant, “A dollars worth, please.” Bill retreated into the narrow shade of the office awning. He spent a nickel for a grape Nehi before walking slowly back to his car. As the attendant returned the gas nozzle to the pump, a shadow cast by a thin-cluster of pearl-gray misshapen cumulus clouds drifted over the filling station. A dull flash of lightning and a pop of thunder preceded the large raindrops, which splattered down in a lazy tempo that barely settled the dust. The insignificant shower abruptly stopped. “A three-inch rain, three inches between the drops, the attendant jokingly observed as he accepted the eight-bits from Bill.

“You are right, no moisture in those clouds,” sighed Bill as he pushed down the Fliver’s low speed pedal and eased onto the sun-hardened Bellingham Road.

In the corn and soybean fields beyond the gas station the failed thundershower plowed into a core of convective heat. In an instant the wispy leading edges of the embryonic storm morphed into an atmospheric grain scoop that ram jetted the new heat energy upwards at eighty miles per hour.

By the time the vortex was midway between Industry and Eldorado Hall the updraft had increased to over one-hundred miles per hour. The super cell thunderstorm uncoiled and blossomed into a cobra’s hood that soared twelve miles in the atmosphere. Raindrops were swept up into the stratosphere by the violent updrafts and frozen into pea-sized hail. An equally severe downdraft shoved the hail down and it thawed slightly before an elevator updraft carried it back upwards.

The hail grew to grapefruit-sized proportions. The lowering rain-free dark cloud base maintained the secret of its tornado as it churned towards Vermont less than five miles away.

Thirty-six-year-old Mollie A. Phillips had always considered the prairie sky overhead as a benign celestial canvas shaped by Nature into a multitude of seasons. She endured the blizzards of winter, shrugged off the windy March chills, savored the damp fogs and frosts of fall and reveled in the spring and summer seasons. The morning had started exceptionally clear, hot and muggy.

After lunch the temperature was ninety degrees. Mollie stepped off her back porch carrying a basket of wet clothes. She and her husband Asa had seven energetic children so everyday was washday. Mollie was pinning up the clothes when a shaft of cold air ruffled her long black hair. She spun on her bare heels and faced the western horizon. The weather had turned; a huge, wall-shaped cloud tinged with yellowish-green haze roiled towards her. The wind shifted to the east and brought to her ears the whistle of the afternoon freight #193.

A skybolt of fanged lightning speared the fork of an Elm tree opposite Mollie’s clotheslines. An enormous thunderclap followed immediately. The five-foot in diameter tree split like a match and crashed down in a tangle of broken limbs. Click, pick, crack, bam, hailstones as sharp as needles stung Mollie as she herded her seven small children into the house.

At the Vermont depot, ice balls pelted #193’s head brakeman as he dismounted to line the switch into the upper yard. Thirty-five-year-old fireman William F. Zimmerman backed away from his window into a corner of the cab as a barrage of hail hammered the locomotive. Engineer W.A. Manvels eased the train ahead and picked up the hunched and soaked brakeman at the switch.

Manvels looked at his watch. They were scheduled to leave Vermont at 4:15 P.M. for Rushville. Even with the light switching they had to do, the storm would delay them.

A curtain of hail slammed into the northeast side of Vermont. The brick two-story North School building on North Main was assaulted by hen-egg sized hail, which broke out forty-six windows. Two blocks south, at the corner of North Union and East North Alley streets, Elder A .J. Conlce was in his office at the First Primitive Baptist Church composing his Sunday sermon.

The hail arrived ahead of the lightning and thunder and surprised the preacher. Elder Conlce ducked as five of the tall, arched windows dissolved in a flurry of flying glass. On South Union Street, the Nelson sisters’ home lost eighteen windows. The South School building lost twenty-three windows. Charlie Kost’s home at the extreme south edge of town had twenty-six windows broken out. Dane Nelson looked up in amazement as hail punched a dozen holes in the tin roof of the Union Newspaper Office on Main Street. The hail pelted down for some thirty minutes and reached a depth of three to four inches.

To be continued Wed. May 8…

John Bybee retired in 2008 after 36 years with the BNSF Railroad at Beardstown, IL.  In the summer of 1975, he was the unofficial fireman on BN train #15832, engine SD-9, #6180, and traversed several times the rail route from Vermont to Rushville taken by the doomed Ghost Train #193 in 1924.

The curious box had been sitting on the coffee table until the quiet of evening when she could finally focus her attention on it. She set her tea cup on the table and plopped down onto the sofa and bent over, staring down into it for a moment. She pulled the other items from the box: the comb, the hand mirror and the perfume bottle, and held them up to the dim evening light, wondering about the person to whom they might have belonged. What kind of person had owned these things and then given them away? These had obviously once been the possessions of a woman, sadly finding their way into an old antique shop where no one would ever know the story behind them. She set the items carefully onto the table and focused her attention on the mysterious book.

She smiled as she stared down at it for a moment, drinking in the refined detail of its hand-crafted cover. Her eyes followed every stitch and curve of its design. It was truly a work of art, she thought, pleased with her purchase.

Suddenly realizing that she had never actually looked inside the book when she bought it, she pulled the box closer and reached in and gripped its sides firmly with both hands.

“Ouch!” she cried. Out of nowhere her eyes dilated to almost fully black as she felt a quick jolt of electricity surge through her fingers like lightning bolts. She quickly dropped the book back into the box and gripped her hands tightly in pain. “What the heck was that?” She stared down at the book again, scowling, with her hands held upright in the air, fingers spread apart. She was afraid to touch anything now.

“It must be really bad static electricity,” she said, grimacing still from the lingering pain in her fingers. She rubbed her hands again in an attempt to reduce the remaining sensation of pins and needles, and stared down at the book for a moment, confused.

But curiosity slowly crept into her mind. She lowered her hands slowly, just short of touching the book again, but then hesitated. Surely that shock was just an isolated incident, she thought. It wouldn’t possibly shock her like that again. She took a deep breath and slowly allowed her index finger to lightly touch its soft surface.

What happens next? Read Hunting Ghosts: Thrilling Tales of the Paranormal to find out!

Copyright 2013 Black Oak Media, Inc. You do not have permission to copy this post.

In April, TNT hosted their 2013 Paranormal Lecture Series at the public library in Streamwood on the 18th.  They had a great turn out (44 people), and hopefully made some new friends. The group also added a program at Arlington Heights Historical Museum for later in the year.  TNT Paranormal has many more lecture dates scheduled this year so check their events page for details.

This issue includes articles on:

• Paranormal “U” article “Baseline Readings”
• Famous Haunts featuring “The Whaley House Museum”
• TnT Asks featuring Michael Kravchuk, aka The Ghost Gadget Guy
• Tools of the Trade article “Shadow Detectors”
• Ask TnT Paranormal with a question on “What is a house clearing?”
• Paranormal Talk with Rev. Kathy article “What Is A Shamanic Practitioner?”
• What’s on Your Mind article “El Duende”
• Return of Paranormal Fiction
• Investigator Spotlight featuring Investigator in Training Barb Smith

To read the issue go to this link.

Readers are encouraged and welcome to submit content for the Ask TnT Paranormal, Ghostly Believe it or Not, and What’s on Your Mind columns. Email melissa@tntparanormal.com if you have information you would like included. Also, feel free to print the newsletter, pass along to your friends and family, or have them email Melissa to sign-up for the newsletter.

Ashmore Estates April 2013. Photo courtesy of Bauer Auction Service.

Ashmore Estates, a former almshouse and hospital for the developmentally disabled, was sold at auction over the weekend. Since 2006, the building has been operated by Scott Kelley as a haunted attraction and has been featured in national television shows and documentaries. On Friday, April 26, it sold to a four member partnership for $12,700.

Since its closure in 1987, Ashmore Estates has captured local and regional attention for its variety of legends and ghostly tales. In the past few years, it has risen to national prominence as its owners opened its doors to the public for tours, paranormal investigations, and as a full-fledged haunted attraction. Its new owners intend to keep its spirit alive and continue to offer paranormal-themed tours and events.

The purchasing partnership consists of four individuals from central Illinois, including painter, pigeon racer, and musician Robert Burton, band manager and song writer Ella Richards,  electrician and entrepreneur Jerry Fegget, and registered nurse and mother Nancy Meier. The was a small crowd at the auction, but in the end, it came down to just a handful of bidders. The auction was conducted by Bauer Auction Service from Windsor, Illinois.

“We have met so many wonderful people,” Robert told us. “There is a magnificent support group behind Ashmore Estates. The previous owners have done a wonderful job.” The new owners plan to add events and programs including a graveyard scene to the front yard, more tours, and a monthly haunted attraction every full moon.

In January of this year, Ashmore Estates was damaged by a tornado that destroyed its roof. Funds raised to repair the roof were given to the new owners, so that they could choose a suitable replacement. There will be more fundraising events in the near future to cover the full cost of the new roof.

The new owners are hosting a potluck informational/organizational meeting for all past present and future individuals who are interested in the restoration development and continuation of Ashmore Estates on Saturday, May 11th at 1pm at Ashmore Estates (22645 E CR 1050N Ashmore, IL 61912).

This page is copyright Black Oak Media, inc., 2013. You do not have permission to copy this for any reason. Please learn how to cite your work.