Alfalfa Bill Murray at the Oklahoma Governor’s Mansion

William Henry Davis Murray, born in Texas in 1869, moved to Indian Territory in 1898 and married Mary Alice Hearrell, a niece of the Chickasaw Nation’s governor. He acquired the nickname “Alfalfa Bill” around 1902 from his speeches to farmers about crops, including his own alfalfa. Murray presided over Oklahoma’s 1906 constitutional convention, became the first speaker of the state House, served in Congress from 1913 to 1917 and was the ninth governor from 1931 to 1935. His term in the Depression was marked by frequent use of the National Guard and martial law. He later published books with racist and antisemitic claims, and historians remember him as both colourful and divisive. He died in 1956.

The Governor’s Mansion in Oklahoma City, a Dutch Colonial Revival house designed by the firm Layton, Hicks and Forsyth, was dedicated in October 1928; before that the state’s governors lived in private houses or hotels. The state’s official mansion page says that during the Depression Murray had the lawn ploughed into a vegetable garden where poor residents could plant potatoes. It also says that some people believe his ghost still lives in the house. Murray returned to the mansion in 1951 for four years when his son Johnston became governor.

The ghost story took on its present shape in the 1990s and 2000s. According to a 2022 Oklahoman article quoting the 2016 book Haunted Oklahoma City by Jeff Provine and Tanya McCoy, Governor Frank Keating, who served from 1995 to 2003, said his teenage sons and their friends watching television in the basement saw Murray’s ghost walk through the room. The book also says Keating’s wife, Cathy, was tripped on the third step of the central staircase, and attributes to her a remark that the step was level and had been checked, so “he’s there tripping people”. She had a doll of Murray made and placed on the step. In 2018, outgoing governor Mary Fallin told a Tulsa television reporter that stories of the mansion being haunted exist, and that soon after moving in, while on crutches after hip surgery, she tripped on the same stair, though she did not tie the fall to a ghost.

Nothing in these accounts is a documented sighting before the Keating years, and every report is humorous in tone. Keating’s sons are the only claimed eyewitnesses, and their account is told second-hand. The stories nonetheless show how a colourful politician can become a household ghost long after his death.

A male figure said to walk through the basement, tripping on the third stair, cabinet doors that open themselves, knocking and footsteps in empty rooms, and a buzzing sound in the sunroom, as recounted in Haunted Oklahoma City. Staff and families often blame the wind and the building’s age.

The central staircase, especially the third step, and the basement of the Governor’s Mansion.

The ghost is told in Jeff Provine and Tanya McCoy’s Haunted Oklahoma City (2016), in the Oklahoman’s Halloween coverage, and by state government itself on the mansion’s official page.