Ella Myers, Oklahoma Territory’s First Ghost

Ella Myers was a young woman reported by a wire story to have come from Pueblo, Colorado. Guthrie’s Daily Leader said she lived in a small house on the Santa Fe railroad right-of-way that was run by a woman named Ella Huston, and that she was found dead on a Sunday morning in early April 1896. According to the newspaper’s account, her death was blamed on a drug overdose. No inquest was held, and she was buried within hours in the county’s pauper ground on the Cottonwood flats. A man named James Whitman, said to have been with her the night she died, was not seen again after the burial.

The burial itself became the first scandal. The Leader asked whether she had been buried alive, reporting that two physicians were uneasy about the speed of the funeral, and it later quoted a businessman complaining that the pauper’s ground was a marsh that the river flooded about twice a year. Rumour filled the gap left by the missing inquest.

Then the empty house began to draw crowds. The Leader of 19 April 1896 reported that for more than a week the house had been the scene of groans, a wail and doors that opened by themselves, and that neighbours had left nearby shacks. It said a man named George Hardie, who went out expecting a joke, found the doors locked, heard a wail and saw the front door swing open, and then reported being rapped four times on the head and seeing a bloody hand holding a bottle in a beam of light. Another man, given in the paper as Kickapoo Charley, was said to have fainted after seeing an apparition. A wire dispatch carried by the Laramie Republican the next day said that more than a score of men and several police officers waited in the house and all saw a woman in white move about and heard moaning.

According to an excerpt from the book Haunted Guthrie, Oklahoma posted on Goodreads, the girl’s half-brother arrived from Kansas after reading the paper, had the body exhumed on 23 April and found no sign that she had struggled in the box, and had her reburied in a cemetery elsewhere. The book says the disturbances stopped afterwards. Details of the exhumation come from that modern retelling rather than from the April 1896 page examined here.

Wailing and moaning, doors opening on their own, a figure in white at the windows, raps, a light with a red hand holding a bottle, and a voice saying “Don’t give me any morphine, I am sick.”

A small house on the Santa Fe right-of-way on Guthrie’s west side, where she was found, and later the pauper’s burial ground on the Cottonwood flats.

Ella Myers is called Oklahoma Territory’s first ghost in Tanya McCoy and Jeff Provine’s Haunted Guthrie, Oklahoma (2015), and the story is retold in Guthrie ghost-walk material.