Mary Hart and the Ghost of Fred Hardy

On 19 September 1902 a man who gave his name as Fred Hardy, and who said his real name was Frederick Watkins, was hanged in Nome. The Nome Nugget described it that day as the first hanging in Alaska since the territory became American. Hardy had been convicted of killing three men on Unimak Island in the Aleutians in June 1901: the brothers Con and Florence Sullivan, who had lived for some years in Butte, Montana, and P. J. (Pat) Rooney. A fourth member of their party, Owen Jackson, survived and testified. Hardy was tried at Unalaska before Judge James Wickersham, lost his appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court, and always said he was not a murderer. The scaffold was built inside the Nome Ice Company’s building, across from the federal jail.

Among the reporters covering the execution was Mary E. Hart, a Nome newspaperwoman and clubwoman who had mined and homesteaded in the north and later represented Alaska at several world’s fairs. Years later she told a West Coast newspaper that she had spoken with Hardy through the bars of his cell in the last hours, hoping for a confession. By her account he refused to lie, then asked whether she believed the dead could make themselves known to the living, and said he would return if she would welcome him. She said she told him yes.

The claimed haunting came afterwards. Hart said she was alone in her office writing up the hanging when she found herself frozen in her chair and unable to speak, as if she were being choked. She said she was released when a young woman known as “Sunshine” came in and touched her shoulder, and that Sunshine then cried out that Hardy was in the room and spoke for a moment in what Hart took to be his voice. After that, she said, she felt his presence day and night, lost her health, and left Nome. She said the obsession did not end until she was aboard the boat south, and that at least one other person also saw the presence. Hart told the story in 1915, when her account was reprinted in Nome’s own newspaper under a headline saying a hanged man’s ghost kept her from returning.

The case is unusual because the central witness was a working reporter, because the execution is documented in the contemporary press, and because the ghost claim has a named, dated origin in her own words. It rests on one person’s testimony, though, and on a story she told years after the events. Details also differ between retellings: Hart placed the killings at “Dutch Flat”, while the 1902 report places them on Unimak Island.

A sensation of paralysis and choking, a felt presence, and a second person who briefly seemed to speak in the dead man’s voice. No visual apparition is clearly described in the 1915 text.

Hart’s newspaper office in Nome, and afterwards (she said) wherever she went until she left the Bering Sea region by steamer.

The story was passed around by newspapers in the Pacific North-west and Alaska in 1915 and has since been retold in modern ghost-story blogs.