Case file · Apparition · Public building

The Ghost of Clara Mills, Nebraska Wesleyan University

Also known as C.C. White Building ghost, Wesleyan ghost, Clara Mills

In 1963 a Nebraska Wesleyan secretary said she saw a long-dead music teacher – and the campus as it looked decades earlier – in an empty office.

Urania Clara Mills joined the music faculty of Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln in 1912 and taught piano, theory and music history there for 28 years, eventually heading the department. Students remembered her fondly. On April 12, 1940, she was found dead in her office in the C.C. White Building, apparently of a heart attack, and she was buried in Lincoln’s Wyuka Cemetery.

Twenty-three years later, on a chilly October morning in 1963 – most accounts give October 3 – Coleen Buterbaugh, a secretary working for the academic dean, went to the C.C. White Building to find a visiting lecturer who was using a suite at the north end of the building. As she stepped inside, she later said, the noise of the busy hallway seemed to stop and she noticed a musty smell. In the inner room she saw a tall, slender woman with dark hair, in a long skirt and long-sleeved blouse, reaching into a cabinet with her back turned, and she sensed a man seated at a desk to her left, though no one was there.

The detail that made the case famous came next. Looking out of the window, Buterbaugh said, she saw no streets and none of the modern campus buildings – as if the view were of the campus decades earlier. Frightened, she left. When she described the woman, faculty members suggested Clara Mills, and old yearbooks are said to have confirmed the likeness for her. The story travelled far beyond Lincoln and is still cited in books on “time slips” and retrocognition. Not everyone agrees on the ghost’s identity: some accounts name Mary Allen Smith, a music teacher at Wesleyan from 1895 to 1920.

The C.C. White Building was torn down in 1973, and the Smith-Curtis Administration Building now stands on the site. The legend did not go with it: the university itself says possible sightings of Clara Mills have been reported in Old Main, Smith-Curtis and the Rogers Center for Fine Arts, and it has invited ghost hunters to campus for Halloween events.

What people report

A dark-haired woman in early-20th-century dress at a cabinet, the felt presence of a seated man, sudden silence, a musty smell, and a window view of a campus without its modern streets and buildings – reported by one witness in 1963, with later, vaguer sightings by students and staff.

Where and when

Originally the north-end office suite of the C.C. White Building (demolished 1973); later reports come from Old Main, the Smith-Curtis Administration Building and the Rogers Center for Fine Arts, especially around Halloween.

Timeline of the haunting

April 12, 1940
Death of Clara Mills Lincoln, Nebraska
The longtime music professor was found dead in her office in the C.C. White Building, apparently of a heart attack, after 28 years on the faculty.
October 3, 1963
Coleen Buterbaugh’s encounter Lincoln, Nebraska
Sent to find a visiting lecturer, the dean’s secretary reported a woman at a cabinet, an unseen man at a desk and an old-fashioned view through the window. She identified the woman as Mills from old photographs.
1973
C.C. White Building demolished Lincoln, Nebraska
The building where Mills died and Buterbaugh had her experience was torn down; the Smith-Curtis Administration Building occupies the site.
October 8, 2010
Ghost hunt on campus Lincoln, Nebraska
Nebraska Wesleyan hosted paranormal investigator Chris Moon for a “Ghost Hunting 101” talk and an overnight campus investigation looking for Clara Mills.

What could explain it?

The case rests on a single witness’s account, recorded after the fact; there is no independent corroboration of what she saw.
Psychologists would point to a brief dissociative or hypnagogic-like episode, in which a startled, distracted person experiences silence, smells and imagery.
Identifying the figure from yearbooks after colleagues had already suggested Mills is a classic route to confirmation bias.
A view of trees and open ground through an old window can be read as the past when the viewer is already frightened.

Ghost tours, books and screen

The Buterbaugh account appears in Alan Boye’s A Guide to the Ghosts of Lincoln and many anthologies of haunted colleges and time-slip cases. Clara Mills is part of Nebraska Wesleyan’s campus folklore, retold every October in campus news and events.

Places to visit

Nebraska Wesleyan University Lincoln, Nebraska

An active private university; the campus grounds are open, but its buildings are for students, staff and invited guests.

Where it’s reported

Nebraska