This story, which took place almost 100 years ago in the American state of Kansas, was widely covered in local newspapers and is purportedly entirely true, as it had at least several eyewitnesses, including among the sheriff’s deputies.
The Ghost at the Window
It all began in 1927 when widowed farmer Fred Kett, who lived in rural area near the town of Ellinwood in Barton County, remarried a woman named Maimie, who was half his age. One evening, Maimie was sitting on the second floor of the farmhouse, taking care of their one-year-old son, while Fred was downstairs in the kitchen. When he finished his chores, he approached the window to blow out a candle and suddenly saw a face in the glass.
It looked as though someone from outside was peering into the kitchen window. However, there was no one in the yard, of which Fred was certain, so he rushed out of the house to catch the uninvited guest. At the window, he saw no one, but then the dog began barking fiercely from the direction of the woodshed, as if it had seen a stranger. Then the cows in the barn began lowing loudly and the horses neighed in fear. Even the chickens started to squawk. All the animals seemed to have gone mad.
Fred searched the yard, bewildered as he didn’t see any people. But then, finally, he noticed a tall, dark figure near the gate leading to the garden. “What are you doing there?” he shouted, but the figure simply silently leaped over the fence (at least that’s how it seemed to Fred) and disappeared among the trees.
Fred wasn’t one to be easily frightened, and he certainly didn’t believe in ghosts or such “nonsense.” So he laughed loudly and shouted after the figure, “Your tricks didn’t work! Come back and try again!”
Poltergeist, Moans, and Footsteps
He regretted his words a few minutes later when he returned to the house and suddenly saw that all the furniture in the house was out of place. When he went upstairs and asked his wife why she had moved the furniture, she was very surprised and said she hadn’t done anything like that and had been sitting with the child all evening.
Fred Kett became worried and slept very poorly that night. The animals in the yard also seemed restless from time to time, making anxious noises, as if someone frightening was wandering around again. At one point, someone started moaning loudly right outside the bedroom window.
When Fred woke up in the morning, he saw that a photo of his first, deceased wife, standing on the bedside table next to the bed, had been turned to face the wall.
Fred still tried to convince himself and his young wife Maimie, who was also very frightened, that everything was fine, just some minor misunderstanding. But the next night was even scarier. They heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, and then someone approached the door of their bedroom and knocked loudly three times. When Fred jumped out of bed and opened the door, all he managed to see was a very quickly retreating dark silhouette in the hallway.
This repeated every night, and then both Fred and Maimie saw the photo of Fred’s first wife turning by itself towards the wall.
After that, Fred believed not so much in evil spirits, but in the fact that someone was trying to scare him off his land. He wrote to his mother and brother, who lived in Miami, asking them to come and help him deal with whatever it was. He also hired three strong workers to guard his farm.
The moaning figure from the closet
One of these workers, named Charles Ammons, was even more of a realist than Fred, and he scoffed at the talk of a ghost. By the way, there were rumors in the county that it was the ghost of Kett’s first wife, who was jealous of her husband’s new marriage to Maimie.
But on the very first night at the farm, when he slept in his assigned room, he heard loud moans coming straight from the wardrobe. When Ammons jumped up and opened the closet doors, a black silhouette flew out directly at him. Ammons tried to grab the figure, but his hands simply passed through it, and the next moment he was lying on the floor, while the black silhouette simply disappeared. The next morning, all three hired workers quit.
Complaint to the Prosecutor and Sheriff’s Stakeout
By that time, Fred believed that one of his neighbors, who didn’t like his wealth or new marriage, had set the ghost on him. He complained to the county prosecutor, Wayne Lamero. But Lamero laughed at the mention of a ghost and said, “Bring him here, and I’ll put him in jail.”
Feeling insulted, Fred then wrote to the governor himself, who ordered Sheriff James Hill to conduct an investigation. Hill didn’t believe in ghosts either, but he sent five deputies to the Kett farm to sit there and arrest the culprit when they appeared.
They split into two groups, and around 10 p.m. on the same day, the first group of three saw a blurry shadowy figure approaching them. They shouted for it to stop, but the ghost didn’t listen. So they opened fire and shot six bullets toward the figure. The ghost howled angrily, but more out of spite than pain, and floated towards the garden, disappearing there.
The Ghost Turns More Malevolent
But the next night, it returned, and now its activity was much stronger and it seemed even more enraged. Objects in the Kett’s house moved on their own, ghostly faces peered into windows, and the shadowy figure roamed the yard and rooms of the house almost constantly.
The final straw for Fred was when one morning he found his beloved dog skewered to death with pitchforks.
Only then did Fred admit defeat in this battle. He and his wife sold their livestock and furniture, packed their remaining belongings into a car, and left with their young son for an unnamed city. They deliberately didn’t tell anyone where they were going so the ghost wouldn’t pursue them there.
It later became known that they settled in the state of Arkansas, and Fred vowed that someday he would return and find a way to deal with the ghost once and for all. However, as the newspapers wrote, he never did return. What became of his abandoned farm remains unknown.