Reported Haunting 1870

Article excerpt from the Nebraska State Historical Society:

"Omaha has had several so-called haunted houses, . . . Away back in 1870 there was one I remember in particular because of a personal experience. . . . The property [near Twenty-fourth and Vinton streets] had been owned by an old German, a shoemaker, who, with his family of five, lived in the cottage. During the severe winter of 1869 the people became poverty-stricken, the shoemaker’s ill-health being the cause, and one by one they died — the mother first and the children afterwards. The old German was too poor to afford funerals, so he burled his family on his own grounds not far from the house. In the spring he also died and was buried in one of the cemeteries by some of his relatives from the east, who claimed the property and sold it. The family had no intimate friends and few acquaintances, so the circumstances of their sudden demise were never known, but townspeople believed the cause to have been starvation.

“The house stood unoccupied while its sale was being negotiated, and before the year was up rumors became current that it was haunted. People said that on dark, still nights the ghosts of the old German woman and her children danced on their graves. . . . [N]obody could be induced to live in it, even rent free.”

The house’s evil reputation grew with the story of a transient who claimed to have spent a night in the kitchen of the empty structure and been awakened by “a weird apparition. Tramping noiselessly from closet to larder and from larder back again to the closet, in search of something to eat, were the phantom figures of the old German woman and her children. Their forms were of vapor and shone like phosphorous.”

https://history.nebraska.gov/publications_section/a-haunted-house-in-omaha/