Tours provide a glimpse of Cape Girardeau's supposedly haunted past

No stars were out Saturday night; only the moon, full and looming over Cape Girardeau’s downtown.

“I’ve been leading these tours for about a decade,” guide Christy Mershon told the 30 or so tourists on the Haunted Downtown Walking Tour.

“But I’ve never done one under a supermoon,” she said, referring to the phenomenon of when a full moon coincides with its closest approach to Earth.

In a black lace veil, Victorian-style cloak and white facepaint, Mershon looked like a ghost herself as she explained how otherworldly presences tend to manifest themselves.

“We as beings are made of energy, but when you don’t have a body ...” she trailed off, implying some aspects of Cape Girardeau’s history are difficult to explain away. “You can believe it or not believe it. ... But we all know the moon has a strange effect. Especially the October moon.”

She led the party south from the Boardman Pavilion to the Red House. Louis Lorimier’s re-created homestead, where visitors can see how a 17th-century trading post would have looked, appears to be the type of place where a ghost from that era would feel at home.

Mershon said a presence indeed was thought to have inhabited the original site.

Lorimier, she said, had been happiest during his time in the trading post with his wife Charlotte, but there was a problem.

Charlotte, being Native American, was not considered a person in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church at the time. But they had a good life and several children before Charlotte took sick and died in 1808.

Lorimier buried her in what now is Old Lorimier Cemetery, and he remarried, this time to a more “appropriate” woman named Marie Berthiaume.

When she died, Lorimier buried her in the same cemetery as Charlotte.

Lorimier eventually was buried between the two, whose headstones identified Marie as his “wife” and Charlotte as his “consort.”

The spectral sightings began at the trading post soon after Lorimier died.

In 1850, a tornado ripped through the trading post and several properties owned by the Catholic Church — an unusual occurrence in November. It could have been just a freak occurrence, Mershon said, but it seemed ominous enough to spur whispers about whether the tornado had come for the church that had slighted Lorimier’s first wife.

In any case, Mershon said, Lorimier’s ghost reappeared later — not in the trading post, but in the cemetery where Charlotte lay.

The tour stopped at Old St. Vincent’s Catholic Church for stories of Civil War ghosts and later at what used to be the St. Vincent’s ladies’ school.

Wealthy Southern families sent their daughters to Cape Girardeau during the war, Mershon said.

Despite the city being Union-controlled, there were Southern sympathies in the area, and Cape Girardeau was safer than Virginia or Mississippi.

While the enlisted men and boys had plenty of downtown distractions in Cape Girardeau, they were known to congregate at the fence of the school to behold the women at study or leisure.

Decades after the war, downtown businesses began hearing occasional reports from tourists of Civil War re-enactors on Spanish Street, Mershon said.

But the supposed re-enactors always were gone upon further investigation.

The tour’s big stop was at the Glenn House, where Mershon said nobody goes alone anymore — not since the footsteps heard on the staircase a while back and mysterious problems with the home’s servant-bell system about a year ago.

After hearing a history of the house, guests were led inside to see whether they felt weirdness in the walls or saw a glimpse of a ghostly figure that sometimes has been seen in the upstairs window looking out over the river to the east — waiting or looking at the moon.

Tours also will be conducted Oct. 21, 28 and 29. To register, go to semo.edu/continuinged/classes/registration-form.html.

tgraef@semissuorian.com

(573) 388-3627