Is There A Ghost Haunting The Old Capitol In Iowa City?

 

Old Capitol looks harmless enough. Gold dome. Stone columns. Students walking past with coffee, phones, and three minutes to get somewhere five minutes away.

Come back after dark. Those windows look different once you’ve heard the stories.

Lights flipping back on after they’ve been shut off for the night. Footsteps with no one to make them. And whispered voices coming from empty rooms.

Maybe there’s an ordinary explanation. Wind rustling through the windows, or the foundation settling? Pranksters?

There have also been reports of museum artifacts changing position. And a contractor who supposedly died during renovations and never quite left. Which is a great story until you check the records, and there are no reports of anyone dying during renovations or otherwise.

That leaves a ghost without a name and a death without a record. Thin stuff for a history book. Plenty for a story told after closing.

The building doesn’t need much help to set the mood. Construction began in 1840. Lawmakers moved in two years later with only four rooms finished. The rest of the job dragged on while government went about its business.

A Haunted House on West Seventh Street In Sioux City

(This story is based on an article from the Sioux City Journal published on February 23, 1896. The narrative is accurate to the story. The quotes are the actual quotes from the story. Enjoy!)

There was something strange going on at 223 West Seventh Street in Sioux City, Iowa.

 

At least, that’s what people were saying. Doors opened and slammed shut in the middle of the night. Strange noises came from empty rooms. And the kitchen stove had a nasty habit of falling over when no one was around to push it.

 

Not once or twice, either. Three times in a single day.

 

The house was a cheap, weather-beaten building at the corner of West Seventh and Bluff streets, a story and a half tall, with faded brown paint and five rooms. Nothing about it looked particularly frightening.

 

But the people living there were starting to wonder.

A Newly Wed And A Haunted House In Ottumwa

 

(This story is based on an article in The Gate City—Keokuk, Iowa. December 7, 1911)

 

Alva Shelley had been married four days when something in his new house scared the hell out of him. It wasn’t a burglar or a prowler. Whatever was lurking in that house sounded like a man being strangled to death.

 

And Shelley didn’t plan on sticking around to find out what it was.

 

The next morning, he left the house, dragged his new bride off to his mother’s place, and marched into court demanding someone put his story on paper. He even paid 25 cents to make it official.

 

“I tell you that the house is haunted and I will not live in it under any consideration,” he told Justice of the Peace W. J. Berry.

 

It started out like any other newlywed story. Shelley got married on Thanksgiving. They rented a house near the old pickle works on Hayne Street in Ottumwa. They moved in on Friday. Everything seemed fine. Then the neighbors started talking.

The Haunted House In Leach Hollow Near Mapelton Iowa

 

Haunted house at Leach Hollow 
(pencil drawing after a picture in the Des Moines Register. April 25, 1909)

There was something wrong with the old house in Leach Hollow.

At least, that’s what people around Mapleton, Iowa, were saying. And after a few families tried living there, even the skeptics started wondering.

 

The house sat about three miles south of Mapleton in a narrow valley known as Leach Hollow. It was an old farmhouse surrounded by rough hills, scrub oak, and thick brush. At night, tucked down in that hollow with nothing but darkness around it, the place must have felt a long way from anybody.

 

And the house had a history.

 

Years earlier, William Leach lived there with his family. He became sick with tuberculosis and died. His widow remarried, but tragedy followed her new husband, George Smith, too.

 

Smith was repairing an old cave or cellar near the house when the roof collapsed, crushing him beneath dirt and timbers.

Four Books Describing Iowa Weird: Ghosts, Cryptids & Other Strange Stuff

 

So you wanna talk about Iowa ghosts, monsters, cryptids, and other mysterious creatures.

Don’t laugh. They’re out there. Sometimes closer than you think 

Sasquatches. Banshees. Black Angels. Truck eating bridges. Bridges that move cars. Maybe even a few UFOs.

Iowa’s got them all. Most of the stories are out there, easy to find. But some of them are hidden. You’ve got to do a little digging to find the real dirt. 

Or—you can read these books, written by guys who’ve spent their lives digging through ancient archives, sifting cemetery dirt, or maybe sitting under the Black Angel at midnight. Waiting. Wondering—if their time was up.

I know. Reading a book isn’t near as satisfying as chasing a banshee down Brady Street at 3 a.m. Or tracking a Sasquatch through the brush at Bulger’s Hollow by moonlight, but— You know you’re going to wake up in your own bed the next morning. That’s a big plus, isn’t it?

The Most Haunted Places in Iowa (Real Stories, Not Legends)

 

Villisca murder house in 1917

Iowa doesn’t try to be spooky.

 

No haunted house gift shops. No fog machines. No one sells ghost tours out of a van.

 

It’s just… normal.

 

Which is exactly why these places stick with people.

 

Nobody goes looking for something weird out here.

 

They just run into it.

UFOs over Iowa

In 1967, two state troopers near Norwalk chased a red-orange
spacecraft down a rural highway at 2 am

Something was loose in the Iowa sky during the 1960s and 70s—something bright, silent, and definitely not from any Air Guard training schedule. Iowa papers were printing UFO stories with the same straight face they used for county board meetings. It wasn’t fringe. It was news. And to read those old clippings today is to feel the weird throb of a state trying to keep its sanity while the heavens misbehaved.

 Take 1964, for example—Lisbon and Mount Vernon. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported locals watching an oval-shaped light that shot across the sky, stopped cold, and hovered like a nervous housefly with a PhD. One man told the paper it “hung there like it was thinking.” Thinking! This was Iowa, where nothing thinks in the sky except clouds and maybe the occasional bird with ambition.

A Ghost Tale of Clinton Iowa

This one is just for fun. There’s not a hint of truth in it, is there?

 

Folks in Clinton don’t talk much about Silas Burdett. Not when the sun’s up, anyway. In daylight he’s a joke you toss around over burgers at Hook’s or while waiting on a latte at 392. A story. A shrug.

 

But when the Mississippi fog slides in after dark, people stop joking. Conversations dry up. Eyes slide toward the windows. And if you listen, if you really listen, you’d swear you hear crackling wood. Burning. Smoldering. Old smoke that isn’t there.

 

Silas Burdett. Yeah. Him.

 

The lumber baron who ran Clinton back when sawdust blew through town like blizzards and the mills never slept. He had a voice like grinding timber and a jaw cut from white oak. Folks say he didn’t walk so much as shove the ground out of his way. His mill squatted on the riverfront where the LumberKings ballpark stands now—back before baseball, before bleachers, before anything except heat, noise, and fear.

Before Bigfoot, There Was the Lockridge Moster

Tracks in the mud, scatnottered turkey feathers--not human

October 1975. Lockridge, Iowa. Population small enough to know who’s in church and who’s not. Then something started killing turkeys. Not clean kills, either—these birds were torn apart, like something angry had come out of the timber hungry for chaos.

A farmer named Bill Beavers made the first call. Said he found ten-inch footprints stamped deep in the mud, wide as a man’s palm. “Didn’t look like no animal I ever seen,” he told the Fairfield Ledger. The cops came out, looked around, scratched their heads, and left with nothing but cigarette smoke and a few plaster casts that didn’t make sense.

Beavers said he saw it one night—black, hairy, broad shoulders, eyes catching the light. He fired his gun, it ran. Left behind that smell every farm kid knows: wet fur and something rotting. The Des Moines Register ran a short piece about it—“Iowa’s Own Monster,” they called it—and suddenly the little town of Lockridge had more reporters than cattle.

Eerie Iowa Booke Review

 

Iowa looks calm. Cornfields. Church bells. Pie contests. Then Eerie Iowa comes along and says, “Sure, but have you met the monsters?”

Michael McCarty and Bruce Walters take you down the gravel roads of the Hawkeye State and into the dark. They find a winged thing glowing over Van Meter in 1903. A lake monster curling under Okoboji. Bigfoot, naturally, tromping around Calhoun County like he owns the place.

 

It’s not just stories—they dig up history, too. Facts. Names. Newspaper clippings. All the little details that make you wonder if maybe it really did happen.

 

There’s a Kafka inspired sculpture that looks like it might start whispering to you if you stare too long. And Black Angels straight out of Hell that portend death if you look at them wrong.

 

The writing? Sharp. Weird. A little wicked. The kind that makes you smile right before the hair on your neck stands up. And the pictures. Bruce Walter’s drawings are haunting. Somewhat scary.

Who's Haunting the Hotel Julien in Dubuque Iowa

Hotel Julien (circa 1930)

There’s something strange going on at the Hotel Julien in Dubuque, Iowa. It doesn’t look haunted at first glance, but if you spend the night—look out—because you just might meet Public Enemy No. 1.

Locals say it’s haunted by the ghost of Al Capone. He rolled into town in the 1920s, and took over the entire eighth floor. His men spread out like killer bees, patrolling the hallways, their jackets bulging where guns hid.

Some say he owned the place, or had a stake in it. The hotel had been struggling for years. Then overnight, it was transformed into the finest joint in town. Suspicions, yes—but people understood, curiosity could buy you a case of lead poisoning.

Then, as quickly as he came, Al Capone disappeared—back to Chicago, and a fast-growing empire of booze, women, and bullets. But something stayed behind.

Lucinda The Phantom of Stony Hollow Road

Lucinda waiting on the bluff. Ready to jump
into legend? Maybe.

Out past Burlington, where the cornfields turn to limestone and the road hums under your tires, lies Stony Hollow Road. Quiet, crooked, and empty. A place where headlights vanish faster than they should and the night feels heavier than it ought to. Locals say a woman named Lucinda still waits there—though for what, no one’s sure anymore.

The story is simple and mean. She was supposed to meet her lover at the bluff. He never came. Maybe he got stuck in the mud. Maybe he never planned to show. She waited, heart cracking open, then stepped off the edge. No records. No obituary. Just a story that settled in the dirt and refused to leave.

If you stop there after midnight and say her name three times—“Lucinda, Lucinda, Lucinda”—she’s supposed to appear on the cliff, pale and silent. Yeah! It sounds like Beetlejuice, but Lucinda was there first, so who’s copying whom?

Terror In Small Town Iowa, The Van Meter Visitor

Townspeople shot at the beast as it crawled 
down the electric pole, then flew away.

Mass hysteria? Maybe.

A bat-winged demon with a spotlight for a forehead? Maybe.

Either way, something strange unfolded in Van Meter, Iowa, in the fall of 1903, and it left the entire town rattled, reeking of gunpowder, and a little embarrassed in the aftermath.

Van Meter wasn’t exactly a bustling metropolis, just 900 people, give or take a few farmers in the fields. But for five nights in late September and early October, this sleepy town on the Raccoon River hosted something nobody could explain, and just about everybody saw it.

It started with lights—floating, brilliant beams that cut through the night like the high beams of a Model T before such things existed. Then came the sounds. Buzzing. Hissing. A low hum like a nest of hornets, and then came the creatures.

One paper breathlessly reported that “two weird-looking, terror-striking monsters are living in a coal mine on the edge of that town.” Apparently, they were nocturnal, winged, and loud enough to serve as a town-wide curfew bell. At sundown, doors were locked, curtains drawn, and more than one brave Iowan supposedly dove for the bed skirts.

Now, you may think: “Sure, people were simpler back then. Easier to fool.” Maybe, but consider this: the list of witnesses reads like a Chamber of Commerce roster.

First up was Dr. A.C. Alcott, who was trying to enjoy a quiet night when a beam of blinding light sliced through his window. Outside stood something “half-human and half-beast, with great bat-like wings,” a horn protruding from its head that shot light like a railroad lantern from hell. The smell, he said, was “worse than death.”

A Haunted House in Leach Hollow

Neighbor's say Burch in Leach Hollow was haunted.

Everyone agrees the Burch House in Leach Hollow is haunted. It’s an old farmhouse surrounded by scrub oak and hazel brush out in the middle of nowhere.

When they had enough of the hauntings, the family sold all their stuff and moved to Nebraska. They rented the place to Clyde Nepper and his new bride in 1908—conveniently forgetting to tell them about the supernatural happenings. After a short while, the Neppers heard strange noises—a weird rapping on the walls and voices. One night when it got to be too much, Nepper hitched up his team, and they fled the house.

Several friends returned with him the next night to help ferret out the cause of the sounds.

“We got down to the house after dark,” said Earl Heisler. “I laid down with my clothes on and had a gun in my pocket and one on the floor near the bed where I could reach it without moving.”

The noises started at about 10 p.m. It sounded like someone was moving in the other room—with wooden shoes or a peg leg.

“I wanted to reach for that gun on the floor,” said Heisler, but “I couldn’t... it seemed that my whole body was asleep, and I couldn’t move a finger.”

1897 UFO Outbreak Over Iowa

It turned out the UFO outbreak was 
nothing more than kids and overzealous
adults playing with kites and candles.

The year 1897 saw an outbreak of unidentified flying objects over Iowa.

On April 7, observers spotted a mysterious airship over Vinton at 9 PM. It swayed like a bird flying against the wind, “darting to and fro, and up and down.” After a half-hour, it was gone. At 8 p.m., it was seen flying over Nashville, Illinois, flashing a large red light.

On Saturday, April 10, the mysterious airship hovered over Waterloo. After dark, all that could be seen were two flickering white lights. And then, the mystery was solved. Five boys reeled in their kite—it was of normal size, with a long tail, and to each end of the tail, they had tied Chinese lanterns.

Even after the boys’ prank was unwound, the airship sightings continued. Two men observed it flying over H. B. Allen’s Farm at about 10:30 Saturday night. It hovered very low and seemed to rest over Fairview Cemetery—flashing green and red lights.

That one had more earthly origins. It turned out to be a switch light on the Illinois Central Railway.

People in Shell Rock joined in the act on Saturday. They saw a mysterious flickering light—that switched between red, white, and blue. It floated a few hundred feet above the town, then turned and headed toward Waterloo.

Is the Alice French Mansion Haunted

If you want to do a drive by, it’s located at 321 East 10th
Street in Davenport. (Alice French house in 1910)

I’m not sure it’s haunted, but—if you follow the online rumor mill, strange things are happening at the Alice French house in Davenport.

If you’re unfamiliar with her, don’t sweat it. No one else knows her either, and the handful who do, know her as that lesbian writer from Iowa’s past which is a real shame. Alice was one of the highest paid woman authors at the turn of the century, but as reader preferences changed she didn’t, and her books fell out of favor.

Alice died in 1934, but the mansion she bought in 1906 lives on. Visitors report feeling cold spots, and seeing a dapper Victorian gentleman seated in the parlor. Others say lights mysteriously switch on and off, and doors slam open and shut when no one is nearby. Some people have heard strange voices in the basement—whispered conversations.

Could it be Alice and her special friend, Jane Crawford? Or is something else haunting the Alice French mansion? We may never know.