Opinion: In 1927, a farmer was the victim of a Kansas haunting. But was it real?

An abandoned farmstead creaks near Marquette, Kansas, in October 2023. A local and somewhat spooky landmark, the structure blew down in a storm in March 2026. (Photo by Max McCoy / Kansas Reflector)

This is my favorite time of year.

It’s not a date but a feeling. It comes after the first frost but before the first snow, when the wind whispers through the falling leaves and the moon hangs like a lantern over the Kansas prairie. This is the season of my birth, and I still carry a childish affection for it. Bring on the candy corn, jack-o-lanterns and, of course, the ghost stories.

Let me share with you now a Kansas ghost story from 99 years ago, a tale that begins like a Washington Irving story but which ends like Greek tragedy. It is a true story, or at least the reporting around it was true enough, although I cannot vouch for the phantom at its heart.

The year is 1927, and the location is a farmstead eight miles northeast of Ellinwood, in Barton County in central Kansas. Located in the fertile Arkansas River Valley, the farm is a prosperous one, and the two-story house there is occupied by 42-year-old A.F. “Fred” Koett, his wife, Ella Mae, and their infant son.

Ella Mae Koett was 15 when they wed.

In newspaper interviews, Fred Koett couldn’t quite get her age correct, always adding a few years, perhaps to make the marriage seem less scandalous. Some accounts report Ella’s age as 21. But in census and other official records, she clearly was 15.

Her maiden name was Waddell, and she was part of a family of laborers brought up from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to work on the Koett place. It was Ella Mae’s job to prepare the meals. The newspapers of the day are silent about how it was that Ella Mae graduated from cook to the second Mrs. Koett, but the Kansas City Star noted that Fred’s family strenuously objected to the marriage. Koett’s father, who owned the farm and several hundred other acres to boot, all but wrote him out of the will.

Fred Koett would inherent lifetime use of the land, but upon his death the farm would pass to the children of his first wife, Mary, who died in 1922. The children were being raised by their aunts and uncles.

How did Mary die? I’m not sure, but there appears no hint in the newspapers of anything but a natural, if tragic, death. The marriage may have been a happy one, at least for Fred, because the local paper in 1916 noted that in the same week Fred became the proud owner of a new Chevrolet automobile — and father to a newborn son.

By 1927, however, Fred’s life revolved around Ella Mae and her family.

Ella Mae was still a teenager of 17, and she had given Fred a new son named Louis Joseph. She had also moved her mother, Sarah Waddell, into the household, along with a brother and his wife.

The trouble began on Decoration Day — now observed as Memorial Day —when the family went on a trip to Otis in Rush County and returned to find that pictures in their Ellinwood home were turned to the wall, even though the house had been locked.

What followed was a series of frightening incidents, strange thumps in the night, ghostly footsteps, and a Bible and a statue of the Virgin Mary being moved. Chairs were tipped over, and food disappeared from the table. Then came sightings of the apparition itself.

Ella Mae said she saw it breeze through a window one night.

Her mother said she saw it “in the form of a woman carrying three candles with green, red, and yellow flames,” reported the Wichita Eagle in 1927. Sarah Waddell said it was just like the apparitions she had seen as a child, foretelling a death unless the family moved.

To others, the apparition was not a woman, but a man.

The Waddell family told Fred Koett it was the ghost of his father, who wanted him to move out.

Whatever it was, the thing made a racket in a clothes closet, and when a hired man went to investigate, it burst out and punched him in the face. The dark man was seen peering into windows but left no footprints in the snow outside. It haunted the farmyard and once stabbed a dog with a pitchfork.

When Fred Koett had had enough, he told reporters, he and some neighbors armed themselves and waited outside for the phantom to appear.

“Tuesday night five of us, myself included, armed with shotguns and pistols, lay in ambush in the farm yard,” the Associated Press reported Koett saying. “About midnight a wraith-like form appeared, soundless and about waist-high off the ground. We let go with everything we had. If it had been human, it would have been riddled with bullets. Instead, it hurriedly departed, sailing over the fence with ease.”

The Associated Press turned lyrical in describing the encounter, saying the phantom “floated soundlessly over a 6-foot wire fence like a slow-motion picture of a pole vault.”

Not to be outdone, the Hutchinson News gave an inspired description of the specter.

“Seven reliable people have seen the ghost and all of them claim he is tall and gaunt,” reported the News, “and when he runs (he makes) a hissing sound, and runs with long jumps, generally landing on his toes.”

A committee of neighbors had been formed to deal with the ghost.

“I believe the fellow wants me to leave,” Koett said, according to the Hutchinson paper. “He’s got something on his mind and maybe that’s it. He wouldn’t keep up his pestering of me if it wasn’t. He hangs pictures backwards, blacked my hired man’s eye, opened the family Bible, changed the statue of the Virgin Mary. Last winter we all saw him peering in windows, but (when) we went outside found no traces in the snow.”

Widely reported in newspapers, the Kansas haunting caught the attention of Charles Fort, the pioneering researcher of anomalous phenomena.

“For months this house had been bewitched” by “an invisible,” Fort wrote in his 1933 book, “Wild Talents.”

He labeled the Ellinwood case as an example of poltergeist activity.

“My general expression is against the existence of poltergeists as spirits — but that the doings are the phenomena of undeveloped magicians, mostly youngsters, who have no awareness of their powers as their own,” Fort wrote.

Modern paranormal investigators might agree with Fort, that the incidents at the Koett farm began with the type of object manipulation associated with poltergeists, those “noisy ghosts” often linked with adolescent girls.

But Fred Koett wasn’t looking for a paranormal explanation.

Instead, he asked the Barton County attorney for protection.

The prosecutor, Wayne Lameroux, seemed amused by the plea.

“Go bring in your ghost and I’ll throw him in jail while I look up the law,” he was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. “We might charge him with disturbing the peace.”

The local sheriff’s department guarded the farm for three nights, but failed to note any unusual activity outside, although there were the usual weird sounds and turned pictures inside the house.

“It’s a real, sure-enough ghost, all right,” Koett said, according to an account in the San Antonio Light newspaper. “But it’s the most ornery, contemptible, indestructible ghost, and it won’t fight fair.”

While most newspapers treated the Kansas ghost story as entertainment, the Kansas City Star was having little of it. The Star was skeptical that anything supernatural was afoot.

“In the first place the ghost at the Koett farm is the crudest that ever was pictured in song or story,” the Star observed early in August 1927. “It does nothing particularly startling and makes its appearances in the form of a human being dressed in dark clothing. All very prosaic, but convincing to Fred Koett, and as it is his ghost probably no one else should complain.”

The primary witnesses to the apparition were all members of the Waddell family, the Star noted.

“Mrs. Koett has given birth to one child and is an expectant mother but she does not let the apparitions frighten her,” the Star reported. “She laughs and jokes about them except when talking before Koett; she says it would not be right to joke about it then because they worry him so much.”

Whether the ghost was real or imagined, Fred Koett gave up.

On a Tuesday in August, he sold all of his personal property at auction and rented the farm to a neighbor. He told reporters that he was going to head for either Oklahoma or Arkansas.

“I couldn’t stand it any longer,” Koett said. “I don’t know what it is that has caused so many mysterious happenings but I’ve experienced things that are hardly believable and I have withstood it longer than any other man would.”

The Koetts landed in Fort Smith, the Waddell hometown.

In 1932, Louis Joseph Koett — an infant when the supposed hauntings occurred in Kansas — fell ill. Not knowing the location of his father, a plea went out over radio station KFPW in Fort Smith: “Persons knowing the whereabouts of A.F. Koett, 22 North Twelfth Street, Fort Smith, notify him that his small son, Louis, 6 years old, is dying.”

Koett was in Ellinwood, and a friend alerted him to the broadcast. He apparently made it back in time to be with the child when he died. The death certificate listed the cause of death as meningitis.

A year later, Ella Mae sued for divorce, claiming “cruel and inhuman treatment,” according to the court record.

In March 1933, the Hutchinson News reported that a farmer by the name of Bob Rick discovered $5,220 in gold coins uncovered by hens pecking at worms in the dirt floor of an implement shed. Rick said the gold had been buried by his late father, who could not remember where the treasure was buried before his death at the age of 84.

Rick had worked the nearby Koett land after the ghost affair.

“It is thought now that someone suspecting that gold or valuables had been buried there terrorized the Koetts in order to drive them away so they could seek the hidden gold,” the Hutchinson paper speculated, but they had the wrong place.

Perhaps a better reason for the “discovery” of the treasure was an executive order by Franklin D. Roosevelt banning most private ownership of gold as of April 5, 1933. Rick conveniently found the gold the month before the deadline and dutifully exchanged it for paper money at a bank at Great Bend, where it was transferred to the Federal Reserve.

Whatever the real story, I’ll bet the chickens didn’t peck up that gold.

I don’t know the details of what happened to the Koetts after the divorce, except that Fred remarried and was living in Muldrow, Oklahoma — not far from Fort Smith — when he registered for the draft in World War II. He appears to have died in 1950, at the age of 65. Also, Ella Mae died in California in 1965, according to the California death index. She was in her 50s.

If I weren’t under deadline pressure for a Halloween column, I’m sure research would turn up more about the Koetts. Or rather my wife, Kim, would turn up more details. She’s an expert researcher who found the death certificate and some of the other official records cited earlier.

Was the Kansas ghost story real?

Fred Koett thought it was real.

But the most disturbing part of the tale is not the phantom that was impervious to bullets, but the legacy of human folly. What frightens us when the wind stirs over the prairie on autumn nights is not what’s out there, but what’s inside of us. Ghost stories are about the dark desires that we the living grapple with, and which happily most of us overcome. The Ellinwood haunting is a study in lust, greed and suspicion.

Happy Halloween.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.