HAUNTED LAWRENCE

On September 13, 1897, the corpse of a woman named Lizzie Madden
was discovered in the bed of the Kaw River. She was found head
downward, with her body sticking up out of the mud.
The night before the grisly discovery, Madden had been walking in
the dark along the old Northwestern railroad bridge that used to span
the river; she was returning from having visited her parents in the nearby
settlement of Weaver. At some point in her journey across the bridge,
tragedy struck. One of the structure’s aged crossties had snapped under
the weight of her foot, and she had plummeted headfirst to her death. It
was a terrible accident.
Or at least, that is what most people thought.
In the days leading up to her death, Madden was living in fear. A few
weeks prior, she had revealed to authorities the identities of several jointists
(i.e., individuals running illegal drinking locations). Subsequently, she received
a number of threats, many promising that she would “never live to testify”
against those whom she had turned in. For the next few days, Madden
rightfully worried that she would soon be disposed of by those whom she had
implicated. No one knows for sure if Madden was the victim of murder or
an unfortunate tumble, since there were no witnesses to her tragic demise.
However, it does seem peculiar that Madden turned up dead only a few weeks
after earning the ire of several less-than-scrupulous individuals in Lawrence.
But even more peculiar was what happened following her death. Within
months of Madden’s body being discovered in the river, people started
to see some sort of apparition on the bridge. It was soon postulated that
the entity was none other than the unhappy spirit of Lizzie Madden. The
Lawrence Daily World took notice of these rumors and, in late November
1897, published the first of two articles concerning the alleged haunting.
The article read:
The old Northwestern bridge is being avoided just now. The ghost of
Lizzie Madden has been repeatedly seen there.…These experiences have
been harrowing in extreme. Those who have seen the ghost say that there is
little doubt about it being the ghost of the Madden woman. Some have said
that the spirit acted at times as if it were in pain and at other times as if
there was a struggle. Those who have seen it are convinced that the woman
was murdered and thrown in the river.
The tale of a potential haunting immediately caught the public’s
attention, and soon, hordes of people flocked to the bridge in the hopes
of catching a glimpse of the supernatural. Unfortunately, this meant that
nighttime travel across the bridge was quickly brought to a halt.
Many in Lawrence were adamant that there was no ghost and that such
talk was utter nonsense. The Lawrence Daily World, however, pointed out
that several of those who had seen the ghost were of otherwise upstanding
moral integrity. Given this fact, along with the sheer number of witnesses in
general, the paper concluded that it was unlikely that these sightings were
simply lies being told to the gullible.
After the Lawrence Daily World published the article, ghost sightings
continued to be reported, and between November 27 and 28, no less than
six individuals observed something on the bridge. One anonymous witness’s
testimony was printed in the Lawrence Daily World: “I was walking along
feeling my way over the ties when Lord a-massy [sic] right before me there
was an object. I do not know what it was but it moved around. I distinctly
saw a representation of the murder of Liz Madden, I cannot be mistaken. I
have never beleved [sic] in ghosts, but I do now.”
Things kept getting weirder. In late November or early December,
a man named George McCann was walking home from the canning
factory where he worked. Having heard rumors about the supposed
ghost, McCann was carrying a loaded gun to fight off whatever might
materialize on the bridge. When he arrived at the spot that the specter
was said to haunt, he saw a white figure. McCann unloaded his gun at the
phantom, and it promptly vanished into the night.
Despite the experiences of people like McCann, there were still many
skeptics. Some suggested that the ghost was really the product of some
ingenious ne’er-do-well who had rigged up a contraption that simply looked
like a spirit. The doubters speculated that the faux-specter (whatever it
actually was) was white on one side and black on the other, which would
explain how the apparition managed to disappear so quickly on the darkest
of nights.
But it did not matter if the ghost were real or not, for it soon became a part
of Lawrence folklore all the same, and in the decades following Madden’s
suspicious demise, citizens of Lawrence have kept her legend alive.
Because it has since been razed, it is now impossible to cross the old
railroad bridge, but maybe, if one stares out across the Kaw long enough
in the dead of night, one just might be able to see the unhappy specter
of Lizzie Madden, haunting the very spot where she tragically lost her life
many years ago.