Description of Place: The Old Pike House is a two-story dull gray clapboard with a pitched roof and a round apse leading to a cupola on the roof. Garret windows extend from the attic as an extended roof covers the porch. At one time, it stood on an open hill, but over the years the old edifice has grown obscured by trees that now fill the hill around it. Fallen branches have outlined an old trail winding through the woods, but it is private property under the protection of the Walnut Grove Historical Society.

Ghostly Manifestations: Rumors and stories of the ghosts of the old Pike House go back almost a hundred years to when it was first built. Laura Ingalls-Wilder even gave the place a mention in her popular diaries of life on the prairie. In her day, kids and parents would make up stories on the place. Children would dare each other to steal pieces of wood to prove they had been up there. Today, not much has changed. The place still sits in a lonely part of the city and sits alone but for the earthbound spirits rumored to live there.

Nearby residents sometimes report seeing a light moving through the old house and occasionally a person does there duty to report someone might be prowling the old house. The local community is an honest and God-fearing folk who haven’t changed since Laura Ingalls lived here. Today, they have learned to fear criminals and the corrupt looking out for deserted houses to sell drugs and manufacture meth so when activity occurs at a house known to be deserted, someone always alerts the police. Once to twice a month, the red lights of a police car enter the vicinity of the hill and officers check the house over for someone shining a light through the old place, but no one is ever found.

Joggers on Wilder Road have other opinions. A few have sighted a figure of a woman with long dark hair wearing a prairie dress wandering around the house as if she lives there. In 1976, a jogger on his morning regiment paused and watched her for nearly five full minutes as she emerged from between the trees and headed up to the old abandoned house. She reached all the way to the front porch and stopped at the door and then slowly turned around as if she knew she was being watched and stared directly at the witness. A cold shiver went through the young man as he now takes his morning runs along another path.

The house with its deserted and nearly inaccessible location does attract the curious trying to get a better look of the female phantom. Vandals have broken windows and wood has been pulled off wherever it can be pulled off. Local teenagers go up there on dares or for a place to conceal their explicit and covert activities. Today, several adults report of hearing someone in the house moving around and getting too spooked to stay up there. One girl heard the tinkling of a music box being played and one former vandal reported he caught the scant image of a woman with skirts on the top landing as he was looking through the house. A gang of hoodlums in the Eighties thinking the house would make a good clubhouse was scared straight by the sound of a woman’s ghostly laughter. One Halloween, a radio disc jockey from Mankato exploring stories of the ghost reported he felt a woman’s hand on him as he wandered the second story.

Nell Oleson, a member of the Walnut Grove Historical Society, unofficially collects the stories about Pike House that have occurred over the years. A descendant of the Oleson family mentioned in the Little House books, she often partakes in the town’s recreation of the prairie days and every Halloween updates a feature article on Pike House with updated stories from residents with a story to share. In May 2000, she accompanied a news crew from St. Paul on a tour of the house and showed the locations where past stories had occurred. In the house, she was present as the camera filmed small balls of light passing in and out of the house. Lasting for up to five to ten minutes, the lights drifted around up the stairs and in circles over their heads. As they departed, the female news reporter present casually reported the scent of lavender permeating one bedroom upstairs, but when they returned to investigate, it had drifted away.

"I don't doubt that the house is haunted." Nell comments. "I just don't want it happening to me."

Most recently during the 2010 Fourth of July picnic, Nell was asked to give a special Sunday tour to guests from Denmark who had come as fans of the "Little House" books. Tours are not usually given on Sundays, but this was a special request from a prominent citizen who donated to the historical society. At dusk as the sun was slowly setting, Nell rode along and opened the house for the private tour, taking the same regular route as other guides, but as she was leaving, she realized something must have happened that she had missed. All of her guests seemed distracted or bewildered by something they had seen. They wanted to know if someone was living upstairs in the house.

Apparently as they were going down the front stair, a strange woman came out of one of the bedrooms and watched the tour going down the stairs from over the front door. Nell wonders: "Could they have surprised the ghost because it was a Sunday?"   

History: Pike House was supposedly built in or around 1850 by Amos Pike. He had fallen in love with an actress named Lilly Baldwin about five years his junior from Mankato. He attended every play she starred in and then had the house built for her just as he started dating her. When it was finished, he asked her to marry him, but she wasn’t happy living so far from the theatre. He did everything to make her happy, but eventually she contracted cholera and died in the house. She was buried on the property and Amos Pike withdrew from public view to mourn her. Becoming a hermit and a recluse in every sense of the word, he ventured into town only once a week for supplies as Laura Ingalls-Wilder reports he always paid with the exact amount. He became a bit amiable in the later years of his life and started coming to town, but in March 1889, it was noticed that no one had seen him in quite a while. Someone checked on him and discovered he had passed away peacefully in his bed. His house stood empty after that as the woods grew up around it. The ghost stories which had already began a few years prior then continued to the present when the Walnut Grove Historical Society claimed the house and grounds to protect it from being knocked down.

Identity of Ghosts: Rumor has it the ghost is that of Lily Baldwin looking over the house. She seems completely harmless. Experiences mostly involve feelings of uneasiness instead of fear.

Source/Comments: Little House on the Prairie (Episode “The Haunted House”) - Hauntings based on the Jensen House in Albert Lea, Minnesota and McPike House in Alton, Illinois