Description of Ghosts: The American Gothic edifice sits well within the city limits on a weed-choked and unkempt yard. Two stories tall with a third floor attic room; the house is decorated with hand-carved wood furnishings, Old American antiques and a wrought iron metal circular staircase to the attic. An old-fashioned coal chute connects the basement furnace to the outside. Many of the Simmons family belongings are still in the house. The location has since been restored as a private residence.

Ghostly Manifestations: For a long time, it was reported that the tiny hamlet of Rachel, Kansas was being haunted by the tragic case of the town’s only murder-suicide case. For over twenty years, several local residents have claimed that every year on the anniversary of the murders that the sound of someone playing the organ would resonate through town. As a matter of fact, no one has actually heard the ghostly organ music for over thirty years; yet, several paranormal believers gather near the house every year on May 18 to listen for the music.

The so-called organ actually still sits up in the attic; its keys still reportedly stained with blood. Several attempts were made to clean them off, but they never came clean. Numerous cleaners were tried that failed, but then in 1982 it was revealed that they weren’t stains at all but imperfections in the pattern of the ivory that had come out with age.

In 1968, Miss Halcyone Winslow who lived across the street reported several times a woman in a long white dress pacing the sidewalk in front of the house’s front gate as if they were waiting for someone to pick her up. Miss Winslow once reported that she had seen her up to twelve times in a three month period and that she never thought much about it. Whenever she looked to see if someone had finally picked the woman up, the distressed girl would already be gone. She adds that on one of the last times she saw her, the unidentified woman actually stopped pacing and turned and looked at her directly as if she had known she was being watched. It is a thirty-foot distance from across the street through the Winslow yard and up to the front of the house, but yet, this phantom woman was able to somehow notice her. Miss Winslow stopped looking for her after that.

Subsequent owners who acquired the house never reported much strange activity from the house, but in 1975, Donald and Elizabeth Griffith purchased and invested much of their money in the old dilapidated house. They started calling the police about a woman in white lurking around the house and possibly sneaking inside, because things were often being disturbed. Officers came as often as twice a week, but never saw a sign of the strange person or any evidence of trespassing. Three years after moving in, the Griffiths hurriedly moved out of the house without an explanation and had professional movers reclaim their property in their absence.

A few of the movers reported seeing a strange woman in white sitting on the bottom stairs. Afterward they locked the house up tightly and returned the keys to Don Griffith. Yet, a day after the fact, the realty company called on him to report every single door in the house had been left unlocked and wide open when they came to inspect it.

Afterward, the house was owned for a time by local reporter Luther Hegg, the same reporter who had wrote about the house in the local newspaper. Nervous and jittery about the house, Hegg was encouraged into buying the house by his wife, Alma, a local restauranteur. By her accounts, his knowledge of the murders and the house's reputation played into his nerves for the first few months he lived there, and to make living there easier, Hegg asked his childhood friend, Adam Taylor, to live there rent free. Taylor made the cellar into a small apartment with its own entrance and whenever Luther came home and found Alma out, he stayed with Adam in the basement until she got home.

Although Hegg was forever reticent to live in the house, neither Alma nor Adam reported much activity. The floors creaked, the house groaned, the pipes made strange noises and the wind whistled through the place. In his capacity as a carpenter, Taylor did much of the work on the house now seen today. In 1975, the Heggs moved elsewhere, but Taylor stayed in the house and tried keeping it as a bed and breakfast. He was assisted by his future wife, Eleanor "Ellie" Lawson, the daughter of the local barber.

"It was harder to restore that house into a bed and breakfast than it was trying to keep guests." Ellie told CGS in 1987. "We put up new wall paper in the kitchen, and it came straight off. We painted the dining room and the wall paper pattern kept showing through. I had the furniture rearranged, and placed an old rocking chair in the cellar, and it somehow ended right up stairs again. We tried to get rid of the old curtains, and that night we heard screaming something terrible. Adam raced out to the street, grabbed the curtains up and brought back into the house. The second they were inside, the screaming stopped. I didn't put them back up, but I stored them in a box in the shelves up to the attic."

"I sure hated getting manipulated by a spirit." Adam comments. "We tried getting rid of the Simmons old possessions, but every time we tried, the screaming seemed to start from upstairs. I never believed in ghost before, but something in that house did not like us trying to change things." 

One out of every seven guests tended to leave because of a figure standing by their bedside. Others described feeling a presence or experienced cold chills in the rooms. One male guest felt his back stroked, turned thinking it was his wife, and found the room empty. Ellie several times found a stray coffee cup at the dining room table. One day, she heard a long thump from upstairs and went to see what it was.

"It was a copy of a book of anecdotes by Mark Twain." Ellie recalls. "I had never seen the book before nor did I know where it had come from. It was not from the study. In examining it, I read a handwritten note in the pages of the book, "With love, Magnolia..."" 

History: In 1945, Abraham Simmons was the owner of a successful contracting business and later a town councilman. He designed and built the house as a gift for his wife, Magnolia Simmons in 1946, but he was very jealous of her and both paranoid and insecure that several men in town wanted her for their own. After a brief year of marriage, neighbors reported heard an incredible screaming fight on May 5, 1946 in the house; Abraham was allegedly accusing of her of being unfaithful. The screaming suddenly stopped and Simmons distraught at what he had done ran to the attic room and poured his grief into music from the organ. His wife’s blood staining the organ in the process, Simmons reportedly tried laughing to hide his grief. A few minutes later, there was a gruesome thud as he threw himself off the roof. The gardener, Bernard Kelly, and Abraham’s nephew, Nicholas, rushed into the house and found Magnolia impaled at the bottom of the stairs with gardener’s shears and then Old Abe Simmons outside on the ground, having jumped to his death from the second floor.

In 1966, reporter Luther Hegg ran a newspaper article on the ghostly legends of the house. His investigation, however, challenged the official account of the murder when he found the original staircase to the attic concealed behind a false bookcase. (A second spiral staircase had been added late in the building to the loft. Nicholas claimed years after it was found that his uncle used it to sneak to the attic to drink alcohol behind his wife’s back.) The secret passageway cast doubts on Nicholas’s innocence when it was revealed that he had been bilking his uncle out of a lot of money. It was later revealed in court that he had killed his uncle first and then his aunt second and tried to frame the murders on Kelly. He came down the passageway and then followed him up the metal staircase as they “discovered” the bodies.

The house was soon being rented out after the fervor of the case died down. After the Griffiths, the house had several tenants until Luther Hegg and his wife, Alma, officially purchased the place. They stayed in the house for a few years, but the size of the house was a bit more for them and they moved out in 1981. One area tabloid claimed the Heggs were driven out by screams in the night and blood from the walls, but none of this actually happened. The so-called modern hauntings were traced back to a would-be reporter trying to make a name for himself by embellishing on local stories.

Identity of Ghosts: Presumably, the spirit is Magnolia Simmons. Hegg theorizes she is looking for her husband to beg for his forgiveness or to just stay connected to the house she loved so much.

Source/Comments: The Ghost and Mister Chicken (1966), Hauntings based on the Heilbron Mansion in Middleton, Pennsylvania and the McPike House in Alton, Illinois.

“My Night in a Haunted House” by Luther Hegg, May 6, 1966, Rachel Courier Gazette

"The Simmons House - Twenty Years Later" by Thelma Campbell, May 15, 1986, Rachel Courier Gazette