Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This account of weird times at a seminary school appeared in the “St. Louis Post Dispatch,” July 8, 1906:

NASHOTAH, Wis., July 7.--At commencement time at the Nashotah Theological Seminary, a stronghold of high-church Episcopalianism in the west, you heard a strange story which concerns the man who not only founded the work here, but was also the pioneer of the Episcopalian establishment at Faribault, Minn. At this point is the theological seminary and three miles away at Delafleld Is the military academy, St. John's, which constitutes the group of schools the Rev. William Lloyd Breck began in Wisconsin.

Rev. William Lloyd Breck was known as “The Pioneer of the Church,” in Episcopalian circles. After he founded the Seabury mission, he went on to California, where he established St. Augustine’s college for boys, and St. Mary’s of the Pacific for girls, at Benicia. He died and was buried there. Several years later, the Wisconsin church asked that his body be transferred to the scene of his early labors and it was exhumed and brought to Nashotah.

After his arrival the casket containing the remains lay for a time on the ground floor of one of the seminary buildings, where each night watchers sat with it until the time for the ceremonies attending the reburial should arrive. On the night before these ceremonies, the watchers were Rev. James Ashmun of Chicago, and Rev. Charles P. Dorset, at the time of his death presiding over a parish in Texas, but then and until within the last few years as a resident of La Crosse, Wis. Along in the hours toward morning, the Chicago clergymen left the building for a little turn in the fresh air, but in a moment came rushing back with the exclamation: 

“Dorset, Dorset, the woods are full of ghosts.”

Both clergymen went out. In every direction through the trees they saw figures flitting hither and thither in a wild and fitful dance. The clergymen approached them, but the figures in front drew back, moving off to the left and right of them. The clergymen asked themselves several questions. Had the farming population of the lonely neighborhood turned out to dance there in the small hours of the morning in the seminary woods? Were the staid theological students out at an unseemly hour, on a night made solemn as the eve of the reburial of the founder of the school? And even if farmers or students had been moved to do such strange things, where did they get the untiring strength that made these creatures in the woods dance so constantly and so lightly?

The clergymen did not believe the apparitions were men, nor did they afterwards learn that anybody had been abroad in the woods at that time. They were convinced that the figures were ghosts, or that some strange phantasmagoria had deceived not one mind, but two, which an illusion does not often do. But the strange experience of the watchers had not ended. In the morning when the casket was moved, there was a round hole burned through the floor on the spot where the casket stood. A heap of old papers underneath the floor also had been burned. Had fire found its way underneath the building to this spot in the mass of paper, and so up through the floor? Perhaps. The freaks of the real are often as strange as anything we attribute to the unreal.

But several things must be noted. If the fire came in under the floor from without, it escaped setting fire to other debris in its progress. Moreover, the appearance of the hole and the area of burned paper seemed to indicate that the fire had burned from above downward, like the ray of a burning glass. How did the fire come to burn the hole under the casket, which, it must be explained, rested directly upon the floor?

A few nights later, the faculty of the institution sat in the office of Dr. Gardner, the president, discussing the recent mystifying events. Suddenly their discussion was terminated by a tremendous racket just outside the door. Waiting a moment in the hope it would cease, Dr. Gardner threw open the door. The noise ceased instantly. All was silent and dark in the hall.

Whoever it was had taken himself off with a rapidity that was astounding. Three times more the noise was resumed and three times it ceased as the door was jerked open and two searchers of the building failed to discover in it a living soul except the members of the facility. When Dr. Gardner had looked out a fourth time upon an untenanted corridor, he said, “If you are gentlemen, you will cease this disturbance.” It did not begin again.

In any other than a theological school, such a manifestation would be assigned to a very natural cause, but there is the presumption that theological students do not indulge in such unseemly pranks. While students might play tricks upon their own number in their own lodging, it seemed strange that they should go into another building to annoy their faculty. Between believing in ghosts and the impeccability of clerical neophytes, it must be said many of the clergy incline to attribute the disturbance to ghosts, while the students themselves in relating this tale, say it is a queer magnifying of a trivial student joke, unseemly, to be sure, but one which some postulant for holy orders did not perpetrate.

After the burial of Dr. Beck, a photograph was taken of the cemetery of the seminary. One of the students was the photographer. In the foreground of the picture can be seen two graves, just as they appear in the cemetery. But at the foot of each grave stands its occupant, Rev. Dr. Cole, former president of the seminary, in full canonical. At the foot of the other, stands the counterfeit presentment of its occupant, a lady who during life was a benefactor of the seminary. 

As in many other unexplainable phenomena, we may dismiss all these queer tales of a theological seminary by repudiating the testimony purporting to substantiate them. At Nashotah no one does this. At Nashotah, the testimony is believed to be unimpeachable.