Lincoln Land tales for the spooky season

Lincoln Land is an institution that confines both students and faculty alike to strict meeting times and deadlines. Homework, group projects and exams are enough to terrorize people here, but there is more that some have faced that has made their lives somewhat of an American horror story. 

Shelby Cass, a current student at LLCC, was happy to have been cast in “Curse of the Edwards Place Mummy,” a murder mystery show at the Edwards Place in Springfield.  

The Edwards Place is a mansion built during 1833, making it one of the oldest homes in Springfield. The place was the home of Benjamin and Helen Edwards, friends of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln during their “courting phase”. 

The house is known for sometimes feeling a bit eerie or having some kind of supernatural presence. This is probably due to Tommy and Alice, the grandchildren of Benjamin and Helen, and the ghosts that haunt The Edwards place to this day. 

“Every time I would go to set up my props for the night, I would always say, ‘Hello, Tommy.’ Just to greet him. It’s just good luck to do that.” Cass says about her experience with the show. 

“We’ve seen lights flicker and rocking chairs move by themselves, or doors will open by themselves too.” These are all things that Cass swears happened while on set in the Edwards Place. 

Cass goes into depth about one instance she’s experienced while she was there.

“One time, we heard running upstairs, which was really great because we just thought it was one of our friends upstairs working. So, we were like, ‘Sarah are you up there?’ When she comes out of the gallery and is like. ‘Why are you yelling for me?’ We checked the motion cameras and everything. No one was up there.”  

Shelby isn’t the only one experiencing creepy things around town, and even Lincoln Land isn’t impartial to scary happenings. Professor Ellen Watkins has a scene of her own that she shares with her students and is still sending shivers down spines. 

“I taught a Monday night class, it was about this time of year and almost Halloween actually.”

Professor Watkins was just a new professor here and was teaching night classes, the ones, according to her, that one else wants to teach.  

Watkins had decided to stay late grading papers one night. Naturally, she gets thirsty and decides to go down to a vending machine for a Dr. Pepper.  When she comes back there is suddenly a screeching sound from the elevator that is just right down the hall from her. 

“Being the big chicken I am, I quickly closed the door to my office and didn’t check,” Watkins explains. Listening from her office, Watkins could swear she heard a high-pitch scream. 

Watkins should have been the only person in the building that night, or so she thought.

“Several minutes later, I heard I heard someone walking down the hall, and from the footfalls. it seemed like probably a man. I had a lamp in here at the time, so I could see shadows underneath the door, and I knew he was standing in front of my door.” 

Well, that person in front of her door just happened to be the head of security at the time, and he was just as surprised to see her as she was him. 

The security officer warns her that she shouldn’t stay so late on campus because of, well something that he’s supposedly experienced. 

“He said that a couple of years before I started to work here, a woman was killed. She was an adjunct faculty member and stayed late to grade and got on the elevator, the next day security found her body in the elevator and she had been stabbed repeatedly, there was blood everywhere, and they never did find her killer.” 

“But sometimes her screams can be heard from the elevator.” 

When the two get out to her car, the security officer made her promise to never stay late like this again. She willingly agrees, but it was halfway on her way home where she realized that he was probably bluffing.  

“I remember thinking, ‘You idiot, you believed him!’ ” Watkins says. Of course, new faculty would have been made aware if something like that had happened. 

Watkins returns to Lincoln Land with a mission, “When I returned to campus, I located the head of security and confronted him about his story. He smiled and said Happy Halloween!”