A room with a view

In my last post I questioned the validity of almost automatic attribution of apparent time/space anomalies to "ghosts".

The story that follows - it's very short (always a commendable virtue in my book), taken from the files of the American Society for Psychical Research - adds little or nothing towards the clarification* of this issue, but it does further illustrate my point (I hope).

If you are from Nebraska, you have probably heard it before.

Then again, I am not, and I have heard it myself. I read it, to be precise, in Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe.

On page 227-228, he speaks of "a woman identified only by the name Buterbaugh", who "looked out the window of her office at Nebraska Wesleyan University and saw the campus as it was fifty years earlier. Gone were the bustling streets and the sorority houses, and in their place was an open field and a sprinkling of trees, their leaves aflutter in the breeze of a summer long since passed".

Charming. ;)

But Talbot's account, while succinct and enticing (certainly enticing enough for me to have remembered it), sounds a little vague. Expressions like "a woman only identified as Buterbaugh" certainly don't help building an impression of credibility.

The good news is that the story is relatively recent and that it involves people whose existence seems to present little doubt (although I should tell you that I usually try to "investigate" them anyway**) .

Furthermore, in the years since the publication of Talbot's book it has spread to other sources of information and is now to be found in versions that contain some more (and quite reassuring) details.

We now know the exact date when it's supposed to have happened: October 3, 1963.

We also know that Buterbaugh's name was Coleen and that she was a secretary at the university.

However, those extended versions feature another player, also a woman: Miss Urania Clara Mills, the former head of the university's music department. She was appointed to that position in 1912, and occupied it until her death, at age sixty, in 1940. (But the accounts - and supposed date - of her death seem to vary; see below.)

Be it as it may, it was apparently Miss Mills' room at the university where the unsuspecting Miss Buterbaugh was confronted with a vista like no other.

Here is a short version posted on a genealogy site:

"The ghost of Miss Urania Clara Mills haunted the C.C. White Memorial Building on this campus. The huge brick building, erected between 1903 and 1907, housed the Music Department, where Miss Mills taught from 1912 to 1936. On October 3, 1963, Mrs. Coleen Buterbaugh, a secretary to Dean Sam Dahl, was in the music building on an errand.

When she entered the rooms of Dr. Tom McCourt she was overcome by a strong, musty odor. Then she saw the apparition of a tall, thin woman reaching for some papers on the top shelf of an old music cabinet in a corner. Looking out the window, Coleen realized it was summertime and the sun shining and flowers blooming. Suddenly the ghostly scene disappeared and the outdoor scenery returned to a gray October day.

When she told Dean Dahl about her experience, she launched an investigation and discovered that those rooms belonged to Clara Urania Mills. She had died on October 3, 1936, in the room across from where her ghost was seen. The case has become a classic in the literature of the paranormal.

The CC White Building was torn down in 1973."

Here is another one, an excerpt from an interesting article:

"Now that is a very good question," said Roger Cognard when asked if he believes in the ghost that haunts the university.

Cognard, a professor of English at Wesleyan, was reluctant to talk about his personal beliefs about Lincoln's most notorious ghost but was willing to tell the story.

On Oct. 3, 1963, the dean of the university sent his secretary, Coleen Buterbaugh, on an errand to the C.C. White Building on campus. She entered a room in the building and saw a woman dressed in early 20th century clothing. Buterbaugh looked out the room's windows and saw that the tall trees she had walked past before entering the building had transformed into small, recently planted ones.

The area surrounding the building appeared to be underdeveloped and resembled what it would have looked like 50 years in the past. Buterbaugh turned and ran.

Upon hearing his secretary's account of the story, the dean sent Buterbaugh to a faculty member who had worked at the university the longest.

He showed her a yearbook, and she proceeded to flip through it, eventually identifying the woman she saw as Urania Clara Mills, a former music teacher at the school.

Buterbaugh was unaware that 23 years prior, Mills walked into the room Buterbaugh entered, sat in a chair and died of a heart attack.

"I came here one year after the incident and got to know the dean real well," Cognard said, "He is a credible man and he accepted his secretary's story as gospel."

But there is another version, much more extensive, where the apparent time slip, amazingly, plays only a minor role:

Nebraska's Haunted Colleges
(by Troy Taylor)

Go ahead, read it.

I'll wait...

(The C.C White Memorial building as it was cca 1906 - 1920.
Photo taken from here.)

So, how did you like it?

What I like about this version is that it questions the date of Miss Mills' death. According to them, the most probable date of death is April 12, 1940 (not even remotely close to October 3, 1936).

What I don't like about it (through no fault of the author) is the fact that there is no mention of that ancient summer's day - in October - with breeze wafting through the leaves of long-gone trees.

And yet, it is precisely that purported fleeting view from the window, into a summer long gone, which not only justifies the inclusion of this interesting incident here, but, more importantly, proves - at least in my mind - that Miss Mills, or whoever that apparition was, was not a "ghost".

As I see it, Miss Buterbaugh somehow entered a point in space/time that included that woman's presence (very real at the time - in her own real time). She entered a moment - a summer's day - that, from her perspective, had passed "long ago", but in reality, in the fullness of time, that moment still is. All moments, past and future, still are.

Miss Mills (asuming that it was her presence) may have somehow triggered an apparent "rift" in the spacetime continuum. Or maybe she didn't - maybe something, or somebody, else did.

Was it Miss Mills' memory that Coleen Buterbaugh somehow accessed?

(That's one explanation that Charlotte Moberly offered for her trip extraordinaire.)
The vision of her reaching for a book would speak against that possibility. People do not usually "remember" themselves as they are seen from outside, by another pair of eyes.

Was it somebody else's memory, then?
Who knows.

Was Miss Mills - or somebody else? - reminiscing across time about her office, her daily work?

Or was she, with all of her life, somehow "hardwired" into the apparent separate space/time of that room - eternally present, so to speak? 
And did Miss Buterbaugh simply (simply?) got the wires of her "now" somehow crossed with the wires of Miss Mills' "now"?

Be it as it may, I have little doubt that Miss Buterbaugh really experienced what she said she had.

But were the presence(s) that she sensed "ghosts"?

Not as I understand them; not unless it is a name for images and other sensory perceptions somehow retrieved from the eternal NOW into the illusion of "present" (illusion in the sense of being separate from that "eternal now", I mean).

I will say this: music being intimately connected with the numerical repartition of time/space, it should come as no surprise that this string of incidents involves a musician.

Many of the physicists and/or mathematicians I know have great talent for music. (Dear old Albert - you know Albert - was a very accomplished violinist. Did you know that? Yes, I know you did. Only the smartest people come here. ;))

And I am almost sure Miss Urania Clara is dancing to the music of the spheres as we speak... in her own former office. In her own former life.

(Honestly: what else would you expect from someone called Urania Clara, I ask you...? ;)

***

* Pun on Miss Mills' middle name not intended - but welcome. ;)

** Somewhat irritatingly, Miss Mills does not appear on this group photo, taken in 1916. Much more unsettlingly, she is not even mentioned in the official catalogue issued by the Department of Music, in April 1916 - or anywhere on that site, for that matter.

For somebody who failed to appear in any photo of the staff, she certainly has a strong presence...

I am not saying that she didn't exist (in case you haven't noticed, the author of the article above gives a precise address for her - see the note at the bottom of the article); all I am saying is that I am yet to find photographic "proof" of her presence at the university.

I anticipate further edits to this post, so do come back at some later date. ;)

EDIT (23. XI. 08):

Actually I am not sure that the photo and the catalogue (see note **) were even published by the Wesleyan university - both refer to the University of Nebraska, which was in Lincoln at the time (or so it seems).
The fact remains that her name is not mentioned on that site.
(Nor is Miss Buterbaugh's, for that matter.)