The Mad Woman of Topeka

Everybody said the lady was odd. Of course she was different, an albino with colorless hair, stark white skin, and small pink eyes. And her habits were unusual too, reinforced perhaps by her physical aberration. She roamed the streets of Topeka at all hours of the night. And during the day she would stand in her yard staring at the children as they walked to school.

The lady sought no friendships, nor did she welcome any.

Mrs. Cook, a resident of Lower Silver Lake Road, told a news reporter that the albino lady lived next door to her once and that everyone avoided her because of her icy stares. Mrs. Cook recalled that children taunted the bony, willowy creature even though they were scared to death of her. So far as anyone knew, the old woman lived alone and had no relatives.

She died in 1963. And that's when the trouble began. People in the Seaman district began seeing "walking ghosts." The sightings were along a route from Seaman to the Rockingham Cemetery where the albino lady was rumored to be buried.

On April 11, 1966, Paul Bribbens saw a pulsating white form in the front yard of his home on Rockingham Road.

"It kept talking in a woman's low monotone," Bribbens said. "I couldn't make out a word of it. Like she was stark raving mad or something."

The homeowner's dogs, at sight of the ghost, dived under the porch and could not be enticed out. Bribbens called the sheriff's department, but by the time the officers arrived the thing had vanished.

Reports continued to come in from residents, passersby and people who worked in the area that a "glowing white woman" was walking the streets and woods at night. The ghost's terrain was bordered by Soldier Creek, the Goodyear Tire Factory, the Boys Industrial School and Lower Silver Lake Road. Several employees of the factory and the school saw the apparition regularly as it skirted the Soldier Creek dike basin.

An elderly man and longtime resident of Topeka who lives west of the Boys Industrial School on U.S. Highway 24 near Soldier Creek always knew when the ghost was about. "Everything will become very quiet," he explained. "Dogs will back up under houses, and cats will band together in the trees."

The old gentleman warned against being out alone on foot "when you hear that Godawful silence."

Predictably, the ghost was often sighted in Rockingham Cemetery. George Sanderson, Jr. was the caretaker in 1968. One late night in the fall of that year he and his wife, Carol, arrived home from a dinner at the Elks Club. As they turned into the driveway of the caretaker's house at the edge of the cemetery, Carol shouted and pointed through the windshield. In the wash of headlights, the couple saw a thin, white figure hurrying among the gravestones. A kid up to another prank, Sanderson thought. He drove on and positioned the car so that the lights illuminated the graveyard more fully.

The caretaker leaped out of the car. "And when I did," said Sanderson, "this 'woman' got up and turned around and glared at me like I had no business being there, and then walked farther into the cemetery."

Sanderson admitted that he and his wife were badly shaken by the incident. He called the police, but they never found anything. "Not even tracks," added the caretaker, shaking his head. "Maybe there was nothing to find."