Volume 9 , Issue 43

NW Oklahoma Ghostly Spirits

Do you believe in ghosts and haunting spirits of the past? Are they for real... or can they be explained away?

With the Full Moon, October 26, 2007 (Hunter's Moon), and Halloween just around the corner our minds roam to the ghostly spirits that allegedly roam the northwest Oklahoma communities.

There is the ghostly, burnt spirit on Mildred Ann (Newlin) Reynolds who haunts the old gymnasium in Avard, Oklahoma. Mildred Ann died in a fiery car crash on a dirt road leading towards Avard in 1956. For more information on that mysterious death, check out our Okielegacy Mysteries.

I wonder if the 1910 ghostly spirit of Mabel Oakes still haunts the area around the Alva downtown square.

Then... there is the ghostly spirits (or vandals) of Alva's Old hospital. We did a search online of the Oklahoman newspaper archives and found more information about those spirits that may or may not haunt the Old Alva Hospital. Some of you might remember Ben Buckland and Dennis Brown who came to be the caretakers of the old hospital in 1971 when vandals or ghostly spirits began to take their toll on the old hospital in northwest Oklahoma.

In 1971, Buckland was part owner of a restaurant catering to college students and a consulting manager of an Oklahoma City FM radio station. Buckland was also a DJ for a local radio station. Brown was the job foreman for his father's lumber company in Alva, Oklahoma.

For two and a half months they occupied the old hospital and experienced numerous strange sounds, unexplained happenings which left them both on edge and about to move out. Brown and Buckland occupied eight of the 96 rooms in the old hospital starting back to October, 1971. They used the lobby as a game room with pool and ping pong tables. Buckland used a small office off the game room and Brown had a former surgery room for a bedroom suite.

Then there was this mysterious, unexplained phenomenon of a reddish-brown stain that measured four inches or so in diameter and located three feet from a floor drain in the sloping surgery floor, near the surgery room adjoining Brown's bedroom. Even if they mopped the floor to clean the stain, it would come back again within a week.

Another news article, dated February 28, 1972, written by Tom Boone for The Oklahoman mentioned Ben Buckland and two other young men occupying the old abandoned Alva General Hospital in October, 1971 as caretakers to keep vandals away. BUT... were they vandals or ghostly spirits?

You can read those 1971 & 1972 news articles in the "Mailbag" section below.
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