Deb Goodrich, Topeka, stands on the Kansas River levee while on a rehearsal run of a Lawrence ghost tour to be offered tonight.

This photo, apparently showing a shadowy figure in an elevator at the Eldridge Hotel, 701 Mass., is among the evidence that, according to some believers, proves a ghost lives in the building.

Beth Cooper, co-owner of Ghost Tours of Kansas, left, with other tour guides for the group, visit Pioneer Cemetery. The group will have a tour tonight and visit locations such as the Eldridge Hotel and the Sigma Nu fraternity. With Cooper Wednesday on a rehearsal tour, from left, are Beth Rupert, Deb Goodrich and Jodi Sullivan.

In both cases, John LeRoy was freaked out.

Story 1: LeRoy was trying to sleep late at night at the Sigma Nu fraternity house, 1501 Sigma Nu Place, when he heard loud footsteps in the hall. He looked out the room, and the motion-sensing lights were still turned off.

Story 2: He was in his room and wanted to go to the restroom down the hall. But when he tried to open the door, it was locked. He had to bang on the door to have another fraternity member let him out.

Was it Virginia, the ghost that is rumored to haunt the fraternity?

“I’m afraid to rule it out,” says LeRoy, a senior from Leawood. “As soon as I say it, I’ll believe, and something else will happen that’ll freak me out.”

Beth Cooper, of Topeka, relies on this open-minded attitude.

She’s co-owner of Ghost Tours of Kansas, which operates tours of supposedly haunted locales in five different cities in northeastern Kansas. She’ll help lead a tour of Lawrence’s ghost hotspots starting at 8 tonight.

“When I first starting doing it, I was skeptical. I love history and old buildings and the stories attached to the buildings,” Cooper says of the tours, which she started five years ago with her sister, Cathy Ramirez. “Since we’ve started, I’m a little less skeptical than when we started the business.”

Ghostly experience

Cooper attributes that change, in part, to an experience at Haskell Cemetery, on the campus of Lawrence’s Haskell Indian Nations University. One of the people on the tour noticed a shadowy figure on the premises and pointed it out to others, who also saw the figure.

She says there have been other experiences like that in the other towns the tours cover, which are Topeka, Holton, Manhattan and Kansas City, Kan. Tours are scheduled to begin in the next few months in Atchison, Leavenworth, Shawnee and Wichita.

She notes that the majority of people on tours come from out of town.

“I believe most people don’t want to know where the hauntings are in their own backyard,” Cooper says.

Local hauntings

Still, some people in Lawrence already know about the hauntings.

Take the Sigma Nu house, for instance.

“Pretty much everybody here knows the story,” LeRoy says.

Specifically, that (undocumented) story is this, according to LeRoy: Gov. Walter Stubbs (1909-1913), who lived in the home, had a mistress who worked as a servant there. When Mrs. Stubbs found out about the arrangement and got jealous, the mistress hanged herself in 1911, supposedly in a ballroom that was on the third floor.

According to legend, the mistress’ ashes are buried beneath the house’s fireplace, which has a mysterious plaque nearby: “The world of strife shut out, the world of love shut in.”

Meanwhile, the Eldridge Hotel, which serves as the launching point of tonight’s tour, is home to another well-known haunting.

Nancy Longhurst, the hotel’s manager, says the appearances center around Room 506 and the Big 6 Room in the basement.

“They say it is Colonel Eldridge,” whom the hotel is named for,” Longhurst says. “He died of natural causes, but he lives here. His presence is here.”

Most notably, the hotel has a photograph of a shadowy figure in the elevator.

Jerry Talbert, a Eudora resident and co-founder of the Kansas Paranormal Group, says an investigation his group conducted five years ago at the Eldridge turned up some paranormal activity, including an “orb” — a ball of light in a photograph — and some unusual spikes in temperature.

He’s not sure how many people really believe in ghosts.

“That’s a real hard one,” he says. “I’m serious, because you can go walk into a grocery store and mention it, and 20 people come talk to you. And you can mention it somewhere else and people think you’re a nut. I think there are more people who adamantly don’t believe in ghosts.”

Talbert says he started believing when his dead grandmother’s ghost visited him when he was 12.

He thinks folks in most towns are reluctant to call his organization for an investigation if he thinks their house is haunted. The one exception to that is Atchison, where he grew up, which he says embraces the haunted reputation.

“Those that are on the fence,” he says, “don’t want to bring it up.”

‘Psychic impact’

Cooper, meanwhile, thinks there’s a specific reason why Lawrence may be more haunted than your average city.

“Quantrill’s Raid had what I call a psychic impact that seems to still linger today,” she says. “We’ve had people tell us of experiences they’ve had that kind of relate back to Quantrill.”

Other stops on the Lawrence tour, in addition to the Eldridge and Sigma Nu, include the Bowersock Dam, Pioneer Cemetery and Haskell Cemetery.

She says the tours attract all types of people.

“It’s a variety of reasons” why people come, she says. “It’s something a little different to do on a Friday or Saturday night. Other folks enjoy the tours because of the history. Without the history, there are no hauntings.”