According to statistics, women are more likely than men to become victims of maniacs and other criminals. And, probably, this is why there are much more female ghosts than male ones. Here are the stories of mysteriously murdered women, whose souls, apparently, did not find rest even after death.
Who killed Nell?
In 1898, a family named Cropsey moved from New York to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The family had nine children. One of them, 16-year-old Ella Maud Cropsey, whose family name was Nell, began dating the son of the local sheriff, Jim Wilcox. The novel lasted for three whole years, but in the fall of 1901 the relationship seemed to go wrong …
Nevertheless, on November 20, Jim went to Cropsey's house and called Nell to the porch to "talk." The girl went out to him - and since then no one has seen her alive. Wilcox was interrogated, but he insisted that he informed Nell of the breakup between them and left, leaving her crying on the porch.
37 days after disappearing, Nell's body was pulled from the river. There was a wound on the forehead of the corpse, which confirmed the version of the murder. Jim Wilcox was arrested, although there was insufficient evidence of his guilt. He spent 15 years in prison, and when he was released, he soon committed suicide.
Meanwhile, when Nell's corpse was taken out of the water, many were surprised that it barely decomposed. Someone remembered that in December the Cropsey family bought a lot of ice … Could it be in order to hide the body?
Several years after Nell's death, two people who were in the house on the night of her disappearance, for unexplained reasons, committed suicide. Her brother drank acid in front of his wife and child, and her sister Ollie's boyfriend, who was then visiting the house, shot himself. Ollie herself began to behave strangely after that. So, until her very death in 1940, she continued to wear old-fashioned clothes, as if it was still 1901 in the yard …
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But that is not all. Several people claimed to have seen Nell's ghost. He wandered up the stairs at the Cropsey house and also appeared in one of the bedrooms. They also observed him on the porch, where the girl talked with the former gentleman. And one local vagrant said that he ran into the ghost of Nell by the river, just in the place where the body was found.
It is possible that the girl was killed in the house (or could it be a suicide, an accident?) And her relatives, wanting to hide her death, drowned the corpse in the river. But the mystery of Ella Maud Cropsey's death has never been solved.
American Tragedy
In 1905, 22-year-old Chester Gillette, who worked in his uncle's garment factory in Cortland, New York, met an 18-year-old worker at the Grace Brown factory. They started dating.
In May 1906, the girl announced to her lover that she was pregnant. Chester offered to pay for her abortion, but Grace refused. She began to pressure Chester to marry her.
The "groom" kept pulling with the marriage proposal, and the girl returned to the farm where her relatives lived. In July, she received a letter from Gillette, in which he said that he wanted to see her.
He announced that he intended to marry her, and offered to make a short trip before the wedding. They went to Big Moose Lake and checked into a local hotel under assumed names.
The next day, Chester Gillette rented a boat. The couple did not return to the hotel. Later, the boat was found upside down on the water. The body of Grace Brown was recovered from the lake. The bruises on her forehead indicated a violent death.
Despite the fictitious name, the police still went to Chester. He stated that his girlfriend had committed suicide. However, the investigation concluded that he stunned Grace with a tennis racket and drowned her. Gillette was convicted of murder and executed in 1908. This story formed the basis of Theodore Dreiser's famous novel, American Tragedy.
Big Moose Lake has become legendary. There is a plaque commemorating Grace Brown and boat tours. On the anniversary of Grace's death, tourists always come here.
The guides say that the ghost of Grace appears in the vicinity of the lake and at the hotel on the shore. In any case, the phantom of a sad young woman has been seen there more than once. Once he emerged from the fog in front of many people.
Curiously, in the prison where Chester Gillette was on death row, his ghost also lives. There is a version that Gillette was not at all guilty of the murder - the evidence against him was only circumstantial, and he never confessed to the crime.
Dead traveler
In 1932, 32-year-old Mamie Thurman lived in Logan, West Virginia. She was married to a police officer, but at the same time did not lead a very respectable lifestyle - she bought alcohol from bootleggers and cheated on her husband.
On June 22, 1932, Mamie's body was found 15 meters from the highway. They cut her throat, put two bullets in the head, and the whole body was bruised …
The investigation began. There was a version that the assistant of a certain businessman, with whom Mamie had an affair, was involved in the murder. However, it was not possible to prove anyone's fault.
Immediately after the murder, the ghost of Mamie Thurman began to appear on Holden 22, near the place where the body was found.
Nowadays, drivers on the same highway sometimes give a lift to a woman in old-fashioned clothes. At some point, they discover that she has disappeared from the salon. They say that this is Mamie Thurman.
Sometimes a woman, soaked to the skin, gets on a bus that goes towards the mountains. She leaves at the final stop, leaving her place wet, and then it does not dry out for a long time …