What Was Buried Under the Garden of an Ozark Convent in 1902 

What Was Buried Under the Garden of an Ozark Convent in 1902 

In the autumn of 1902, three novice nuns at St. Agatha’s Convent in the Missouri Ozarks began sleepwalking. Each of them ended up in the same corner of the vegetable garden standing barefoot in the frost staring at the ground. When Mother Superior Bernice Halloran asked them what they were doing there, none of them could answer.

 One of them, 17 years old and only 3 months into her novitiate, said she could hear something crying under her feet. Within a week, the convent’s groundskeeper had dug into that patch of soil with a spade and struck wood at just under 4 ft. What he pulled out of the ground would be sealed inside the convent walls, denied by the Diocese of Kansas City for the next 60 years, and quietly listed in a 1963 Archdiocesan inventory under a single Latin phrase that translates roughly to the buried mouth.

This is what was actually found in that garden, who put it there, and why the story vanished from every parish record in Southern Missouri until a retired archivist named Dolores Kemp published her findings in 1998. Before we dive in, press subscribe and let us know where in the world you are watching from.

St. Agatha’s was founded in 1871 by a small order of Benedictine sisters who traveled from Conception Abbey in Northern Missouri down through the Ozarks looking for isolation. They found it on a ridge above the Current River in what is now Shannon County on a piece of land donated by a lead prospector named Elias Whitmore.

Whitmore’s motives were not documented at the time. He was a widower. He had no children. And according to the county assessor’s ledger for 1869, he owned more than 800 acres of ridge top and hollow that he had been unable to sell. He gave 40 of those acres to the sisters in exchange for two things. The first was a promise that the sisters would pray for the soul of his late wife, Cordelia.

 The second was a written agreement, filed at the Shannon County Courthouse, that the northeast corner of the property, roughly 1 acre in size, would never be cultivated, disturbed, or built upon. The sisters agreed. They put up a stone chapel, a two-story dormitory, and a bakery. They planted vegetables on the flat land near the dormitory.

 They left the northeast corner alone, as promised. For 31 years, they left it alone. The sisters who arrived in 1871 were led by a woman named Mother Emerentia. She kept a journal. That journal survives in the archives of Conception Abbey, and it is the only first-hand account of the convent’s first decade. In it, she describes a visit from Elias Whitmore in the spring of 1872, less than a year after the sisters moved in.

 He arrived on horseback, unannounced, and asked to speak with her privately. What he told her is recorded in her journal in a passage that Dolores Kemp would later translate from the original Latin. Whitmore said that he had lied to the sisters about the reason for the restriction on the northeast corner.

 There was no burial there, as he had implied. There was something else, something he had put in the ground himself in the winter of 1863, and he wanted Mother Emerentia to know that if the sisters ever violated the agreement, the entire order would suffer for it. He would not say what was in the ground. He would only say that he had made a mistake in 1863, and that the mistake had to stay buried.

Mother Emerentia wrote that she asked him to leave, and that she did not sleep for three nights afterward. Whitmore died six months later, in October of 1872, of what the county physician recorded as heart failure. He was 54 years old. The restriction held. For the next 30 years, the northeast corner of the property grew wild.

Cedar trees came up through the underbrush. A spring that ran through the corner in wet years cut a small ravine along the eastern edge. Sisters who joined the convent after 1872 were told, as part of their orientation, that the corner was not to be entered under any circumstances. No reason was given.

 Mother Emerentia died in 1889 and was succeeded by Mother Bernice Halloran, a younger woman from St. Louis who had entered the order in 1878. Mother Bernice inherited the journal, read it, and continued the restriction. She wrote in her own records that she considered the whole matter superstitious, but that she saw no reason to break a written agreement with a dead man.

And so the corner sat undisturbed until October of 1902, when the sleepwalking began. The first of the three novices was a girl named Agnes Farrell. She was 20 years old, the daughter of a railroad clerk from Springfield, and she had been at St. Agatha’s for 8 months. On the night of October 14th, another sister found her standing in the vegetable garden at 3:00 in the morning, barefoot, in her night clothes, facing east.

Agnes did not respond when spoken to. She had to be led back to the dormitory by the arm. In the morning, she remembered nothing. Two nights later, on October 16th, a second novice named Catherine Boland was found in the same spot, in the same posture, at approximately the same hour. On October 19th, a third novice, the 17-year-old whose name was Mary Louise Kelleher, was found there as well.

Mary Louise was the one who spoke. When Mother Bernice knelt beside her in the frost and asked her what she was doing, Mary Louise said, in a normal waking voice, that she could hear something crying under her feet. Then she blinked, looked around, and asked where she was. Mother Bernice sent for the convent’s confessor, a priest named Father Ignatius Doran, who rode out from the town of Winona the following day.

 He spoke to all three novices individually and concluded in a letter to the Bishop of Kansas City that the girls were suffering from what he called an infectious hysteria brought on by isolation and by the recent onset of cold weather. He recommended that the girls be sent home for the winter. He also recommended, as an afterthought at the bottom of his letter, that the ground where the girls had been standing be inspected.

 He did not explain why he added this. The letter is preserved in the archdiocesan archive, and Dolores Kemp reproduced it in full in her 1998 paper. Mother Bernice acted on the second recommendation before the first. On October 23rd, she asked the convent’s groundskeeper, a man named Thomas Peel, to dig a test pit at the spot where the three novices had been found.

 Peel was a local man, 47 years old, married with three children in the town of Eminence. He had worked for the convent since 1894. Mother Bernice did not tell him about the Whitmore agreement. She simply told him to dig. Peel began digging at first light on October 24th. At approximately 3 ft, his spade struck what he first thought was a root.

When he cleared the soil away, he found that it was a wooden lid. It was about 2 ft square, made of oak, and it had been sealed around the edges with what appeared to be pitch. Peel stopped digging and went to find Mother Bernice. What happened over the next 4 hours is described in three separate accounts. Peel gave a statement to the Shannon County Sheriff in 1904, 2 years after the fact, as part of an unrelated inquiry.

 Mother Bernice recorded her own account in the convent’s private log. And a third account was written decades later by a woman named Sister Perpetua, who had been a young sister at the convent in 1902, and who claimed to have witnessed the excavation from an upstairs window. The three accounts disagree on small details, but agree on the substance.

 Mother Bernice came out to the garden, looked at the wooden lid, and told Peel to pry it up. Underneath the lid was a second lid, smaller, made of lead. Peel had to go back to the tool shed for a chisel. When he pried up the lead lid, the first thing anyone noticed was the smell. Peel later described it as the smell of a root cellar that had been closed for a long time, sweet and sour at the same time.

Mother Bernice, in her account, called it the smell of iron and old cloth. Underneath the lead lid was a shaft, roughly 2-ft square, lined with brick, descending into the ground. Peel lowered a lantern on a rope. The shaft went down approximately 11 ft. At the bottom of the shaft, according to all three accounts, was a wooden box, roughly the size and shape of a child’s coffin, with iron banding around it.

 Mother Bernice ordered the shaft closed. She told Peel to replace the lead lid, replace the wooden lid, and rebury it. Peel later told the sheriff that he refused. He said he could not in good conscience close up a coffin without knowing what was in it. Mother Bernice, according to Peel’s statement, told him that if he opened the box, he would be dismissed from the convent’s employment, and that she would tell the bishop he had done so against her direct order.

 Peel opened the box anyway. He lowered himself down the shaft on a rope ladder, which took the better part of an hour to rig. He pried the lid off the box. Sister Perpetua, watching from the upstairs window, said she saw him come up out of the shaft with his face gray and sit down in the frost with his back against the toolshed and put his head in his hands.

 He would not speak to anyone for the rest of the day. What Peel said he saw in the box when he finally described it to the sheriff 2 years later was this: The box contained a body. It was a woman, approximately 30 years old, wrapped in what had once been a blue dress. The body was remarkably well preserved, which Peel attributed to the sealed shaft and the cold.

 Her hands were folded on her chest. Her hair was red. Around her neck was a piece of wire twisted tight that had cut into the skin. Her mouth had been sewn shut with what Peel described as heavy thread in seven stitches. On the inside of the coffin lid, someone had carved, in what appeared to be English, but in an unfamiliar hand, the words, “She will not stay.

” Under those words was a date, January 11th, 1,000 863. Mother Bernice, in her account, does not describe the body in the same detail. She writes only that the shaft was reburied on the same day, that Peel was paid an additional $50 for his silence, and that the northeast corner was surrounded by a low stone wall the following spring.

 She wrote to the Bishop of Kansas City on October 26th, 2 days after the excavation. Her letter did not describe what had been found. It said only that a matter of some gravity had arisen at the convent and that the Bishop’s guidance was needed. The Bishop, a man named John Hogan, arrived in person on November 8th. He spent two nights at the convent.

 When he left, he took Mother Bernice’s private log with him. He also took Mother Emerentia’s journal from 1,872, which had been kept in the convent’s library. Both documents were transferred to the archdiocesan archive in Kansas City, where they remained sealed for the next 60 years. The three novices were sent home for the winter as Father Ignatius had recommended.

 Agnes Farrell returned in the spring of 1903 and completed her vows. Catherine Boland did not return. She married a man from Springfield in 1904 and lived to the age of 81. Mary Louise Kelleher, the 17-year-old, also did not return. She entered a Carmelite convent in Baltimore in 1904 and died there in 1919 of influenza. None of the three ever spoke publicly about what had happened at St.

 Agatha’s as far as any surviving record shows. Thomas Peel continued to work for the convent until 1908 when he moved his family to St. Louis. He died in 1927. The 1904 sheriff’s statement was the only time he described the contents of the box on the record. St. Agatha’s itself continued to operate until 1961 when declining membership forced its closure.

The property was sold to a lumber company. The lumber company, in the course of surveying the land, discovered the stone wall in the northeast corner and asked the Diocese of Kansas City what was inside it. The Diocese sent a representative, a Monsignor named Francis Cottrell, who arrived at the property in the spring of 1963.

He found the stone wall intact. He also found, at the center of the walled area, a small marker that had been added at some point after 1902, a flat stone with a single word chiseled into it. The word was the Latin phrase for silence. Monsignor Cottrell ordered the walled area to be filled with concrete. Approximately 18 cubic yards of concrete were poured over the northeast corner in April of 1963.

The lumber company was told in writing that the area was a consecrated burial site and could not be disturbed. The concrete slab is still there. It is now on private hunting land and it can be seen, according to hikers who have photographed it, as a rectangular gray shape about the size of a small room, cracked in several places with cedar trees growing up through the cracks.

Dolores Kemp was a lay archivist who worked for the Diocese of Kansas City from 1971 until her retirement in 1996. In 1995, in the course of an inventory project, she came across a sealed box in the diocesan archive labeled with the file number relating to St. Agatha’s. She obtained permission to open the box.

Inside, she found Mother Emerentia’s journal, Mother Bernice’s private log, the letters from Father Ignatius and Bishop Hogan, the 1904 sheriff’s statement from Thomas Peel, and a fifth document she had not expected. It was a letter from Elias Whitmore dated December of 1863 addressed to his brother in Kentucky.

The letter had been found among Whitmore’s papers after his death in 1872 and had been forwarded to the convent by his executor. Mother Emerentia had kept it. Bishop Hogan had inherited it. It had sat in the archive for 92 years without being read. The letter, which Kemp reproduced in her 1998 paper, describes what Elias Whitmore did in the winter of 1863.

He wrote that in November of 1862, a woman had come to his farm asking for shelter. She was traveling from Arkansas to Illinois alone and she was pregnant. She told him her name was Ruth. Whitmore, who was recently widowed, took her in. Over the following weeks, according to the letter, Ruth’s presence in the house became, in Whitmore’s word, unbearable.

He did not explain what he meant by this. He wrote that Ruth spoke to people who were not there. He wrote that the animals in his barn refused to eat while she was in the house. He wrote that his late wife Cordelia’s voice, which he had not heard since her death 2 years earlier, began speaking to him at night, telling him to send Ruth away.

 He did not send her away. On January 9th, 1863, according to the letter, Ruth gave birth to a stillborn child in the upstairs bedroom of his farmhouse. The next day, Ruth herself died of what Whitmore described as loss of blood. On January 11th, Whitmore buried them both together in a lead-lined shaft he had prepared on his property.

 He did not explain why he had prepared the shaft in advance. He wrote to his brother that he had done what needed to be done, that Cordelia had told him what to do, and that he asked his brother to pray for him. He signed the letter, and, as far as the record shows, never spoke of Ruth again. There are several things about the 1863 letter that do not match the 1902 excavation.

Peel, in his statement, described one body in the coffin, not two. He did not mention an infant. He described the woman as approximately 30 years old, which is consistent with Whitmore’s account, but he described her mouth as sewn shut and a wire around her neck, neither of which Whitmore mentions in the letter.

The carving on the inside of the coffin lid, “She will not stay,” and the date, January 11th, 1863, are consistent with Whitmore having sealed the shaft on that date, but the letter does not describe carving anything into the lid. Kemp, in her 1998 paper, suggested three possibilities. The first was that Whitmore had added the wire, the stitches, and the carving after the initial burial, and did not mention this in the letter to his brother.

 The second was that someone else, either before or after Whitmore’s death in 1872, had opened the shaft and modified the body. The third was that Peel, in his statement to the sheriff in 1904, had exaggerated or invented some of the details. Kemp did not commit to any of the three possibilities. She noted only that the phrase, “She will not stay.

” implied that whoever had carved it into the lid had expected the woman in the box to try to leave. The stone wall in the northeast corner of the property, and the concrete slab poured over it in 1963, are still there today. The property is owned, as of the most recent county records, by a hunting club based in Springfield.

 The club does not permit visitors. There is no historical marker. St. Agatha’s Chapel was torn down in 1974. The dormitory burned in 1981. The bakery is a foundation in the woods. The infant that Ruth was carrying, if the 1863 letter is accurate, was buried in the same shaft as its mother, and no account of the 1902 excavation mentions finding it.

 It is possible that Peel did not look carefully. It is possible that Whitmore lied to his brother. It is possible that the infant was buried elsewhere on the property and has never been found. The three novices who had been sleepwalking in October of 1902 were all standing on the same spot in the vegetable garden facing east.

 The northeast corner of the property, where the shaft was located, is due east of the vegetable garden by approximately 140 ft. Mary Louise Kelleher, the 17-year-old, said she could hear something crying under her feet. She was standing not on the shaft itself, but on the ground between the shaft and the dormitory.

Dolores Kemp, in the closing paragraph of her 1998 paper, noted that Mary Louise did not say she could hear something crying underneath the northeast corner. She said she could hear it under her own feet in the vegetable garden more than 100 ft away from where the body was buried. Kemp did not offer an explanation for this. She simply noted it.

And she noted, as a final point, that the 1902 log records a fourth incident that Mother Bernice did not report to the bishop and that was not discussed in Father Ignatius’s letter. On the night of October 25th, the day after the shaft was closed, Mother Bernice herself woke up standing in the vegetable garden barefoot in the frost facing east.

 She wrote in her log that she did not remember getting out of bed. She wrote that she could hear nothing under her feet, but she wrote that when she turned around to walk back to the dormitory, she was certain, absolutely certain, that something was walking behind her. She did not turn around again. She reached the dormitory, went inside, and closed the door.

And she wrote at the end of the entry that she did not sleep in the ground floor rooms of the convent for the rest of her life. She wrote one more sentence in a smaller hand at the bottom of the page. She wrote that when she had reached the dormitory door and put her hand on the latch, she had heard, very distinctly, a woman’s voice behind her in the frost saying her name, not shouting it, saying it the way a friend says a name.

 And she wrote that she had not turned around because she was afraid in that moment that she would answer.