Death and the Hurdy Gurdy Girl

The Big Bloodbath of 1934...

Mar 31, 2024

(A Popular Neighborhood Haunt)

I heard sounds coming from our living room in the wee hours, when everything should have been quiet, yet our dogs didn’t seem concerned. Padding into the hallway, I immediately saw crackling shadows that could only mean one thing.

The Baroness was awake, poking at a white birch log in the fireplace, and she wanted some company around the hearth.

You all remember the Baroness, don’t you? Otherwise known as Anna Louise Fransen Van Gestel, she was the retired Shakespearean actress who was the first occupant of my home here in Indianapolis, back in the late 1920s. We inherited her ghostly presence when we moved in here, just about three years ago.

The Baroness can be annoying – she makes tandoori chicken and doesn’t clean up the kitchen, and she never stops playing “Lady of Spain” on her accordion. But that is a small price to pay for getting to live with a genuine stage star from the 1890s, a woman who dazzled audiences on two continents.

“Lady of Spain, I adore, you,
“Right from the time I first saw you…”

She stopped playing when she heard me approach. Her accordion wheezed as the last bit of air escaped.

I could see that she was sipping from a snifter of my good single malt Scotch. “Hey, Bob, you want some samosas and naan? I was in the mood for Indian this evening. I can heat these up…”

“Gosh, it’s pretty late, Hurdy Gurdy Girl…”

“A hurdy gurdy isn’t the same as an accordion, Bob. I’ve told you that before.”

She chucked another log into the fireplace, taking a step back from the sudden flare. The fresh blaze illuminated the arched door to our Juliet Balcony. I liked to think she had spent many happy hours out on that balcony, reprising her signature role of Queen Gertrude, from “Hamlet,” for startled passers-by waiting to cross the canal bridge.

I poured some peaty Laphroaig for myself and refilled her empty snifter.

“Is everything okay, Your Ladyship?”

“Not really, Bob. You know I get moody around April, and it’s especially hard this year”

“You’re talking about next Friday?”

“Yes. April 5. The day I died, in 1934. Right up those stairs, there, in that bedroom. They said it was the flu, you know…”

“Right. The flu. But according to the death certificate, the drinking helped kill you.”

“The drinking was bad, I’ll admit that. Say, do you have any more of this yummy Laphroaig?”

“Of course. So, tell me, Hurdy Gurdy Girl, why is it worse this time around?”

Friday is the 90^th anniversary of my death. That’s an important anniversary for my people.”

“Your people?”

“Dead people. Very soon it will have been a full century, and then nobody will care about me anymore. Well, I’m not going quietly, I can tell you that. This time, I plan to block out the sun! Day will become night! People will recoil in fear!”

“That’s a nice try, Baroness. Everybody already knows a solar eclipse is coming.”

“Oh. They do?” She looked crestfallen, a magician bereft of tricks.

I tried changing the subject. “I guess the neighborhood must have been stunned when you died?”

She took a hefty quaff. It filled her cheeks, and then she swallowed and grimaced.

“No, they barely noticed. After all, I died during the ’Big Bloodbath of 1934.’”

“The big what?”

(One Farmhouse. Two ghosts.)

“We were dropping like flies. First to go was Susan Howard, just three doors down, in the old place they call the Farmhouse. Her son, C.B., found her. March 13, 1934. Diabetes. She was just an FWW…”

“FWW?”

“Female White Widow, just like me. When she was born, Franklin Pierce was President! She knew people who fought in the War of 1812!”

“So, she died, and then just two weeks later, you passed away?”

“Yes. So that was two of us FWWs, wandering this tiny patch of North Meridian Street.”

“Well, I guess that was unusual, the two of you going at the same time, but…”

“It wasn’t over. Next, it was C.B. himself…”

“Her son? He died, too?”

“Yes. A couple of weeks after me, C.B. died. Same house where his mom passed. Of course, he was an MWM - Male White Married. It was pneumonia.”

“Hold the phone! You’re saying THREE of you, just three houses apart, all died in a six-week period?”

“Yes. It got pretty crowded with ghosts, hereabouts.”

“Crowded? Didn’t they bury you?”

She scoffed. “Oh sure, they put me in Calvary Cemetery, over there in Terre Haute. It was okay, until they planted that Tony Hulman guy in the same cemetery…”

“THE Tony Hulman, who owned the Indianapolis Motor Speedway?”

“The very same. All the drivers who had died in Indy 500 crashes started showing up to party with Tony and get all macho, talking about their big flaming wrecks. Stubby Stubblefield, Bill Vukovich, Tony Bettenhausen, Eddie Sachs…

“Those were some pretty rowdy drivers, let me tell you! That’s when I came back here to Meridian.”

“So, I suppose it’s calmed down a bit? I mean, ghost-wise?”

“Not with Alice Carter around. You know, the Alice Carter Park, right across the street from us? Next to the Meridian Restaurant. Her husband gave that land for a neighborhood park.

“Alice died in 1937, but her ghost still hangs out at the restaurant. You can read about it in that gossipy book, ‘Meridian Whispers,’ by that Kassie Ritman woman.”