Missouri Legend of the Ghost of Goat Milk Woman
My boyfriend Carl and I were visiting my aunt and grandma in Jefferson County Missouri last summer. They live in a little rural area and my family all thought it would be the perfect place for a family reunion. I hadn’t been back to visit my grandmother in years and was eager to see her so I decided to help my mom make the trip happen and I applied for the time off of work and tried to help plan it. As it turns out only a couple of cousins were able to go and the whole reunion agenda kind of fell apart. And because of the small response I decided to ask my boyfriend to go with us because it didn’t seem like a lot of reunion activities were going to happen and I thought maybe we could take my cousin and go into St. Louis to see a show or something and spend the night in one the hotels to kind of night burden my grandma and aunt so much.
So, it turns out the four day visit was actually really fun and not only did Carl get to meet everyone, but my cousins and I were able to have a great time and it was so good to see my grandma. One afternoon my cousin Shirley asked my grandma about a ghost town that was supposed to be in the area. My grandma said she must be talking about Hematite, though it really wasn’t much of a ghost town, according to grandma. We decided to make a little road trip out of it though and followed the directions three miles off of highway A. It was actually more fun to explore some of the area’s history than to investigate a stereotypical ghost town setting. Hematite, named after the iron ore that was mined there, was established about 1867 after the railroad had been there for about ten years. There are few old vacant homes and a graveyard from the time. We heard a story about an old lady outside of town that used herd goats and sell their milk. This was a remedy at the time and she used to care for people using the goat milk. Apparently she died of a heart attack and her ghost can still be fond wandering around trying to help people. We looked for her on our way out though we never saw anything.