The most celebrated spirit in Atchison, perhaps, is Sallie, the Heartland Ghost. Featured on the television show Sightings in the mid-1990’s, we may never know the truth behind her puzzling demise. Local lorists will tell you one of two things about Sallie. She was an adolescent, around the age of six, who became unwell one day and was rushed to the turn-of-the-century home in Missouri Bluffs she later became rumored to haunt. This domicile was the home of a doctor who treated his patients on site, and Sallie later died there. Some say she passed from pneumonia when the doctor did not realize how dire her respiratory condition was. Others claim she died during a fruitless endeavor to extract her appendix, frenzied and wrestling against the ether, waking on the table during the initial incision. Either way, Sallie did not leave this earth calmly.

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