The C. C. White Building apparition at Nebraska Wesleyan University

Nebraska Wesleyan University stands at 50th Street and St. Paul Avenue in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1963 its campus still held the C. C. White Memorial Building, dedicated in April 1907 as the home of the music department. That autumn, a suite there served as the temporary office of Thomas McCourt, a visiting lecturer from Scotland. One morning Dr. Sam Dahl, the academic dean, sent his secretary to find him. Her name was Coleen Buterbaugh.

October 3, 1963. About 8:50 a.m. On the way over she heard the usual sounds of classes changing and students in the halls. She stepped into the suite. The windows were open. The room was empty. Then the hall outside went strangely quiet, and a strong odor of musty, stale air reached her. She later compared it to a gas jet left open. About four steps in, she felt she was not alone.

"I saw the figure of a woman standing with her back to me at a cabinet in an inner office." The woman was tall, young and slender, with black hair, in a long-sleeved white blouse and an ankle-length skirt. "She was reaching up into one of the drawers." Buterbaugh never saw her face.

She sensed a man as well, seated at a desk to her left. "But as I turned around, there was no one there." Through the large window behind the desk, the scenery looked many years older. No streets. No Willard Sorority house. Nothing modern. It lasted "just for what must have been a few seconds." Frightened, she left the room.

Buterbaugh told Dean Dahl that same day. Dahl asked Dr. E. Glenn Callen, professor of political science, whether anyone at the university had matched her description. Callen remembered Clara Mills. Other retellings say Buterbaugh searched old yearbooks with an instructor and picked Mills out herself.

Mills had come to Nebraska Wesleyan in 1912 and taught piano, theory and history for 28 years. On 12 April 1940 she was found dead in her office, apparently of a heart attack. The man at the desk was never identified.

The case reached Gardner Murphy, of the Menninger Foundation and president of the American Society for Psychical Research. With psychiatrist Herbert L. Klemme he came to Lincoln in 1964 to interview the secretary. They studied the room, her background and her home life, ran physical and neurological examinations, and spoke to her supervisor and others on campus. Their paper, "Unfinished Business," appeared in the society's journal in 1966.

The window is what sets this case apart. Writers including Michael Talbot and Rosemary Ellen Guiley file it as retrocognition, a glimpse of the past rather than a ghost. In Guiley's summary of Murphy's view, the witness stays in the present while hallucinating a scene from an earlier time. Murphy framed it with Whately Carington's psychon theory. Doubters note that the retellings disagree on the floor, the year Mills died and how she was identified. No one has alleged a hoax.

Before it came down in 1973, the C. C. White building gathered reports of footsteps, lights switching on and off and piano music in empty rooms. The Smith-Curtis Administration Building now occupies the site. Later sightings spread to Old Main and beyond.

In 2010 ghost hunter Chris Moon led an overnight investigation with students. Buterbaugh, it is said, was never the same. She reportedly quit her job and moved to Colorado.