31 Days of Halloween | Day 11: The Woman Who Tamed Halloween

Christopher Feinstein (0:02)

In Wichita, Kansas, on Halloween night in 1899, a merchant named OB. Stocker went outside and sat on a lime barrel just inside of his gate. He stayed there all night with a shotgun across his lap and a copy of the book, Pilgrim's Progress. Another man in town didn't bother with the shotgun. He just put up a sign that said, if you can, please leave the cook stove.

The chief of police had already warned the public that pranksters could face fines and prison time. And that tells you how bad it was. Grown men were guarding their property overnight as if they were expecting a raid. In America, at the turn of the last century, Halloween wasn't just about candy. It wasn't about the cute costumes or a bowl on the porch. It was the one night a year when young men felt entitled to tear a town apart. And a lot of towns just braced for it and hoped that the damage stayed under a few hundred dollars.

So it's strange that a night like that got domesticated in a small town in the northeast corner of Kansas, and that the person who did it wasn't a sheriff, a mayor, or a preacher. She was a gardener in her sixties, who was just tired of people wrecking her flowers. And if you go back far enough into her life, you find something that the parade brochures don't mention much. Two of her children died in October in different years, one day apart on the calendar, just before Halloween.

Today's story is about Hiawatha, Kansas, the woman who put a leash on Halloween, the argument over whether she was first, and a cemetery up the road, holding one of the strangest monuments to grief that anybody will ever see.

I'm Christopher Feinstein, and this is The 31 Days of Halloween.

Her name was Elizabeth Oehler. She was born in 1848 in the Canton of Bern in Switzerland. She was a little girl when her family crossed the ocean and settled in New Philadelphia, Ohio. By the time she was 13, both of her parents were dead. So she starts out as an immigrant orphan, and that's the opening line of her biography.

In 1870, she married a man named John Krebs. The way the story is told is that the two of them came out to Kansas on their honeymoon, which tells you something about what counted as a romantic getaway in the 1870s. They farmed for five years near a little place called Claytonville. And in 1875, they moved into Hiawatha, the county seat of Brown County. They bought a house on the corner of 6th and Iowa streets. That house is gone now. And for the rest of her life, the town didn't call her Elizabeth. It called her Mrs. John Krebs. And that's how she shows up in newspapers and in the city council minutes. And I want to get that front and center now because in some modern retellings, get her husband's name wrong. Her own world knew her by his name. So she and John had four children, John Edward, Louise, Emma, and Charlotte, who everybody called Lottie.

Over the next 20-some years, Elizabeth Krebs became a fixture in Hiawatha. She belonged to the Knights and Ladies of Honor, a fraternal lodge, and they elected her an officer. She won premiums at the Brown County Fair. She's credited with founding the Hiawatha Garden Club. Mostly though, she grew flowers. For years, she tended the flower beds around the Brown County Courthouse, the building that's at the center of town. That's the normal world. A small Kansas County seat, a courthouse square, a Swiss-born gardener on her knees in the dirt, making the place look pretty. Now for the other part. On October 19, 1893, her son John Edward died of consumption, which would be later called tuberculosis. We all know that. He was only 22

Two years later, her daughter Lottie got typhoid. She died on October 20, 1895

They buried her on what would have been her 17th birthday.

The next year, 1896, her daughter Emma died of consumption, too. Emma was a school teacher in her third year. Every teacher in the city came to the funeral, all 19 of them.

So in three years, Elizabeth Krebs buried three of her four children. Only Louise outlived her parents. Two of those deaths fell in the same week of the calendar, the third week of October, as the town was gearing up for Halloween. I have no idea what was in her head every year when that week came around. I mean, nobody wrote it down. She certainly didn't, and I'm not going to make it up. But the dates are the dates, and once you start looking at them, you can't really stop noticing them.