In Brief
The Morse Mill Hotel near Catawissa, Missouri kept a boardinghouse keeper named Bertha Gifford, who sat up with sick neighbors and fed at least three of them arsenic. She's buried in an unmarked grave a short walk away, and her name never left the building.
The Full Story
The woman whose name is welded to the Morse Mill Hotel near Catawissa, Missouri ran the boarding house long before it was a ghost story. Bertha Gifford and her first husband Henry Graham kept the place, and what the neighbors knew of her then was kindness. She could cook, and when someone fell ill she was the one the family sent for. She would come sit at the bedside through the fever.
At least three of the people she nursed died with arsenic in them.
The named ones were Edward Brinley and two brothers, Elmer and Lloyd Schamel. When the bodies were finally exhumed, post-mortem exams found large amounts of it. She was charged with three murders and suspected in roughly a dozen more deaths around Catawissa, and she had bought rat poison from the local druggists, sometimes only hours before someone in her care stopped breathing. Her 1928 trial in Union, Missouri lasted three days and ended not guilty by reason of insanity. She went to the state hospital and stayed there until she died in 1951.
It is worth being plain about the building's part. The poisonings happened miles away, in Catawissa, not in these rooms. What ties her to the hotel is that she lived here, worked here, and was buried in an unmarked grave a short walk away in Morse Mill. That was enough. Her name attached to the place and never came loose.
The hotel collected other figures before her and after. Visitors leave toys in the attic for a child the stories call Annabelle, and come back saying the toys have moved. In the cellar room locals call the dungeon, a chained presence is said to walk, in the dark where the story sets old shackle bits into the stone. More than 20 spirits are said to fill the halls, with locks that unlatch and doors that swing shut on their own, and shapes that turn up in photographs. Footsteps, voices, cold breezes through closed rooms.
The four-story building began as an 1816 farmhouse, then a bridge engineer named John Morse rebuilt it into a 33-room hotel in the 1870s. The iron bridge he threw across the Big River nearby still stands, and you can walk it. By the 1920s the place was in its heyday, and for a stretch in recent years the owner ran paranormal tours through the renovation work. The Travel Channel even came to film it.
It is a private home now, closed to everyone, the tours and the cameras gone. The bedside nurse is still down the road, in a grave no one ever marked.
