In Brief
The ghost people name at Union Station in Kansas City is Frank Nash, the prisoner gunmen tried to free in 1933 and shot dead instead. Five men died in 30 seconds on the plaza. Now visitors say Nash never left the building he was marched through that morning.
The Full Story
The ghost people name at Union Station in Kansas City is Frank Nash, and the strange thing about him is that nobody meant for him to die. Witnesses say he turns up all over the building, day and night, the bank robber still walking the station he was marched through on his last morning. Out front, beneath the great clock, a well-dressed man tips his hat when you greet him and is gone before your hand drops. Photo historian Roy Inman heard it told the same way for years. "You look at him and ask, 'Hello? May I help you?'" he said, "and he looks straight at them, tips his hat and disappears."
What happened to Nash happened in about 30 seconds. On June 17, 1933, lawmen were loading him into a car on the plaza, a handcuffed federal prisoner headed back to Leavenworth, the prison he'd broken out of three years before. He was an escape artist, nicknamed "Jelly." Gunmen had come to set him free. Someone shouted, "Let 'em have it," and the firing opened from roughly 15 feet away.
When it stopped, five men lay dead. Two Kansas City detectives, William Grooms and Frank Hermanson. An Oklahoma police chief named Otto Reed. An FBI agent, Raymond Caffrey. And Nash himself, killed in the crossfire by the same men who'd driven to Kansas City to rescue him. "They're all dead," one of the shooters said. "Let's get out of here."
The case rebuilt American law enforcement. J. Edgar Hoover used it to push the 1934 reforms that first let his agents carry guns and make arrests. The man who led the gunmen, Verne Miller, had once worn a badge himself, a South Dakota sheriff before embezzlement turned him into a hired killer. The FBI also named "Pretty Boy" Floyd, though historians have argued for decades that Floyd was never there at all. None of the three lived long. Miller was found beaten and strangled near Detroit that November; Floyd was killed by agents a year later; the last man went to the gas chamber in 1938.
The station went quiet in 1985, sat through a $250 million restoration, and reopened in 1999 as a science center. Families now buy tickets in the plaza where the bodies fell. Inman has other accounts from his years documenting the rebuild. A lady in white who shows up as a reflection in glass, gone the moment you turn. Footsteps in the corridor out toward the parking lot, the same way the officers walked the morning they took Nash to the car. People still report men in dark suits standing outside, near where the shooting happened, who vanish the instant you walk toward them.
