A sudden flickering of lights. The cry of a random baby. The sound of someone’s voice in the wind, yet no one is there. Or just the feeling of a spirit’s presence.
As Halloween approaches and, as legend goes, the veil between the living and the dead becomes thinner, stories of experiences with ghosts, spirits and other paranormal entities start to surface. In the Twin Cities, many of those stories come from the American Swedish Institute, built between 1904 and 1908, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which opened in 1915.
Are these stories real or just figments of creative people’s imaginations? In a 2021 YouGov poll of 1,000 American adults, 41% of those polled said they believe ghosts exist.
ASI’s former chief operating officer Peggy Korsmo-Kennon remembered running out of her office one day when she saw a woman standing in front of former curator Curt Pederson’s desk.
“It was so vivid,” she said. “The woman had shoulder-length hair, a long midi-skirt on and a cardigan, like ‘70s style, and her back was to me,” she said. “So I pivoted, dropped my stuff on my desk and turned back around to talk with her, but she was gone.”
None of her colleagues had seen the woman. Korsmo-Kennon speculated the woman might have been a former Swedish language teacher.
Nadya Goncharova, food and beverage director for Fika Café, had an experience at Turnblad Mansion. It was 2018, and she was working a party on the second floor and was stationed in a room that used to be a dressing room. The mirrors on the doors were covered with life-size photos as part of Swedish fashion designer Gudrun Sjödén’s exhibition. Suddenly, one fell on her head. She and her colleague looked at each other, puzzled. She put it back up, figuring it was an accident.
“I’m not touching anything and then the photo comes down and hits me again on my head, and at that point we were like, ‘This is so strange,’” she said. “But what I realized was that the photo was covering that mirror and, you know, ghosts like the mirrors, like a different reality.
