American Swedish Institute visitors make their way near a door mirror in one of the rooms where an employee experienced a spooky occurrence. (Elizabeth Flores/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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.

There have been claims of different haunts at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis. (Elizabeth Flores)

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.

“Maybe that ghost was telling me that that mirror needs to be uncovered,” she said.

This is the hallway where two ASI employees claimed to have heard a baby crying during a concert around 2013. (Elizabeth Flores)

On the third floor of Turnblad Mansion, sometime around 2013 after the completion of ASI’s new wing, former CEO and president Bruce Karstadt and front-of-house staff member Jo Wagner were enjoying a concert.

“There was an intermission and all of a sudden both of us heard a baby cry,” Karstadt said. “That came from the northeast room in the mansion, which had been the bedroom inhabited by the Turnblads’ daughter Lillian.”

There was no baby there anywhere in the mansion, and according to Karstadt’s knowledge no baby had ever lived in that room. When Lillian lived there, she was already an adult.

“This is where history meets mystery,” he said.

The ASI offers Halloween flashlight tours of the museum.

Twin Cities Paranormal Society investigated the ASI in 2013. The society captured audio of a woman’s voice and of a door slamming, according to a report that the ASI provided to the Minnesota Star Tribune. The society suggested that the paranormal events at ASI were historical imprints and spirits that have not passed on.

If such ghosts really exist, though, what do they want and why have they stuck around?

“We have some theories, but I think that some of them are afraid, that if they grew up religious, that they’re going to hell, that they believed in hell, so they are afraid to move on,” said Dawn Bernadette McClain, leader of the Twin Cities Paranormal Society. “Then there are some people who don’t know they’re dead. We have to tell them ‘Do you know you’ve passed away and this isn’t your house anymore?’ And then others just want to watch over, or they have unfinished business, or they’re just earthbound for some reason.”

Many people experience a haunting sensation in the Connecticut Room at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. (Evan Gruenes)

Haunted Mia

The Minneapolis Institute of Art is rumored to be haunted, particularly the Connecticut Room. The Haunted Tour of Mia Flickr account, compiled by donor relations assistant Lori K. Erickson, is filled with spooky sites at Mia and continues to make the rounds even though it was posted more than 15 years ago.

Former curatorial department assistant Heather Everhart noted that the bed in the Connecticut Room is “particularly eerie. … Sometimes it was made up tight, and other times the coverlet would hang off onto the floor, the curtains closed entirely or pushed back open.”

And sometimes the ghosts aren’t there to haunt — they just want to help.

During the 1997-98 expansion, Mia’s label and signage technician Rurik Hover stayed late one night in his third-floor office working on new labels for the museum. He let security people in the Control department in the basement know he was there so that he wouldn’t set off the sensors. He knew how spooky things could get at Mia late at night.

“As I left my office, all the lights started coming on,” he said. “I walked around the corner to the silver galleries, and they started coming on there, too, and when I turned the corner to go down the marble stairs, they turned on again.”

The next morning, he asked who was working the previous night. He wanted to thank them for turning on the lights so that he wasn’t wandering around in the dark.

Hover recalled that “the guard’s eyes popped wide open, and he said, ‘No, Control has nothing to do with those lights. Those lights are in the breakers that were in your office when you left, so unless you left somebody in the office, there’s no way anybody could use those.’”