As told by Yvette Jenkins McDaniel, Edited by Samuel Knox
My name is Yvette Jenkins McDaniel. I was born and raised here in Springfield, Missouri. My mother, Shirley Blakely, and her sister, Hester Thomas, told me this story one Halloween night — I want to say back in 1975.My mother, my aunt, and my grandparents had moved from Fulton, Missouri, to Springfield in 1944. Back then, everything west of Silver Springs Park was made up of what they called “shacks,” because they weren’t big or pretty houses. This whole area — west of Silver Springs Park — was all Black, or “Negro,” as they used to say. Across the tracks, down by Pythian and Scott, was known as “the Bottoms.” One of the first things my grandfather was warned when they moved in was that after dark, his daughters shouldn’t be outside. You could go to church — Timmons Temple was right on the corner — but after that, you went back inside. Because down there, after dark, there was bootlegging, the occasional murder, prostitution, and gambling. So you stayed home unless you were a customer. White people didn’t come over this way except to see the prostitutes, and that was about it. And if you called the cops, they weren’t coming.
Strange Stories from Fulton Missouri
One Halloween night after we had moved to Washington Street, my mother and my aunt were reminiscing. They told stories about Fulton, where my grandfather once went under their house to do some work and found human hair growing out of the ground. He knew no one would believe him, so he cut some of it and showed it to my grandmother. Apparently, someone had been buried underneath their house. My Aunt Eunice claimed to be psychic. Once, she dreamed that a young woman would die and be found on the other side of the bridge two blocks from their house — and two weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. A young woman’s body was found there.
The Tale of Mr. McPhee
Then my mother said, “Do you remember Mr. McPhee?” and they both started to laugh. My cousins and I asked, “Who’s Mr. McPhee?” So the story goes: Mr. McPhee was a tall, dark-skinned Black man, well over six feet. He had done time in prison in Chicago for murder. After he got out, he moved to Kansas City to be near family, and later came down to Springfield. Here, he got work at one of the local gambling houses as an enforcer and collector. One night, a man gambled and lost but didn’t have the money to pay. The rule was: when you finished gambling, you paid up. Mr. McPhee warned him on Thursday night to bring the money on Friday after he got paid. The man didn’t show. On Saturday, McPhee found him and roughed him up, telling him he needed to come up with the money. The man promised he would, maybe even Sunday — they gambled on Sundays, too. But Sunday came — Halloween night — and the man still didn’t pay. So McPhee went looking for him. He couldn’t find him anywhere. Later, after everything had shut down, McPhee walked along the railroad tracks toward his shack at the far end of the neighborhood (where new houses stand now). Someone came up behind him — they assumed it was the man who owed him money — and attacked. According to police and people who saw the body, McPhee had been beaten over the head with a baseball bat, likely by at least two men. After he was unconscious, they laid him across the tracks — and then one of them cut off his head. They set his head near the tracks beside his body. The next morning, a man walking to work found the body. He ran up the hill to the nearest house and called the police from a party line. The police first claimed a train must have hit him, but his body wasn’t mangled. They concluded he had been beaten and then beheaded. This was in the late 1940s or maybe 1950 — and because it was down in the Bottoms, nobody pushed too hard. The ambulance took him to Smith’s Funeral Home. His family in Kansas City was notified, and they came to claim the body. That was the end of the investigation. But the “story” didn’t end.
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