The Girl in Blue

Unknown but Not Forgotten

 

 

 

Whether it be Portugal, Norway, Brazil, Japan, Czech Republic or the Philippines, every country and every city has a local legend. Whether it be the Japanese Yurei, the medieval legend of the White Lady or a folktale as popular as Resurrection Mary, these legends have long survived their years as iconic legends and have grown to become part of a cities history, including the tale of the Girl in Blue.

It was in December 1933, two days before Christmas when a five foot, four inch auburn-haired, hazel-eyed young woman dressed in blue arrived to the town of Willoughby, Ohio. She had been travelling by the Greyhound bus alone, her motives for being in the city unknown. No one knew her name and no one would for the next sixty years.

Unfamiliar with the city, she exited the bus roughly a quarter mile beyond the downtown station. With the guidance of a fellow passenger, she sought lodgings in the boardinghouse of Mrs. Mary Judd on Second Street. Shortly after arriving, the young woman went to sleep. When she awoke, she ventured down the stairs, and inquired about local church services before wishing Judd a Merry Christmas and leaving.

Dressed entirely in blue, the woman walked the streets, greeting anyone she passed by with heartfelt warmth. As she approached the train station, an eastbound flyer was rushing nearby, bound for New York. Witnesses of the event say that the Girl in Blue dropped her suitcase and sprinted for the tracks. Suddenly, a glancing blow from the train sent her body hurtling through the air before she landed on the gravel siding.

When authorities arrived shortly after the tragedy, they were astonished to find no blood or visible wounds. However, after an examination, it was indicated that her death was caused by a fractured skull due to the injuries sustained by the train.

With no identification found in her purse, the only clue to the mystery of her life lay in a train ticket to Corry, Pennsylvania. Saddened by the circumstances surrounding her death, the residents of Willoughby were left mesmerized by the enigma surrounding the short life of the Girl in Blue. Questions of whether she had committed suicide or was racing to catch the train lingered.

McMahon Funeral Home adopted the young woman’s funeral arrangements, while local donations paid for a headstone and flowers. Though none of the locals knew anything about the girl, more than 3,000 local residents attended the funeral service to bid her a farewell.
Interred in the Willoughby Village Cemetery, her headstone reads:

In Memory
of the
Girl in Blue
Killed by Train
December 24, 1933
“Unknown but not Forgotten”

 

As the years passed, the mystery of the Girl in Blue lived on, until the week before Christmas Eve in 1993, when the News Herald ran an article commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of her death. It was with this publication that a real estate broker near Corry, Pennsylvania named Edward Sekerak remembered the sale of a family farm by the Klimczak family.

With the assistance of his wife, the Sekeraks’ made a startling discovery. The Girl in Blue had a name. The daughter of Jacob and Catherine Klimczak, Polish immigrants who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1901, the Girl in Blue was named Josephine Klimczak, but to her five sisters and three brothers, she was known as Sophie. Through the documents that finalized the sale of the one-hundred acre farm, a signed affidavit was filed by her brother Leo in 1985, stating Josephine had died in Willoughby, Ohio after a tragic accident on December 24, 1933, and was buried as “The Girl in Blue”.

Quickly word began to spread throughout Willoughby and nearby communities, after which a second gravestone was added to her burial plot, bearing her name Josephine “Sophie” Klimczak, followed by the date of her death. Even after nearly 80 years, the mystery of her death still haunts the city. Photographs of her gravesite have documented strange orbs hovering nearby; recordings of a mystifying female voice have been captured at her grave; and in some instances, it has been said a figure of a woman has been seen standing next to the headstone, dressed in blue and staring with a forlorn melancholy at the gravesite.

Regularly, since her death fresh flowers would appear on her grave with many visitors asking for directions to her location. Meanwhile, shortly after her death, a fund was established by city administrators to ensure certain geraniums were planted on her grave annually. To this day, the fund still continues to provide her grave with proper maintenance.

for the over-50 crowd

Needed a little chuckle - got it when I went and checked my email. I thought I would share it. It's a little long but cute.

Should I Really Join Facebook ? (Priceless)

Read it all the way through! It's a good laugh! AND really quite true!!

A good laugh for people in the over 50 group !!!

When I bought my Blackberry, I thought about the 30-year business I ran with 1800 employees, all without a cell phone that plays music, takes videos, pictures and communicates with Facebook and Twitter. I signed up under duress for Twitter and Facebook , so my seven kids, their spouses, 13 grand kids and 2 great grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I figured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.

That was before one of my grandkids hooked me up for Tweeter, Tweetree, Twhirl, Twitterfon, Tweetie and Twittererific Tweetdeck, Twitpix and something that sends every message to my cell phone and every other program within the texting World.

My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything except the bowel movements of the entire next generation. I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag.

The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Blue tooth [it's red] phone I am supposed to use when I drive. I wore it once and was standing in line at Barnes and Noble talking to my wife and everyone in the nearest 50 yards was glaring at me. I had to take my hearing aid out to use it, and I got a little loud.

I mean the GPS looked pretty smart on my dash board, but the lady inside that gadget was the most annoying, rudest person I had run into in a long time. Every 10 minutes, she would sarcastically say, "Re-calc-u-lating." You would think that she could be nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me. She would let go with a deep sigh and then tell me to make a U-turn at the next light. Then if I made a right turn instead. Well, it was not a good relationship..
When I get really lost now, I call my wife and tell her the name of the cross streets and while she is starting to develop the same tone as Gypsy, the GPS lady, at least she loves me.

To be perfectly frank, I am still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house. We have had them for 4 years, but I still haven't figured out how I can lose three phones all at once and have to run around digging under chair cushions and checking bathrooms and the dirty laundry baskets when the phone rings.

The world is just getting too complex for me. They even mess me up every time I go to the grocery store. You would think they could settle on something themselves but this sudden "Paper or Plastic?" every time I check out just knocks me for a loop. I bought some of those cloth reusable bags to avoid looking confused, but I never remember to take them with me.

Now I toss it back to them. When they ask me, "Paper or Plastic?" I just say, "Doesn't matter to me. I am bi-sacksual." Then it's their turn to stare at me with a blank look. I was recently asked if I tweet. I answered, No, but I do fart a lot."

P.S. I know some of you are not over 50. I sent it to you to allow you to forward it to those who are.

Us senior citizens don't need anymore gadgets. The TV remote and the garage door remote are about all we can handle.

                                                                           

 

 

                                             The Elephant Rope

As a man was passing the elephants, he suddenly stopped, confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at anytime, break away from their bonds but for some reason, they did not.

He saw a trainer nearby and asked why these animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away. "Well," trainer said, "when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it's enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free."

The man was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they couldn't, they were stuck right where they were.

Like the elephants, how many of us go through life hanging onto a belief that we cannot do something, simply because we failed at it once before?

Failure is part of learning; we should never give up the struggle in life.