The haunted legacy of a historic Jesuit community

There is a Jesuit community building in Mission Flats, S.D., that people say is haunted. 

It is.

The wood floors in the bedrooms have been sanded down by the footsteps of men and the door frames caked with the oil of human hands. The windows—still the original ones, from 1888—let the light through, but also the hornets. The bricks of the building are burnt orange and they were made of clay from White Clay Creek, which runs nearby.

I say the bricks were made, but I should use the active voice: Lakota people made the bricks and stacked them so this building would stand. They made them alongside German Jesuit brothers who came here both as missionaries and as refugees, fleeing the Kulturkampf in their homeland. Together, they built this structure—Drexel Hall—the oldest building on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and one of the oldest in South Dakota. It opened as Holy Rosary Mission and housed the Jesuits, Franciscan sisters and the old boarding school. The mission evolved to become Red Cloud Indian School and then Maȟpíya Lúta—a network of parishes, schools and an art center on the reservation.

I moved to the community in 2021 to teach and work on the Mahpíya Lúta’s Truth and Healing project. The day I moved in, I remember opening a deep drawer that was filled with a stack of maybe 30 empty Blue Ribbon ice cream buckets. “We save those to carry watȟéča home after feeds,” one of the Jesuits told me—watȟéca being the Lakota word for leftovers. 

We save a lot of things here. A pile of 50 or so egg cartons makes a leaning tower of styrofoam atop one of the fridges. We used to give these to Sister Barb for some reason I can’t remember. There is a pile of plastic grocery bags saved for packaging food donations at Our Lady of the Sioux Church. Before 91-year-old Brother Zimmerman moved out, aluminum cans used to be saved so he could take them downstairs to the basement where he would crush them in a homemade can crusher. 

When Father Peter needed a walker, we found a “new” one in the attic. Then we scavenged for some tennis balls to put on the bottom of its legs. No one has played tennis here for decades, but we found a dusty milk crate with about 30 old tennis balls in a back closet down a dark hallway. 

I once found a letter in the archives from 1929 in which the Jesuit provincial, following his annual visitation to the community here, wrote, “the accumulation of junk of every description is notably excessive…. [there are] innumerable articles stored for future and for possible needs: still there is much that is kept uselessly.” 

He then puts a finer point on it: “A thorough cleaning up everywhere should be undertaken this summer.”

This summer, nearly 100 years later, the Jesuits followed through. In June, the community moved out of this historic building and said goodbye to the bricks that have housed us for over 130 years. A thorough cleaning up and throwing away was undertaken. Needless to say, it was bittersweet. 

In the final weeks, water puddled on the living room floor. It came in through the tin roof—a poorly constructed add-on to the German brothers’ original architecture. I sat in the room while the rain smacked the tin, a familiar and comforting sound. 

On the walls of that living room hung many photographs. There is one that I have always loved—an image of a woman sitting at a dining room table that is covered with a vinyl tablecloth printed with little roosters. One of her hands rests on the table, the other clasps her chest. She is clenching her jaw a bit, as if in the middle of a sentence, explaining something serious.

The woman’s name is Lydia Haas. It is written on the back of the portrait. If it hadn’t been written there, I could ask Peter Klink, S.J.—who has lived here for decades—what her name is and he would tell me. And he would tell me who her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are. We could go through the house like this for hours, naming and remembering.

The hallways are lined with group photographs of the Jesuit community from each year over the many decades of service as parish priests, counsellors, school bus drivers, carpenters. As the years go on, the numbers decrease but remain a healthy size. The Jesuits in the photos are wearing jeans and T-shirts, or plaid button-ups and slacks, or a clerical collar. Some are smiling; some are not. Some appear in photo after photo, having lived here many, many years. Some are there just once. Sometimes when I walk down these hallways with friends or colleagues from the rez, they stop and point at this or that Jesuit: He taught my sister. He was my homeroom teacher. He buried my grandpa. I remember him being around. 

It does not matter how many times I have passed these pictures, I still stop and inspect them. I see the faces of men I know well and men I never met, but have memories of. I know their habits, their humors, their foibles and their virtues because I’ve sat at the dinner table while we have remembered them, telling their stories years after they died. When I stroll through the dimly lit hallways, I walk with these men who walked these same creaking corridors.

This house is haunted by memories. 

It is haunted, for instance, by the names written on the ceiling and walls in the popcorn room, the room where the old brothers jerry-rigged a greasy metal contraption hanging from the ceiling to make just the right amount of popcorn. It is a homemade popcorn maker with a chair beneath it, outfitted with two-by-twos so the big, plastic Rubbermaid container can sit at just the right angle to collect the popcorn when the lever is pulled to release it. For decades, this space supplied popcorn for countless school dances, basketball games, parish events, school plays and evening movies in the Jesuit living room. 

The walls and ceilings of the popcorn room are signed and dated by hundreds of people—Jesuits, former students and faculty members from the school, dating back to the 1950s. From the walls, we know that Jeannie Cuny, who manages the office at the elementary school today, was there in 1986. Angie Yellow Boy, who now oversees the bookkeeping for Maȟpíya Lúta and whose office is just a few feet above the popcorn room, was there in 1991. We know that Jim Pribek, S.J., today a professor of literature at Marquette University, was there in the mid-’90s, teaching, driving the school bus and popping popcorn. Alicia Mousseau, now vice president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, popped popcorn there on March 8, 2001. The ceiling could tell you that my four siblings came to visit me there in 2024 and stopped in the popcorn room. 

If you wanted to know the instructions, or the price of one tub of popcorn, you would not have to guess. You could read the chipped and faded sign taped to the door dated Dec. 12, 1983, “From the desk of Father Kurth.” 

The things in this house, the nooks and crannies, some of the dust bunnies that have been undisturbed for years, carry stories and memories. And memory is the currency we use to pass the toll roads of growth. 

I also know that memory tinged by nostalgia can be a kind of poison, that it can warp how we feel, obscure the truth, pull a person into overly romantic visions that cover over more painful, complex histories. And nostalgia is a liability in remembering a house like this. 

Drexel Hall is haunted by bad memories alongside the good ones. The condition of the house reveals the consequences of deferred maintenance and a resistance to change. It holds a complex history—one that has tied the Jesuits and the Lakota people together in ministry, in prayer, in pain, in blessing, in smoke, in meals, in learning, in tears, in friendship, and in living for over 130 years. And the Jesuit community is only one part of it. The building was home to good, bad and ugly memories of the old boarding school, a place that felt like a punishment for some and a refuge for others. That complex history is not ending. 

The Jesuits are moving to a newly constructed house about 100 yards away. The bricks of Drexel Hall will stand strong, the inside gutted and then refreshed to house the administration of the evolving ministry of Maȟpíya Lúta.

In the process of moving, Ron Seminara, S.J., who has spent many years of his life on the rez, placed sticky notes with an “A” on them to indicate what might be an antique, and perhaps be of value, because of its age. 

How to determine, though, the value of a brick in the Popcorn Room that Porky Randall signed on Oct. 3, 1959? Or the dozens of homemade star quilts that have flooded the house as gifts, given to Jesuits as part of traditional honorings during funeral rites or to mark accomplishments. Or the cookie jar in the dining room whose metal lid carries an old, faded missive that reads: “NO FIG NEWTONS HERE!!! THEY MAKE ALL THE OTHER COOKIES VERY SOGGY.” What about the value of the tennis rackets and fishing nets we keep at the ends of multiple hallways to swat or capture the bats when they flew through the hallways or kitchen? 

We could put a sticky note on the VHS copy of “Mean Girls” that sits in the giant chest of VHS tapes that are alphabetized because people used to check out movies from the Jesuit community like it was the reservation’s Blockbuster Video. Or a sticky note on the old, wooden and seemingly indestructible dining room chairs we have had for who knows how long and that have held who knows how many Jesuits sitting, telling stories, arguing, roaring in laughter. And, certainly, a sticky note belongs on the wall in one of the bedrooms where, maybe 10 years ago, in pencil scratch, someone wrote: “Rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength,” and everyone since then has had the good sense not to wash it off. 

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