Workman Chapel

For generations, students at nearby Northwest Missouri State University and area residents have traded ghost stories about Workman Chapel. The best-known legends, as documented by the Maryville Forum and the Northwest Missourian, claim that a preacher stabbed a woman in a white dress and concealed the murder weapon beneath the floorboards, that a voice will reveal the knife's hiding place to visitors, and that a woman was hanged from one of the great old trees beside the chapel - her spirit said to drag booted toes across the roof of any car parked beneath the branches. Other accounts describe a fire that left the building untouched, a phantom horseman, and figures glimpsed hanging in the trees or inside the church.

According to the family caretaker Lester Workman, who spoke with reporters before his death in 2011, none of these violent events can be substantiated; he could recall no record of a murder, hanging, or fire matching the stories. Workman offered one grounded possibility for the ghostly soldiers and horse sounds: two Civil War veterans, reportedly part of a cavalry unit, are buried in the chapel cemetery.

The site has been documented in regional newspapers and explored by amateur ghost hunters, including author Josh Heard, a former Northwest Missouri State student who described being unable to see inside despite bright moonlight and recounted companions being pushed or thrown - claims that remain anecdotal. The weight of local reporting treats the Workman Chapel stories as durable rural urban legend rather than documented haunting, even as the abandoned chapel remains a magnet for the curious.