A Deadly Cyclone and a Ghost Named Potsie
JEFFERSONVILLE, INDIANA — A month before Catherine Richardson witnessed the desperate pumping operation outside her house at 122 Walnut Street, she celebrated the holidays with family members crowded into the small home.
“We had prepared for a Christmas party,” Catherine later said. “So my family had painted the house in October. It was beautiful and white, and we had refinished the hardwood floors in the house.”
It was an unseasonably warm December, and it began to rain two days after Christmas, as Catherine recalled.
The visitors were gone. Actually, she was glad to see them drive away.
“I felt very much that I was coming down with the flu.”
Catherine immediately went to bed. When she awoke the next morning and her husband drew the shade, she saw “a sea of water.”
She recalled steady rain — a downpour, preceded by drizzle.
“I would say several inches of rain came … during the night because when I woke up the next morning and sat up in bed, I could look out to the corner, and there was water on the corner.
“Now it had been there before, but it didn’t have that foreboding look at the times before, because this time both my husband and I said this may mean a great deal more than we realized.”
Still feeling ill, Catherine stayed in bed for two days.
The Richardsons arrived in Jeffersonville in the early 1920s. William, an insurance adjuster, was from Huntsville, Alabama. Catherine was from Tennessee. They had two daughters, Ruth and Ann, born in Nashville and Jeffersonville, respectively.
“When we came there to live,” Catherine later said about her home on Walnut Street, “we were told that Potsie Wimmer and his mother had died in the cyclone and had lived in the house that was on the site where our house was built.”
Centered in nearby New Albany and called a cyclone at the time, the March 1917 disaster was later described as an F4 tornado. The twister killed at least 45 people, injured hundreds, left more than two thousand homeless, and caused extensive property damage.
The Richardsons moved into their new two-bedroom home in 1926, one of three houses built in a row on a short section of Walnut Street. It was the third house from the earthen levee. In the opposite direction, one house stood between them and the intersection of Walnut and East Market streets.
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There was another visitor in the Richardson home after Christmas Day in 1936.
“There were those who say that Potsie came around every now and then,” Catherine remembered, “and that night he was pretty active in our basement, because we heard cracklings and all sorts of noises on that Sunday night when my family left and I had gone to bed with flu.”
The noises during the night disturbed William and Catherine.
“So my husband said, ‘Potsie is going to get his pay; Potsie is going to get his pay.’”
What did Potsie’s visit mean? Was it a warning?
“We faced what we believed to be a crisis,” Catherine later said about events unfolding in their home and neighborhood.
“We didn’t know to what extent, but he and I agreed that we would do everything we could. And it would be better for us to stay right there and have our phone available and our house, or whatever we could do. So that’s what we did.”
Read or listen to the introduction to The 1937 Flood Journal or access the archives for the full chronology and anything you’ve missed.
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