MINOT — We live in an age of misinformation. The internet is chock full of false narratives and egregious bunkum that can seem plausible to some if for no other reason than the sheer volume of it, or perhaps because it confirms certain biases and attitudes the audience already has.

Recently, a website called the Gateway Pundit,

which was forced to print a retraction as a part of a settlement in a defamation lawsuit brought by Georgia election workers,

published what it purports to be a news story about the Bank of North Dakota.

Citing anonymous sources and critics, the

“story”

insinuates that the Bank of North Dakota is involved in a cover-up of bad loans, bailouts and other nefarious activities. The one on-the-record statement was given by Sen. Kent Weston, a Republican who serves in District 9.

Normally, one might think it unwise to respond to internet cranks, but we live in an era where talk radio host Alex Jones was

able to convince 1 in 5 Americans that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.

These things can’t be taken lightly.

Bank of North Dakota President Don Morgan joined this episode of Plain Talk to provide factual answers. “The only part of the article that is true is they got our name right,” Morgan told Chad Oban and me.

“As it kind of got picked up by some locals, we decided we want to get some facts out there,” he continued.

Morgan says the bank is in strong financial shape, and it hasn’t received bailouts. He also said that Sen. Weston hasn’t, to his knowledge, contacted the bank about the claims made in the article.

Also on this episode, Democratic-NPL auditor candidate Tim Lamb joined to discuss his campaign.

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FARGO — When she was a child, Kari Dordal Christianson, of Elk River, Minnesota, remembers hearing stories of how her grandmother Bertha died young and was buried in a remote cemetery in western North Dakota. The rest of Bertha’s family — her husband and three young children — moved east following her death.

“I used to think how lonely it must be that Bertha was alone in that cemetery with no one visiting or caring for her grave,” Kari said.

Although Bertha’s grave marker — inscribed with “Mrs. L. Dordal, May 19, 1880 – May 8, 1917” — was rarely adorned with flowers lovingly placed by family, the nearby town of Sims never forgot her, and for some, it felt as though she never really left.

To them, Bertha is “The Gray Lady of Sims,” a ghost who still walks the church and parsonage in the dark of night.

As another Halloween rolls around and eerie tales are spun of vengeful spirits, shadowy figures and restless souls crossing over from the great beyond, please understand that this is not one of them.

This ghost story is more sweet than scary. But one that still attracts visitors to this once-thriving town 47 miles southwest of Bismarck. The story has been told for more than 100 years, but not always accurately.

Bertha’s granddaughter, Kari, and grandson, Mark, visited Sims years ago and uncovered some of the truth about their mysterious grandmother and the legacy she left behind.

Sims, North Dakota, was founded in 1883 off the Northern Pacific train route. Coal mining and the town’s brickyard helped the population swell to more than 1,000 people within a couple years.

In 1884, Scandinavian immigrants — 35 men and eight women— built the Scandinavian Evangelical Lutheran Church and parsonage to house the minister who would lead the thriving congregation.

From 1916 to 1918, Rev. Dr. Lars Dordal, his wife Bertha, and their three young children, Raymond, Adeline and Harald, lived here.

The Dordals had answered the call to Sims (and nearby Almont) from Madison, Wisconsin, where Lars was serving as a pastor for a congregation. While there, Bertha contracted tuberculosis. They figured a change of climate in western North Dakota might help restore her health.

They moved to North Dakota in the fall of 1916. Lars’ brother, Rev. Jacob Dordal, wrote of them: “Joyous and happy, they undertook their work there. The congregations were also happy and thankful for the young and active minister and family God had sent to them.”

However, the disease slowly took its toll on the beloved pastor’s wife. Bertha soon was too weak to play the church organ or head Ladies’ Aid.

In 1917, just shy of her 37th birthday, she died.

Less than a year later, Lars remarried a woman named Clara, who had been hired to care for the Dordal children. (Over the years, several newspaper stories, magazine articles and books have reported that Clara was Bertha’s sister. She was not. Kari believes the confusion came because, for a time, Lars’ sister Anna cared for the children. The stories have also incorrectly reported dates the family was in Sims, as well as the age at which Bertha died.)

The Dordals left Sims in 1918. Lars eventually became a long-serving pastor in Larimore, North Dakota, where he and Clara added two more children to their family.

In the years after the family left, parishioners suspected Bertha hadn’t gone anywhere.

They heard footsteps when no one was there, and the organ played, even years after it had been removed from the church.

Was Bertha, once again, playing beautiful hymns for her congregation?

Olga Nelson lived in the parsonage with her pastor husband in the 1930s. She said she used to see “a gray shape upstairs.” Tuberculosis victims often have a gray pallor to their skin.

The term “gray lady” was born.

While the name “gray lady” might sound ominous, the reports of Bertha’s hauntings tell a different story. She is described as a warm-hearted and gentle spirit, known for covering guests with blankets on chilly nights, opening windows when the air was stuffy, and gently opening and closing cupboards to show where things belong.

As the years passed, the sightings of Bertha’s ghost continued, as Sims became a ghost town.

The boom was over, the railroad moved, the post office closed and Sims was all but deserted, except for the beloved church and parsonage, which still served people in the neighboring area. It continues to serve the region today as an active church community with services held every other Sunday.

The church is also frequently visited by curiosity seekers, paranormal investigators and others who have heard the legend of the Gray Lady of Sims. It is even listed on

North Dakota’s Official Tourism Department website.

While tourists come to Sims to see the Gray Lady, the Gray Lady’s granddaughter hadn’t even heard about Bertha until 1988, when she read an Associated Press story about her in The Forum.

Kari said her father, Harald, knew the story but didn’t talk about it much.

“The only mother he knew was his stepmother, Clara. So, I think he was protective of Clara’s role in the family,” Kari said. “Clara absolutely was our grandma.”

Harald, like his father, became a pastor and reverend doctor, serving congregations and later working in Concordia College’s education department.

Through his job, Kari believes Harald traveled to Lutheran congregations in the area, including Sims. Her assumption is backed up in William Jackson’s book “More Dakota Mysteries and Oddities.”

In it, Sims historian Sig Peterson said that, around 1960, he went out for coffee with Harald Dordal and a few other pastors in Sims.

“One of them told us about his first call in western North Dakota when he had to leave on account of a ghost,” Jackson wrote. “That’s when Harald told him the ghost was his mother!”

Kari said after her father retired from Concordia in 1977, he spoke more about his mother, the ghost.

“He became very active in Kiwanis, and that was one of the stories he did for one of their meetings — ’I’m the son of the Gray Lady of Sims,’” she said, laughing.

She said her father had a sense of humor about the ghost stories; however, he and others in Bertha’s family were sometimes frustrated by inaccuracies and misinterpretations of Lars and Bertha’s life together.

“He liked ghost stories, but I’m not sure he necessarily believed in ghosts,” Kari said.

In 2014, Kari and her brother Mark, who lives in Moorhead, decided to visit Sims to learn about their grandmother Bertha, the famous Gray Lady of Sims.

“The stories we heard when we were in Sims was that this was a very kind person. She loved to hear children sing, and because she was a nurse, she would bring blankets to people at night when they were cold. Those were the kinds of things we heard, that she was a kind, benevolent kind of ghost,” Kari said.

Two of the people Mark and Kari met in Sims had seen or experienced Bertha’s ghost in some way. But they didn’t have the same luck.

“Unfortunately, Bertha did not choose to come and greet her grandchildren. We tried!” Kari said with a laugh.

Even so, the trip to Sims, which she recorded in dozens of photos, was a win.

“We heard all kinds of loving stories about Bertha,” she said. “There was a lot of love.”

Not everyone will believe ghost stories — scary ones or sweet ones like Bertha’s. But for the Gray Lady’s granddaughter, that’s OK.

“I would say that there’s a part of that end of existence, or existence in a different realm, that I absolutely do believe,” she said. “I think there are things that I don’t understand.”

While she didn’t meet her grandmother, it was comforting to see that Bertha wasn’t alone in that cemetery in Sims, after all.

“I saw that it is well cared for and well-loved, and it’s the most gorgeous, peaceful, beautiful cemetery that I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Bertha’s meticulously kept grave rests on a hill overlooking the church where, on this Halloween, 106 years after her death, she could still linger. A lucky few might see or feel her presence. The luckiest few — those who spend a chilly night in Sims — might even feel the warmth of an extra blanket.

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, with the White House as her backdrop, gave what she called her closing argument Tuesday evening, pressing voters to support her bid over that of “unstable” Republican candidate Donald Trump.

The 30-minute speech on the Ellipse was the same location where Trump, then president, held a rally nearly four years ago before his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. Harris highlighted Democrats’ core argument that another term for the former president would present a threat to the country’s future.

“This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates,” Harris said. “It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American, or ruled by chaos and division.”

Harris evoked the conception of the United States, how it was “born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant.” She said since then, Americans across generations have fought to protect those freedoms and expand them, from those who marched in the civil rights movement to the troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy.

“They didn’t do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” she said. “We are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”

Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, said in a statement that Trump’s “closing argument to the American people is simple: Kamala broke it; he will fix it.”

In the crowd of tens of thousands of rallygoers was LaShaun Martin, 52, of Prince George’s County, Maryland, who said she is voting for Harris because the vice president is “incredibly positive.”

“She has been for all people, Republicans and Democrats,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what walk of life you come from. She really wants to represent you, and whatever it is you need to be able to be a prosperous person.”

One week until Election Day

Harris’ speech took place just one week before voting ends on Nov. 5, following a history-making campaign that began when President Joe Biden withdrew from the race following a disastrous debate this summer. 

Biden’s endorsement of Harris and widespread support from Democrats throughout the country forced the GOP to overhaul its approach to the campaign, as Democrats shifted their focus from the policies that Biden wanted to champion to those important to Harris.

In her remarks, Harris rebuked Trump and his supporters for their disparaging comments about immigrants living in the country illegally, a main element of his campaign.

“Politicians have got to stop treating immigration as an issue to scare up votes in an election,” Harris said. “And instead treat it as the serious challenge that it is, that we must finally come together to solve.”

Harris pledged to work with Congress on immigration policy as well as a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers and for the more than 500,000 children brought into the country without authorization. They are known as Dreamers, enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Harris touched on several of her top policy issues, including housing affordability, abortion access nationwide, a ban on price gouging at grocery stores and expansion of the child tax credit.

Reaching out to the undecided

Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler previewed the speech earlier Tuesday, telling reporters the vice president would speak directly to undecided voters’ “sense of frustration, their sense of exhaustion with the way that our politics have played out under the Trump era — and offer them directly a vision that something is different, that something different is possible.”

Trump on Sunday appeared at a six-hour campaign event at Madison Square Garden in New York City that brought bipartisan condemnation for a comedian who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”

Ahead of Harris’ Tuesday speech, Trump gave remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, accusing her of trying to divide the country and seeking to distance himself from the racist and vulgar remarks made by the comedian and other speakers during the rally.

Trump did not take questions, but told ABC News earlier in the day he did not hear the comedian’s remarks.

“I don’t know him,” Trump said. “Someone put him up there.”

With the presidential race essentially tied, Harris and Trump have both focused their final campaign push on the crucial swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Harris promised the crowd during her speech that if elected she will protect institutions and the democratic ideals that are the bedrock of American law. She also slammed Trump’s comments referring to Democrats as the “enemy from within.’”

“The fact that someone disagrees with us does not make them the enemy within,” Harris said. “They are family, neighbors, classmates, coworkers, they are fellow Americans, and as Americans, we rise and fall together.”

Time to ‘turn the page’

Harris said the country must move beyond the ever-widening polarization that she described as a distinct feature of Trump’s grip on American politics.

“Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other,” Harris said. “That’s who he is.”

In her pitch to undecided voters, Harris offered an opportunity to leave the Trump era behind.

“It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division,” she said. “It is time for a new generation of leadership in America and I am ready to offer that leadership as the next president of the United States.”

That leadership, she said, would seek to build on bipartisan work.

“I pledge to seek common ground and common sense solutions to make your life better. I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress,” she said. “I pledge to listen to experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make and to people who disagree with me. Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy.”

During her speech, protesters advocated for an arms embargo on U.S. military weapons sent to Israel amid the war with Hamas. Several senators have also called for an arms embargo.

“Stop arming Israel. Arms embargo now,” one protester said before being escorted out.

The death toll of more than 43,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to health authorities there, has fractured Muslims, Arab Americans and anti-war Democrats within the party. It spurred the Uncommitted National Movement that sent 30 delegates to the Democratic National Convention this summer.

After Harris’ speech, nearly 100 pro-Palestinian protesters surrounded an exit of the campaign rally.

Harris supporters gather

The campaign’s finale in Washington, D.C., was expected to draw more than 50,000 supporters, according to the local NBC affiliate. The Harris campaign estimated 75,000 spectators showed up.

It featured speeches from supporters such as a mother who was able to access affordable insulin for her son because of the Affordable Care Act; a farming couple from Pennsylvania who were previously Trump voters; and Craig Sicknick, the brother of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died following the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.  

“(Trump) incited the crowd to riot while my brother and his fellow officers put their lives at risk,” Craig Sicknick said. “Now, Mr. Trump is promising to pardon the convicted criminals who attacked our Capitol, killing my brother and injuring over 140 other officers. This is simply wrong.”

The Justice Department has charged more than 1,500 defendants in the Jan. 6 attack.

Craig Sicknick endorsed Harris, who he called a “real leader.”

The family farmers, Bob and Kristina Lange from Malvern, Pennsylvania, said they are lifelong Republicans, but will be voting for Harris this election.

“It’s very clear that Donald Trump doesn’t care about helping hard-working people like us,” Bob Lange said. “He’s too focused on seeking revenge and retribution to care about what we need. We deserve better.”

The couple have been featured in multiple digital ads targeting rural voters in Pennsylvania.

History and excitement

Attendees from as far as Illinois to local residents made the trek to the Ellipse for the speech.

Tiffany Norwood, 56, of Washington, D.C., said she attended the rally with her 87-year-old mother, Mary Ann Norwood, for “the history of it, the excitement.”

“I feel we need something different in the United States, and she is it,” said Tiffany Norwood, who identified herself as an entrepreneur. “Her plan for the economy, for the future, for women, for everyone. I love the fact that it’s a big umbrella that includes the melting pot of the United States.”

Some attendees weren’t old enough to vote, such as 13-year-old Grace Ledford of Champaign, Illinois.

The teenager said her first political rally felt “like a big party.”

“Kamala would be a great president because she is, for one, a woman, and she is African American,” she said. “A lot of men presidents don’t know how hard it is to be a woman, especially Trump.”

Daniel Nyquist, 79, of Rockville, Maryland, stood in the crowd wearing a hat with the words “Make America Less Hateful.”

“It’s the alternative of Trump’s theme,” Nyquist said, pointing to his hat. “He’s a big promoter of hate, and this is to counter that.”