FARGO, N.D. (Valley News Live) – With election day just days away North Dakota Secretary of State is reminding voters how secure North Dakota elections are.

“Absolutely, the North Dakota legislature has been very proactive in implementing election integrity really long before election integrity was cool,” said North Dakota Secretary of State Michael Howe.

North Dakota is being very proactive in keeping it’s elections safe “We utilize paper ballots in the state of North Dakota. Are paper ballot tabulators have zero internet connection whatsoever. We have a voter ID law so there are a lot of common sense things in North Dakota state law,” said Howe.

7 counties in North Dakota have already utilized in-person early voting.

“We have 7 counties in the state of North Dakota utilizing in-person early voting and we’re seeing very high turn out early on,” said Howe.

Secretary Howe says historically the state sees high voter turnout for President “historically for Presidential elections in North Dakota we average 63% statewide turnout we’re already approaching 15% turnout a week before the election so we’re going to have a high or above average turnout for this election,” said Howe.

A reminder Secretary Howe wanted to get across about election security was “that’s probably the biggest thing as we enter the final week of the election and then the days after to keep that in mind what you may hear in another state may not and probably doesn’t apply to how North Dakota conducts our elections,” said Howe.

Stick with Valley News Live for all your election coverage.

Copyright 2024 KVLY. All rights reserved.

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.