She Pulls a Spotless Bell Plate From the Mud: The Harwick Hall Mystery

She Pulls a Spotless Bell Plate From the Mud: The Harwick Hall Mystery

A woman fishing Caldwell Creek finds a spotless brass plate, four inches by six, with a push-button engraved MATRON - unchanged by mud, screws still threaded, as if placed that morning rather than buried for decades. The plate ties directly to a sealed dormitory at Harwick Academy where a fourteen-year-old, Cora Simms, died in 1987 after an over-administered sedative; why was a matron's bell lost to the creek only to reappear in 2011?

In this episode, we follow the discovery on August 6, 2011, and the documents and memories that connect the plate to Harwick Academy, the dormitory, the matron's alcove and the unresolved questions about Cora Simms' death and the missing records that left her family without answers.

Person: Heather Collins
Date: August 6, 2011
Location: Caldwell Creek / Harwick Academy
Person: Cora Simms
Date: August 14, 1987

- The brass plate measured 4 inches by 6 inches with a central push-button and the engraved word MATRON.
- Heather Collins had fished the same stretch of Caldwell Creek for 20 years before finding the plate.
- Harwick Academy operated from 1922 and Harwick Academy survived a 1961 fire; the school closed permanently on August 14, 1987.
- Cora Simms was 14 years old when she died in the Harwick Academy dormitory in the summer of 1987; her death certificate lists a cardiac event.
- Administrator Walt Greer removed every school record from September 1986 through closure before leaving Tennessee.

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