Patrick Richard Heffron
Patrick Richard Heffron was the second Roman Catholic bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona, in Winona, Minnesota.
He was born in New York City. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest for what is now the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. On March 4, 1910, Pope Pius X appointed him Bishop of the Winona Diocese; he died in 1927 while still bishop.
On the morning of 27 August 1915, he was shot twice while celebrating private mass by a disgruntled priest named Laurence M. Lesches, who after many reassignments had demanded a parish of his own and had been turned down because of his arrogant behavior and emotional instability. Heffron survived, but the paranoid Lesches was committed to an insane asylum where he remained until his death in 1943. This incident, which was followed by accidental deaths among some of Heffron's acquaintances, is the explanation given for the supposed haunting of Heffron Hall by Lesches.
