Some people call mediums or psychics to try to explain seemingly paranormal occurrences in a house. But others, wary of explanations that can't be documented, turn to house history researchers. In the 1980's, prominent architectural historian Jim Sazevich and I (folklorist) were invited to host a ghost storytelling at the Weyerhauser Auditorium in St. Paul. Two dozen people turned up, and after Jim and I warmed up the crowd with several stories, others told theirs. I will relate some of these stories--notably the ones about the Chauncey Griggs House--in other posts.
But this story comes from researcher June Burd, who passed on to me a number of stories about houses in the Kenwood/Lake of the Isles area of Minneapolis. It concerns a large pre-World-War-One brick house on Franklin Avenue near Blaisdell that had been converted into an office building. Workers reported that a room on the third floor always seemed cold, whatever the weather. But other than that, nothing out of the ordinary happened during daylight office hours.
But one winter evening as she was standing in the lower hallway preparing to leave, a secretary saw a girl in a vintage formal gown coming down the staircase from the second floor. The girl appeared and disappeared in a few seconds.
The secretary naturally wondered if she had been "seeing things"--that is, until another employee saw the girl again. One evening as this woman was preparing to come out of an office on the second floor, she sensed motion in her peripheral vision. She quickly turned and glimpsed a teenager in a vintage prom dress pass by the doorway only a few feet away. The woman rushed to the door and looked down the hallway. No one was there; all was quiet in the house.
Reports of full-bodied apparitions are rare in ghost stories. Research suggests that this apparition was likely the ghost of the daughter of a former owner, a teenager who met an untimely death in a car crash in the 1940s. Why she appears in a prom dress, we can only speculate.
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