“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
―
For Halloween, here's one of my favorite stories. It involves a deceased owner hanging around, haunting her former home in Duluth, Minnesota.
In the late 1990s, I stopped by to visit a friend who was restoring a spacious 1905 Craftsman house in Duluth's East End. Knowing that I was collecting ghost stories, she introduced me to Marie, who lived with her family in the house across the street.
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Marie had quite a story to tell. The 5,000+ square-foot house that her family occupied was built in 1911, designed by a prominent architect who had designed a number of notable houses, churches, and civic buildings, some now on the National Register. In 1917 a well-to-do young couple bought the house and moved in. The house was so large, the family had a live-in maid to help manage it for the couple, and eventually, their two children. The wife--whom we'll call Mrs. Smith--lived there until her death in the late 1960s.
At that point, Marie and her husband Paul acquired the house. On their first night in the house, Marie and Paul heard someone walking around above their second floor bedroom. Their dog heard it, too, following the sound of footsteps around with his eyes. Paul decided to check it out, but the dog was very reluctant to accompany him. Paul had to drag the dog up to the third floor with him. But no one was there. All was quiet.
As the weeks went on, they regularly heard footsteps on the third floor. Paul and Marie learned that Mrs. Smith had had a liquor cabinet on the third floor over the master bedroom. Was it merely coincidental that the footsteps were heard in that area? They also heard someone walking around in what had been maid's room over the kitchen. Those weren't the only unexplained noises. From the kitchen they sometimes heard the crystals tinkling on the chandelier in the foyer, as if someone had opened the front door; they occasionally heard the back door open and shut.
Three years after Paul and Marie moved in, their son was born. Marie took leave from work to care for him. One day, Marie was doing laundry in the basement. She loaded the washer and crossed to the stairs. As she walked past it, a large door with a window insert that had been propped against the wall since they moved in fell behind her with a loud crash. She had not so much as brushed against it. Terrified, Marie dashed up the stairs and scooped up the baby. Hot-footing it to the garage, she strapped him in his car seat and drove off. Marie drove around Duluth and environs for several hours, fearing to go back into the house alone. When her husband got home from work, they found the door still lying on the basement floor, and nothing else had changed.
Six years later, their son, now with his own bedroom, took to using the bathroom in the master bedroom suite at night because it was closer than the main bath. One night as he came into the darkened bedroom, he was startled to see a luminous blue form moving around his parents' bed as they slept. He ran back to his room and hid under the covers for the rest of the night. And that was the end of his visits to the master bathroom.
As the months passed, the odd noises continued. Sometimes a clap-on-off table lamp in one of the first floor rooms would go off, or on, when no one clapped or turned the switch. Marie and Paul had the opportunity to buy a large Persian rug that was original to the house, and they got it and installed it. Mrs. Smith--if that's who it was--calmed down somewhat after that, but paranormal activity never stopped completely.
One evening, Paul and Marie went out to attend an event. They came into the house through the back and walked through to the living room. As they came into the room, the babysitter and her friend looked up in surprise.
"Did you just come home?" asked the teenagers--who freaked out when they heard the answer. A half an hour earlier, they had clearly heard the back door open and close and had assumed that the parents had been in the kitchen since then.
As time went by, stories about the house began circulating around town. Sometimes when Marie was at a party, she would overhear someone relating a story about their house. It came as no surprise, as a number of people had witnessed strange goings-on there, and the family did not attempt to keep the incidents a secret.
The strangest incident of all happened one day as Mrs. Smith's son was driving down the street with a friend. As they approached the former Smith home, the friend said, "I've heard stories that your mother is haunting the family abode."
"Rubbish!" exclaimed the son--just as the engine cut out right in front of the house.
Stories of hauntings by former occupants are among the most common ghost stories. As someone who lived for four decades in a house haunted by an owner who had died in 1942, I can relate. As Marie found, activity can be sporadic with long, quiet intervals between incidents. For the most part, the incidents were not scary, and our family learned to accept the occasional unexplained event, just as Marie's family had.
Halloween decorations at my old house
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