If you think your home might be haunted, to find out who might be haunting it, you have two main options: 1) Hire a psychic 2) Hire a house historian. For us, the advantage of the second option was that even before the grate incident, my then-husband, Anders Christensen, had already done extensive research on our house.
In a nutshell, he discovered that the house was built in 1885 by master builder Charles J. Buell. A native of New York, Buell built his first three houses in the Lowry Hill East neighborhood. Our house was his third, constructed for what was at the time the princely sum of $5,100. Buell went on to build 27 more houses, most of them in St. Paul, but is best remembered in Minnesota for his history of the legislature.
House historians like Jim Sazevich of St. Paul are sometimes contacted by people trying to find out who or what is causing strange occurrences in their house. For example, one St. Paul couple who had recently bought an historic house, called him because of disruptions in the library of their new home. When they moved in, they set up the library with their books. One afternoon when they returned to the house, they had a hard time pushing open the door to the library. When they got it open, they discovered that books had been taken off the shelves and hurled helter-skelter around the room, with a pile blocking the door. At first they thought that vandals had broken in, but after this had happened several times, they decided to call in Jim.
However interesting the research on Buell was to us, after I suspected that something paranormal was going on, our focus turned to the owners and other occupants of the house over the years. Of these, two stood out as possibilities: the second family who lived in the house, the McCormicks, and the family that owned the house from 1912 to 1941, the Cartwrights.
The McCormicks caught our attention because Ellen, the wife of William E. McCormick, who bought the house in 1888, died in the house. According to her death certificate, in June of that year 24-year-old Ellen died in the house of "heart disease" lasting only one day. Three years later, William married Mary Heckman, listed as the housekeeper for the family, and in 1892, the family moved to the Pacific Northwest. Ellen is buried at Lakewood Cemetery, and we would visit her grave, wondering what really caused her death and wondering what Mary's role as "housekeeper" actually entailed.
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The Cartwrights owned the house longer than any previous owners. Frank M. Cartwright leased the house in 1910. In 1912, Cartwright and his wife Gertrude bought the house. Cartwright ran a livery and tack business out of the barn, catering to the horse owners who stabled their equines in the nearby horse barn. At that time, people would ride around Lake of the Isles and the other city lakes in the summer, and take sleighs out on the frozen lakes in winter. Frank died in 1936, Gertrude in 1941. Their children, Dana and Helen Ruth, sold it the next year.
We were fortunate enough to be able to track down Helen Ruth Cartwright Kinney, then in her 80s, who visited the house, told us family stories, and gave us old photos of herself, the family, and the house. In fact, it was the photos of house taken in 1914 that allowed us to restore the exterior to its original appearance in 1978. (The interior restoration took much longer.)
As it turned out, Ellen was soon eliminated as the likely haunter when it became clear that the person haunting the house was male. Frank Cartwright then moved to the top of the list of likely culprits.
Of course, after you find a likely candidate for who's haunting your house, this still may not explain why. One theory that explains a haunting that occurs when new owners make changes to the property is that the ghost is reacting to these changes--and we had made significant changes. In many cases, the reaction is a negative one, but not always. We would have to wait until more incidents took place before we came to any conclusions.
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