My Haunted House II: Researching who Lived in the House

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.

                                  Buell's image on the title page of his book seems rather sinister.

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.

. 

                                                                  Ellen's death certificate

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.)

                                                            Gertrude Cartwright, c. 1910

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.

Do You Believe in Ghosts?

                                        Edith Wharton at her writing desk, 1905 (Photo: NYTimes)

American author and designer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote a very scary collection of literary ghost stories, Ghosts, reissued in 2021. I was intrigued by Wharton's answer to the question, "Do you believe in ghosts?" in the preface to this collection: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.”

                           The cover of a first edition copy of Ghosts. You can have it for $2,500.

In her biography, Life and I, published posthumously, Wharton explains that this fear of ghosts emerged after she read a ghost story during convalescence from an illness at the age of nine: "To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless, . . .[but] with my intense Celtic sense of the super-natural, tales of robbers & ghosts were perilous reading.” Wharton, thanks to reading this story, entered "a world haunted by formless horrors.” She continued to be "haunted' into adulthood, even though she had no paranormal experiences--only the experience of reading about ghosts.

I understand how this could happen. When I was 16, I read a collection of ghost stories from New England folklore, and got scared senseless--for a week. Then, as the memory of these tales faded, ghosts went off my radar for a couple of decades. (Obviously, I do not have Wharton's powerful imagination.) Then, coming to the realization that my family and I were living in a proverbial haunted Victorian house, ghosts were brought to my attention again. However, after experiencing quite a few inexplicable events over the years, my daughters and I became more nonplussed than scared. (I plan to write up these experiences in future blog posts.)  When I heard footsteps or witnessed a TV turning on in the middle of the night, my reaction was not, "Aieee!", but "WTF?" On the other hand, some of my daughter's friends who came to check on our pets when we were out of town understandably got freaked out when they heard footsteps in the upper hallway when no one was there.

                     A ghost photoshopped into an image of a staircase in a wrecked Minneapolis mansion.

A couple who told me very scary stories about their haunted house (where I, too, had a ghostly experience), when asked, said they did not believe in ghosts. Perhaps denying their existence made it easier to cope with the very strange goings-on. My father, who also was not a believer, nevertheless told stories about his experiences in the auditorium in Woodlawn School and stories about a fellow actor who haunted the old Pittsburgh Playhouse. My Aunt Estella, another non-believer, told me of an eerie experience on the death of a relative. 

Some non-believers are willing to suspend disbelief to hear a good story; other non-believers scoff at and ridicule believers. ("She must have been drunk", "He's a nutcase," etc.) Others just don't care one way or the other.

Of course, many believers who have not had any paranormal experiences desperately want to believe. They watch TV programs about "investigations"; they go to allegedly haunted locations to see if they can have an experience. Many don't have experiences, and some, I suspect, want to believe so badly that they start "seeing things."

                                                    An old wing in Eastern State Penitentiary

I have never been to a Halloween haunted house, but I have visited one of the allegedly most haunted locations in the US, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. On a lovely summer day my friend Jay-Louise and I did a tour of this historic prison, where inmates once lived in horrific conditions. We'd heard some of the ghost stories about this place; we learned the history as we walked through its corridors. If a place should be haunted, Eastern State should be. We didn't have any paranormal experiences, but I admit to getting the heebie-jeebies in some of the cells and walkways in this crumbling, dark edifice. 

I have been to other places that creeped me out, most recently a house on a architectural tour. As I walked through the house, I felt more and more uneasy, but said nothing. It had a nasty odor. The rooms seemed dark, even on that sunny day. As we hastily exited, my companion commented, "I couldn't wait to get out of that place. Horrible!" An earlier visitor had a similar experience, going so far as to say that the house should be torn down. Others, however, thought the house was cool. Who's to say?

Duluth's "Haunted Ship", the William A. Irvin. Is it really haunted? You can try to find out for yourself during one of the October "Haunted" tours.

If you haven't had any ghostly encounters, but want to experience them in their most intense forms, I recommend reading literary ghost stories. You can get thrills and chills from the comfort of your home by reading Wharton's "Old Souls", Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," or Ellen Glasgow's "Jordan's End"--or so many others from Dickens to Shakespeare. 

                 Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost (although no one else does) Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4

MACBETH, to the Ghost 
Avaunt, and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee.
Thy bones are marrowless; thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with.

 

Leave the lights on.

Dead Still

 One of the first stories I collected was from a librarian, Joan, who lived with her husband and two children in an old foursquare house on a broad avenue in South Minneapolis. 

                                                             A typical Midwest foursquare 

Because the librarian worked days and sometimes evenings and her husband worked night shift, they hired a babysitter to stay with the children until their mother got home in the evenings. As the weeks went by, Joan frequently found the kids curled up with the babysitter on the sofa instead of in bed. The babysitter said that the kids didn't want to go upstairs and be alone in their beds. When Joan asked why, the babysitter replied that there were sounds of someone moving around in the central landing hallway, but when Joan investigated, she found no one there.

At the same time, the door from the third floor onto the landing kept opening. Joan was sure they'd shut it, but they'd find it open even when no one in the family had been on the floor. As with the attorney with the opening hatch, Joan's husband got annoyed that the heat was flying up into the attic, increasing heating bills. He locked the door and assumed that would be the end of it. It wasn't. The locked door was unlocked and opened as before.

After the husband started locking the door, disturbances increased on the second floor. When Joan came home at night the kids and babysitter were always on the first floor, huddled together. Even though Joan and her husband had witnessed none of these nocturnal disruptions, the kids had, and they grew increasingly scared. It got to the point that they refused to sleep in their second floor bedrooms.

The husband decided to fix the problem for good. He nailed the door shut--not just one nail, but a dozen of them hammered all around the frame. He was reluctant to take this measure, but it was January, and the heating costs were increasing alarmingly. In addition, he and Joan thought that securing the door would perhaps stop the sounds the kids and babysitter were hearing at night.

The house was quiet for several nights. The kids returned to sleeping upstairs. But then, on one below-zero January night, Joan was preparing for bed in the master bedroom, which shared a wall with the staircase from the third floor. She turned out the light and was about to get into bed when she heard a faint scratching sound coming from one of the bedroom windows. Was she imagining it? No. Although barely audible, there was definitively a scratching noise.

Joan looked around the dark bedroom, trying to figure out the source. She went to the window to see if the wind was scraping a branch against the glass. No branches were anywhere near the window. White vapors from the chimneys of the neighboring houses rose silently into the air. All was dead still, as it is on extremely cold nights. Even the slightest sound will carry a long way. Abruptly, the scratching sound stopped. 

 Joan grew uneasy, overcome with a feeling of dread. She glanced at the clock. Almost midnight. Hesitantly, she prepared again to go to bed. But she heard another faint sound, this time coming from inside the stairwell from the attic. It sounded like fabric being brushed against the wall as someone descended the stairs. Swish, swish. Then, footsteps very slowly coming down, stopping after each step. Joan was frozen with fear as she stared at the wall, trying to imagine what was behind it.

The footsteps stopped at the door. Silence. Then. . . Crash! All hell broke loose. Joan heard the nails ripping out of the door, some rattling against the wood floor. The door burst open, slamming against the wall. And then suddenly, all was quiet again. The terrified kids and Joan ventured out of their rooms into the hallway. Joan turned on the light. The door was wide open. The nails were scattered around on the floor. No one was there.

It took a long time for Joan to calm down herself and the children. She shut the attic door, and they all went downstairs to finish the night on the sofa. When her husband got home in the morning and Joan told him what had happened, he was very upset. They obviously needed to do something different. After some discussion, they decided to call upon the elders of their church to do a cleansing ceremony. 

 Within a few days, the elders came out and did a prayer service. And here's where this story ends very differently than most similar stories: The prayers worked. There were no more weird sounds on the landing and stairway, and the door stayed shut. 

Although this story has an anticlimactic conclusion, Joan and her family were very grateful that there were no more disturbances and they all were able to sleep in their beds in peace.

The Girl in the Prom Dress

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.

                                           A prom dress pattern from the 1940s.

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.

Looking east from Hennepin Avenue on Franklin Avenue today. The haunted house was a couple of blocks beyond the dip. --Photo, City of Minneapolis

The Man Who Wasn't There

                      Last night I saw upon the stair,
                      A little man who wasn't there,
                      He wasn't there again today
                      Oh, how I wish he'd go away...

                                            --from 'Antigonish' by Hughes Mearns

While visiting an historic Ohio River city on a Victorian Society architectural tour, I visited an art historian who worked for a museum there. She told me this story that she heard from the night security guard at the mansion, who related it to the administrators as it unfolded.

                                                                                                                          The house in the 1950s

A daytime visitor to the 1840's Greek Revival house would probably find nothing spooky about it--a sunny, spacious house with broad hallways and open staircases. The night watchman, however, knows a different house. His story begins several weeks after he started working there. 

                                      The original security system for the house: metal bars

The museum, which houses artifacts and objets d'art worth millions of dollars, is guarded by an electronic alarm system. In addition, sensitive microphones are placed in every room to pick up sounds of an intruder during the hours that the museum is closed. From a room in the basement, the night guard listens to the sounds received by the microphones. During training he was given instructions that if he heard anything suspicious, he was not to investigate on his own, but immediately to call the police.

                                                        The museum dining room

For a while the nights passed uneventfully for the guard. Then, one night he heard the sound of footsteps from the microphones in the second floor hallway. He listened carefully. Yes, someone definitely was walking around up there. Had someone broken into the building, somehow bypassing the alarm system? The watchman pressed the red button that automatically summoned the police.

                                        One of the lighting fixtures in the large entrance hall. 

In a matter of minutes, spotlights flooded the building and grounds; squad cars drove up and screeched to a halt outside the building. Weapons in hand, the police charged into the house. . . and found no one. The guard was flabbergasted. He had heard footsteps; he was certain. 

He took the police officers to the guard station and played back that night's recording of the sounds the microphones had picked up. Sure enough, there was the sound of footsteps, clear and distinct, from the hallway. The police were as nonplussed as the guard.. They conducted a second search of the museum complex and grounds, but found no trace of an intruder. The police unit drove off, leaving the embarrassed guard to puzzle over the mysterious sound of footfalls.

Several more weeks passed uneventfully. This time, sensors picked up a sound in a third floor storage area, the sound of a baby crying. The watchman couldn't believe his ears. How could a baby get up there? Why would a baby be up there?

Since the crying was coming from a part of the house where no valuable objects were kept, the guard decided to check it out for himself. He went up to the third floor and stealthily approached the door to the storage area. Gun drawn, the guard carefully unlocked the door, threw it open, and switched on the lights. Nothing. Silence. Dead still. He searched the area, but found nothing--no baby, no animal, no living thing.

A few weeks later, another incident occurred. Again, the sound of someone walking in the second floor hallway came from the microphones. This time the guard chose not to call the police. No exterior alarm had sounded, and the guard did not want to turn in another false alarm.

                                                                   The main staircase

Quietly, he made his way from the basement, into the house, and up the main staircase to the hallway where he had heard footsteps. Holding his breath, he stopped at the top of the staircase and listened. All was quiet. He turned and began creeping slowly down the long, pitch-black hallway. He had gotten halfway down the hallway when he suddenly heard footsteps coming towards him. He froze. At that instant, to his horror, he felt someone brush past him, gently rubbing against his right arm. Whipping out his gun with one hand and turning on his flashlight with the other, he whirled around to face the intruder. But the beam of light fell on a deserted hallway. He was stunned, knowing it would have been impossible for someone to have gotten all the way to the staircase in the instant it took him to switch on the flashlight.

Heart pounding, the guard hastily turned on the lights and searched the area. All was in order. Shaken, but nevertheless glad that he did not call the police that time, the guard reluctantly concluded that he was dealing with something paranormal.

After that incident, the guard heard the baby crying several times, and sometimes even the sounds of children playing in that attic room, which, he learned, had been a playroom for the family that built the house many decades before.

The ghostly footsteps have not sounded again. The young guard was left with the dilemma of trying to decide which is more terrifying to him alone all night in the dark, silent mansion--an intruder that is there or an intruder that isn't.

                                                A window treatment in a main floor room.
 

Note: It's been many years since the guard had these experiences in the house. The woman who related these stories swore me to secrecy regarding the exact location of the house, for an obvious reason: The story offers an opportunity for a real, live thief to get in and make off with some priceless work of art. 

But today, the house has a sophisticated security system that monitors not only sounds, but includes a video IP system, touch detection, and intrusion alarms. Night guards don't have to physically check out parts of the house in order to know what's going on.

The fascinating part of this story is the unseen person making physical contact with the guard. Many people have heard ghostly footsteps, as I have myself, but very few have actually bumped into a ghost walking down a dark hallway.

A Dead Ringer: Service, Please!

 

       The bell board in Highclere Castle, which served as Downtown Abbey in the BBC-TV series.

A minister's wife told me this story about incidents that occurred when they first moved into a large Edwardian-era church rectory in Duluth, Minnesota. When her husband took the position of minister at this venerable old church, the family moved into the rectory next door. Like many upper-class houses of its day, this one had a system of bells with which the owner could call the servants to perform some task. The bells in the rectory were wired for electricity. For example, if someone in a bedroom wanted a maid to bring up linens, they could press a button in the bedroom and a bell would ring in the kitchen. A board listing all the rooms in the house would let the maid know by an arrow indicator which room was ringing.

By the time this minister's family moved into the rectory in the late 1970s, the bell service had not been used for decades. Some of the little arrows pointing to the room numbers were broken; some dangled loose and useless. So when one day shortly after the family moved in, one of these bells rang, it startled the minister's wife, who was downstairs at the time. Since she knew nobody was upstairs, she wondered how and why the bell was ringing.

                                  A small bell box with arrows similar to the one in the rectory.

The incident turned out to be one of several. Over the next few months one or another of the bells rang on a half dozen other occasions. In each case, no one was upstairs to press a button, yet a bell rang in the kitchen.

The couple became concerned that faulty wiring might be causing the bells to go off seemingly randomly. The wiring in the house was original, and they worried that a short could start a fire. They called an electrician to check out the house's electrical service. They told him about the bells ringing when no one had pressed a button and asked him to pay special attention to the bell wiring. 

After examining the wiring, the electrician declared that it was sound--except for the bell system, where at least half the wires had been disconnected. To assuage their fears about shorts, he suggested that he cut the wires to all the bells. They readily agreed to this solution, and he severed each of the wires where it entered the box in the kitchen.

Imagine the couple's shock when, as they stood talking in the kitchen a couple of days later, one of the bells rang. They stood gaping at the cut wires as the little bell kept ringing for 15-20 seconds. 

Completely unnerved, they called back the electrician, who suggested another solution: take down the bell box. So they did. The box was removed from the house, and that at last ended the ringing. In any case, whoever had been ringing for service wasn't going to get it, and after the removal of box, they could no longer bother the living occupants of the house.

                          A Minnesota rectory of similar vintage that was converted to a B&B.

Hauntin' around the Christmas Tree

Another personal ghost story of mine dates from the 1980s when I was a member of the choir at the Church of Gethsemane (now closed) in downtown Minneapolis.  One of the choir members, Kay, invited us all to her large 1960s house in Edina for a holiday party.  Kay knew that I collected ghost stories, and she told me privately that her house was haunted.

When she and her husband first moved in several years earlier, they noticed odd things happening: a cupboard door found open when it had just been closed, a book placed on a side table sliding off onto the floor, lights turning off and on, and a rocking chair moving on its own. After doing a little research, they learned that a young couple previously owned the house and that the wife, Barbara, had died of a virulent cancer that had spread quickly. They deduced that the woman was the one moving objects around the house. The rocking chair was Barbara's particular favorite. Kay said she often found it rocking away when she came into the living room. 

With a couple dozen people in attendance at the choir party, it was hard to tell if anything ghostly was going on. People were sometimes sitting in the rocker, sometimes not. In any case, only Kay, her husband, and I knew about the ghost. 

At one point, I decided to go down to the family room on the lower level to check out the Christmas tree. Several guys were at the bar at the end of the room opposite the tree discussing the Vikings' prospects as I went over to see the ornaments and lights on the tree. I hadn't been there more than a couple of minutes when all of the lights in the downstairs went out: the tree lights, the overhead lights, the bar back-lights, the stairwell lighting. It was pitch black. To my surprise, the men stopped talking for only a few seconds, and then went right back to sports talk, sitting there in the dark like nothing had happened. I stood there by the tree, wondering how long the blackout would last. I was afraid to move, concerned about stumbling into furniture in the dark. A few minutes went by, and the lights went back on all at once. Since the lights were on three different switches, no one person could have accomplished this.

 I went back upstairs and told Kay what had happened. She just smiled, nodded, and said, "Merry Christmas from Barbara."

God bless Us, Every One!

Ghost of a Winter Solstice Past

 

      Andy Serkis scares the dickens out of Scrooge as the Ghost of Christmas Past (BBC 2019)

One of the most delightful traditions of my family was the Winter Solstice party and carol sing, held each year on the solstice itself. Guests would bring holiday treats to share, and a large pot of glögg (Swedish mulled wine, very potent) and another of apple cider would be simmering on the stove. After socializing for an hour or so, the guests would assemble in the parlors of my Victorian house for a short program of readings of the season--for example, Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man", Thomas Hardy's "The Oxen", Clement Moore's "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" or a humorous holiday story. 

After that, people would arrange themselves around the tree and baby grand piano in the front parlor for the carol sing. Since many attendees were from the St. David's (Welsh) Society, we'd sing carols and songs in English and a few in Welsh in four-part harmony. We'd sing all the favorites, as well as some unfamiliar ones, always ending with "Silent Night" in English and then in German.

                  Singing around the tree, Solstice Party 2014, with David Evan Thomas at the piano.

Most years, 15-25 people would show up to celebrate the solstice. But one time in the early '90s, heavy snow falling kept away all but the most avid carolers. Around 9 p.m., five of us were in the front parlor singing as the snow fell silently with about 8" already on the ground. Few cars and pedestrians were out and about.

We were therefore quite surprised when we heard the sound of heavy boots coming up the steps to the porch and across to the door. All of us heard the footsteps, but we couldn't see anyone out the front window. I got up from the piano, went into the foyer, and opened the front door. But no one was there. I looked out onto the snow-covered porch and was nonplussed to find no footprints there or on the walk from the gate. When I went back to the parlor, everyone wanted to know who had come to the door.

I knew. It was Frank Cartwright, the owner of the house from 1912 until his death in 1942. Frank had been putting in appearances since the early '80s. A number of friends and family had been witness to Frank's shenanigans, which ranged from making the sound of footsteps and opening doors to turning lights and the TV on. He wasn't scary--a protective ghost. 

                                                        The front porch in falling snow.

Several years after this, we had another party that Frank showed up for. In this case, the house was filled with people who were going to listen to or to tell the stories of their ancestors' experiences during the American Civil War. I was in the front parlor with my friend Mitzi and several others awaiting the arrival of Colin, who was going to play the trumpet for the parlor concert. Clomp, clomp, clomp went the heavy footsteps across the porch. I was facing the window, but couldn't see anyone pass by. I went to the front door and opened it. No one there. The people in the front parlor were a bit freaked out that there was no one at the door after they clearly heard the footsteps going up to it.

I could go on and on with Frank stories--and one day I will write them up for the blog. But suffice it to say that Frank's daughter, who was a professional singer, told that us that the Cartwrights often held musical soirees in the house, with people gathered around the piano in the back parlor. It's possible that Frank came to other musical parties at the house, but because of the noise made by all the party-goers, we didn't hear him. 

                                                                  Frank M. Cartwright

Haunted Apartment

With so many stories to tell, I've had a hard time deciding where to start. I suppose the best place to start is the beginning, with stories from people who contacted me right after the Wedge article was published in 1978.

In early November '78 I got a call from a woman stockbroker in her late 20s who lived in a 1910 apartment building not far from our house in the Wedge. Over the phone she told me that she feared her apartment was haunted, and she and her roommate were moving out, enough though it meant losing several hundred dollars in rents and deposits. She invited me to the scene of the alleged haunting on the third floor of the brick building. 

               The apartment where these incidents occurred has been converted into condos.

When I arrived that November evening, it was dark and dreary outside. A couple dozen boxes crowded the entrance to the apartment, as if they couldn't wait to get out. She, her roommate, and a friend gave me a tour of the apartment, showing me the corner in her room which emitted an obnoxious stench that scrubbing and painting could not erase, and pointing out the window in the air shaft where a black cat had entered on three occasions. They showed me the shaft, and I could not see any way a cat could get up to the third floor in it, let alone get into the shaft itself below. These things did not initially scare the roommates, although they later thought there might be a connection between these and the incidents that conspired to drive them out. 

         Many 19th and early 20th century buildings had ventilation shafts to allow in light and air.

The two roommates had moved into the apartment nearly three months previous to my visit. The apartment was roomy and attractive, with hardwood floors and varnished woodwork. The roommates found it a comfortable place to live--until three weeks before my visit.

The woman came home late on a Friday night. Her roommate was still out. As was her custom, she turned out all the lights in the apartment and went to bed. Exhausted from a long day at work, she immediately fell into a deep sleep.

But an hour and a half later, around 1 a.m., she was suddenly awakened by an odd feeling that someone else was in the apartment. She immediately noticed that the light in the bathroom across the hallway was on. She called out to her roommate; there was no answer. She searched the apartment. No roommate. Nothing had been disturbed. She tested the pull chain on the bathroom light. It worked as before. She sat up for a long time, racking her brain for a reasonable explanation, but could think of none.

A week later, she and her roommate were sleeping in their respective bedrooms when click, the large portable radio by her bedside came on at 1:30 a.m. Loud music blasted forth, startling her from sleep, her heart pounding. Both roommates were so shaken by this rude awakening that, even though it was in the middle of the night, they decided to go to relatives' homes to sleep.

                                       The interior of a similar apartment in the neighborhood.

The last straw came the next day, a Sunday, when the woman was in her room listening to the Vikings game on the radio. She heard the front door being unlocked, heard the doorknob creak and the door close, followed by footsteps coming down the hall toward her room. She looked up, and seeing no one, concluded that her roommate had gone into the front bedroom.

But when she called out a greeting, there was no answer. Hoping against hope, she went from room to room. No one was there. The front door was closed and locked. All was still.

Terrified, she fled the apartment, vowing to move out with all haste and never to stay there alone until the last stick of furniture was carted away. 

Her roommate wasn't eager to risk further disturbance by remaining there, either. When they gave the apartment manager notice that they would be leaving early in the month, he asked them why they didn't like the apartment. Hesitantly, they decided to tell him about the spooky incidents. He then told them that an elderly couple had lived in the unit for many years and had passed on several years previous, adding that two other sets of tenants had also moved out of that apartment before the end of their leases. Hearing of others' premature exits from the apartment made them feel better, validating their own experiences.

The next week a moving truck came and hauled their furniture and belongings to another apartment--one that they hoped would be quieter and less nerve-wracking than the one they had just evacuated.

                                                          The front entry to the building

Exactly 43 years have passed since the young woman told me that story. Judging from the experiences of others who related stories of their ghostly experiences years ago, I'd say it's very likely that the current residents are not being harassed by unseen persons. Claims on TV shows notwithstanding, active hauntings do not continue unabated for decades--at least, so I've been told.

                

Haunted

What would you think if you heard a crash in the dining room, immediately looked in and saw that the cast iron heating register had come out of the floor and was now sitting a couple of feet away on the carpet? When this happened to me, I was in the next room and my six-year-old daughter in the adjacent parlor. We were mystified. The grate weighed over three pounds and couldn't have been lifted by the furnace blower. What moved it? My husband and I didn't know what to think.

Then, several months later in the winter, my husband had gone out to the garage for something when it happened again. He came back into the house to find our daughter completely freaked out. She had been watching TV in her room over the dining room when she heard the metallic crash from below and knew exactly what had caused it: the grate crashing onto the floor.  

These incidents occurred six years after I had started collecting ghost stories, so I recognized the possibility that the cause was paranormal. Over the next thirty-some years my daughters and I, plus a number of our friends, witnessed other strange happenings in the house. Nevertheless, when these inexplicable events first occurred, we couldn't help but think that there must be a normal, not paranormal, explanation for them. But as the number of incidents grew, we had to conclude that, yes, there was a ghost afoot in the house.

These experiences and my ever-expanding collection of ghost stories inevitably spurred me to research theories of what is known as a "ghost." If you've watched any of the numerous paranormal TV shows from the past two decades, you've probably found that there is an orthodoxy involving ghosts: They are spirits, entities, or demons that have materialized. You can discern their presence or contact them via mediums, psychics, ghost boxes, EMF meters, REM pods, etc. 

Many ghost hunters say that they want to prove that ghosts are real. I don't. Nor do I care about the theories of what ghosts are. To me, the hundreds of stories from witnesses is enough proof that ghosts are "real" in some way.

In his 2012 book Ghosts: A Natural History: 500 Years of Searching for Proof , Roger Clarke gives a well-researched history of ghost hunting. "Written as grippingly as the best ghost fiction, A Natural History of Ghosts takes us on an unforgettable hunt through the most haunted places of the last five hundred years and our longing to believe."--NY Times Book Review.

This excerpt from my Goodreads review sums up why I like Clarke's approach so much:  

"Clarke covers it all, from poltergeists to séances to ESP to ghost hunters--and more. He examines the hoaxes as well as the unexplained. My personal favorite was the story of a cursed German WW I U-boat--which Clarke calls 'a mobile haunted house.' I was fascinated by the tracing of the story upon which Henry James based 'The Turn of the Screw,' my favorite literary ghost story.

There are quite a few memorable quotes, but the one I like best is by Harry Price, the first ghost hunter: 'People don't want the de-bunk, they want the bunk.' Alas, one need look no further for proof of this statement than the current spate of paranormal TV shows, such as the laughable 'Alaska Monsters'. At least the gullible viewers of these shows are not as dangerous as the 18th century 'flash mobs' of thousands that showed up, ready for action against the alleged ghost--even if it meant tearing down the allegedly haunted house. Now that's scary." 

* * *The Chauncey Griggs House on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, based on the many stories told about it, the most haunted house in Minnesota. * * *

So what can I generalize about ghosts from personal experience and the stories I've collected? Ghosts do not perform on cue. The most commonly reported experiences are physical manifestations, like hearing footsteps or doors closing, or seeing lights go off or on, or having things move. Very few people report seeing full apparitions. Rarer yet are stories about witnessing past incidents or events, such as seeing a scene from a long-ago battle. Many stories concern single incidents, although some witnesses describe hauntings that last for months or years. Ghostly activity can happen over very long periods of time, and incidents are usually few and far between. Activity often fades as the years pass. Ghosts can be hostile or protective, interactive or passive. They can haunt houses, woods, apartments, battleships, skyscrapers, whatever. And yes, they can sometimes be busted (more on this in a future post). 

Have you witnessed an explainable event? Many people do--for example, a door opening and closing when no one else is home. Some decide it's paranormal; others conclude it's an unsolvable mystery. Whatever they believe, or don't believe, these stories about uncanny events are endlessly fascinating.

             Harry Price, the first ghost hunter. "People don't want the de-bunk, they want the bunk."

 

"Enter Ghost" Reprint from Wedge newspaper, Minneapolis, October 1978

                                                            ENTER GHOST

Horatio: Look, my lord, it comes! 

Hamlet: Angels and ministers of grace defend us!/ Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd,/ Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, /Thou com'st in such a questionable shape/ That I will speak to thee. 

A 19th Century Hamlet, Henry Irving, confronts the Ghost at London's Lyceum Theatre in 1874.
 

Few of  us have, like Hamlet, met an apparition of our dead father at midnight and discussed family problems with it. We assume, quite understandably, that ultimately the cause of so-called "ghostly" shenanigans can be found in the physical world. But many people--more than most realize--have experienced things as strange, and perhaps stranger than Hamlet did, virtually right in your own back yard. The Lowry Hill area on both sides of Hennepin seems to be a fertile area for ghostly occurrences. The common explanation for the higher proportion of psychic phenomena reported here is that our neighborhood consists almost exclusively of turn-of-the-century houses which have housed several generations. Why this fact should be significant is a matter of continuing debate among people who are concerned with such things.

Curiously enough, the people whom I interviewed in the Wedge became interested in the theories about ghosts only after some thing very peculiar occurred in their house or apartment. For example, when Peter and Mark (all the names here are fictitious) moved into the ground floor of a big old house on Colfax last year, they were pleased with their new quarters. Peter's work kept him out past midnight most of the time. When he returned home, Mark would already be asleep.This routine went on for over a month, when one night Peter came home to find the light on in Mark's room. This seemed odd, so Peter peeked in to see what was going on. Mark was very puzzled and a little upset. He was a big man, a no-nonsense carpenter who had never had an experience like the one that had happened that night: He was sound asleep when all of a sudden he was awakened by an overwhelming sensation that someone was standing at the foot of his bed. He quickly turned on the light, but there was nothing to see. The incident was inexplicable to him, and he didn't feel very comfortable afterwards. So he decided to sleep with the light on that night. The next night he slept through without disturbance.

Peter noticed. . .along with a couple other close friends. . .that sometimes as they passed through the hall, at the entrance to Mark's room they'd feel a "chill" like the sense of an alien presence. Several weeks after Mark's first midnight wake-up Peter arrived home to find the lights on again in Mark's room while Mark slept. This happened a couple of other times while they lived there, although nothing spectacular ever happened. Eventually they moved out, and at the time Mark suggested that the nocturnal disturbances were partly responsible for his decision to leave.

Further down the street is another late nineteenth century house where the inhabitants have also had some unusual experiences. One night when I was visiting there, Tom complained that he was having trouble laying a floor in the front room. He would carefully line up the parquet block as he knelt in the doorway. Twice, he had turned away for an instant, only to find the blocks scattered helter-skelter when he turned back to work. Other peculiar things have happened to him, too. One day he saw a boy pulling a wagon down the upstairs hallway. . .a child who seemed inexplicably to vanish. Another time a faint glow emanated from part of a back room, a glow that Tom tried in vain to find a source for. These experiences are so strange that Tom, quite naturally, does not fully trust his recollection of them. Others in the house, however, have also reported uncanny events: the upstairs hall light comes on, unbidden, in the middle of the night sometimes. Also, a study lamp goes off and on at odd hours and there appears to be nothing wrong with the wiring.

A few blocks away on Bryant is an 1980's house where only one peculiar thing happens, and this happens over and over again. When they shut the door to one bedroom, it often opens as soon as they turn away. The latch and the hinges appear to work fine. The room used to belong to the son of the original owner, both now deceased.

Up the block is a house which the current residents have owned for two years. When Karen and Jim first moved in, even though they liked the house, they frequently got the feeling that the house wasn't completely theirs, as if someone else's presence sill pervaded certain rooms. One night a while back Karen and a friend came home and entered through the back door. The rest of the family was not at home, and the two women remained in the kitchen, occupying themselves with petty tasks. They dawdled there for some time, when the friend finally remarked, "Don't you feel like running through the house, looking under the beds?" After the friend broached the subject, they both admitted that they felt a presence in the rest of the house and just couldn't bear going into the living room. In a while this feeling passed and they felt they could proceed as usual.

Karen and Jim's daughter, who was three at the time they moved in, quickly acquired the unorthodox habit of leaving her room in the middle of the night to sleep in the hall. This practice has continued to the present day on the average of two or three times a week.

Recently, when Karen slept in this room, she was awakened by the disturbing impression of a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon delivered by a male voice like that of a sidewalk evangelist. A stranger experience yet is that of their son. Last year as he was coming out of his room, he saw a misty figure emerge from the bathroom, turn to look at him, and disappear into his sister's room. The apparition was that of a man, his mousy brown hair wet as though he had just washed it. Who the preacher and/or bather might be, they haven't yet discovered. Some time ago, though, as he was working the the yard, Jim was approached by a funny old man carrying a violin case. He told Jim that he had lived in an upper bedroom (indicating the son's bedroom) for 25 years and he had recently been having recurrent dreams about the house. At least the family knows they aren't alone in having their sleep disturbed by something connected with the house.

All of the people I've mentioned so far have talked about feelings and impressions. But one couple on Bryant has had rather a different experience. Claire and Paul have lived in their house for nearly six years. During that time, some odd things have happened. One night, for example, they came home to find all the basement windows wide open, but most of these incidents could be explained without straining one's imagination. One night last spring, however, this was not the case. 

It was about ten at night and they were preparing to retire after a long day. Paul was already in bed and Claire was just climbing in--when, suddenly, the chest next to the bed began to shake violently. This large, heavy antique chest was not merely vibrating, but rocking rapidly from side to side. They were absolutely boggled by the chest's antics and began to look around the room for clues to its behavior. The light cords the window shade pulls, the drapes, the other furniture--seemed perfectly still. While they sat in bed staring at the chest, the foot of the bed began shaking, too. For the few seconds this went on, they huddled in bed, astonished and frightened at the same time. Then all movement ceased. For the next hour they checked out every possibility as to the cause of the disturbance. Was the chest off balance?. . .Had something fallen elsewhere?. . .An earthquake? etc. But they couldn't come up with an answer. Finally, they gave up and went to bed. Paul soon fell asleep, but Claire lay awake, plagued by a feeling that it was going to happen again. Sure enough, in another half hour or so, the chest started shaking again. Paul awakened and reached out toward the chest. As soon as his fingers touched it, the shaking stopped. They at once felt greatly relieved and spent the rest of the night undisturbed.

What possible explanations for these experiences can be proposed? The theory most frequently advanced, especially by those who haven't had such an experience, is that these weird events are products of the percipients' overactive imaginations or disturbed minds. Somehow, there must be a "rational" explanation; there must be some physical cause which, once discovered, will explain all. For those who find this scientific skepticism inadequate in terms of evidence, there are three possible approaches to take: First, that there is a spirit in all living things which is independent of the body and which lives on after physical death. Thus through seances people try to make contact with this spirit world. Over the centuries this has certainly been the most pervasive and simplest of explanations, although modern psychologists have attacked it. They suggest on the other hand that all living beings emit a psychic energy which can reappear in various ways, independent of space and time. Thus if someone dies in a disturbed form of mind, his agitated psychic force may appear after death in a place he feels comfortable. A third possible explanation is that "ghosts" are subjectively perceived in an extrasensory way and are essentially hallucinations emanating from "mid-level consciousness." Psychic phenomena are really part of the enormous power and faculty of the mind, the nature of which we have barely discerned.

I myself can hardly tell you what to think, let alone decide for myself. Last week I went to Kenwood to interview the owner of a house with a poltergeist, a prankster ghost. Before I left home my portable tape player recorder worked fine, but when I arrived at the other house the apparatus refused to work. After a number of futile attempts to get it going, the lady of the house said resignedly, "Well, I guess Betty doesn't want to be interviewed." I took down the story on paper, then rushed home to see if my record would work there. It did.

Do you have a ghost story to tell? At the suggestion of Ellen Steckert, director of the Institute for Minnesota Folklife, I am collecting stories of urban ghosts. If you or someone you know has such a story, I would be grateful if you would contact me about it. All information will be strictly confidential. If you can help, please call me at 377-XXXX. Many thanks!

NOTE: I have corrected a few misspellings, typos, and punctuation errors. See next post for comments about the article and the events that followed it.