My Haunted House V: Circuits and Psychics

Besides the footsteps, bangs, and opening doors, we also experienced electrical anomalies in the house.  One evening in the late 1980s, after dinner my younger daughter M decided to go fetch her homework from her room. Our border collie Minnie, who usually followed her around the house, however, balked at going up to the second floor with her, and M had an uneasy feeling as well. She went upstairs, turned on the light in her room and hastened in to grab her homework when poof! the overhead light turned off, leaving M in the dark. Frightened, M ran right out and down the stairs and breathlessly told me about the light turning off on its own.  I was so sure that the bulb had burned out that I took a new one upstairs. But when I flipped the switch, the light turned on. The switch had moved from on to off by itself. M, validated, gave me an I-told-you-so look. 

 The former upstairs kitchen after it had been restored as a guest room. 

Eventually, it became M's room.

Around the same time, flashing around the main chimney had come loose, and rainwater had begun leaking onto third floor landing, which was over the one lighting fixture in the second floor hallway. The narrow, dark hallway ran the length of the house from the foyer staircase to the bathroom and stairs to the third floor at the back end. The hanging fixture with a painted glass shade and its wall switch were at the mid-point, and you had to walk halfway down the hallway in the dark to turn it on. There was one electrical outlet and only one small nine-light window next to the stairwell door. As a precaution against shorts until the chimney leak was fixed, I disconnected the power to the hallway light.

One night, my daughter Ceridwen awoke in the wee hours. Through the open door of her bedroom she saw that a light was flickering off and on in the hallway, as if the electrical connection was faulty or the bulb was malfunctioning. She turned over and went back to sleep. Only until later that night, when she was walking down the dark hallway to the bathroom, did it occur to her that the power to the fixture had been disconnected and the bulb removed.

Not just lights turned on by themselves. In January of 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The crew's family members watching the Challenger rise into the sky and the hundreds of thousands of people watching on TV were stunned and horrified when it blew up right before their eyes. Throughout that day and the next week the TV networks played the video of the disaster over and over again.  I found the media's obsession with this horrific event upsetting and avoided watching the news.

                                           

                                                              The Challenger exploding.

Two nights after the disaster, about an hour after I had gone to bed, all of a sudden, from Ceridwen's room came the sound of a newscast blaring. I got out of bed and looked into Ceridwen's room. There, on her little portable TV, was the CNN video of the explosion! Ceridwen was sitting up in bed staring at the TV screen. Obviously, she hadn't turned it on. We speculated about how it could have come on, but couldn't determine a cause. In the end, I pulled the plug on the TV and went back to bed.  Fortunately, no other disturbances occurred that night, nor did the TV ever turn on by itself again. (Two decades later there were other electrical shenanigans in that room, but that's for another post.)

One day in 1990, Ceridwen and a few friends were hanging out in the dining room when the overhead chandelier began turning sporadically off and on. The friends knew about Frank, and indeed a couple of them had heard Frank walking around when they came to take care of the pets. Naturally, they and Ceridwen blamed Frank for the light flickering, but for practical reasons, I needed to find out if the cause was physical.

Over the next week, the dining room light turned off and on several times, and I decided to call Northern States Power to check out the connection to the electrical box. A guy came out, examined it, and declared that the connection was good.  So I called an electrician to see if he could find the problem. He came and checked the house wiring, but could find nothing wrong. In desperation, I turned to a psychic medium.

 Her name was Judith Dale, and she worked out of Sunsight Books at Lake and Lyndale. The three of us greeted her at the door as she arrived carrying a large piece of crystal. I had, and still have reservations about most self-proclaimed psychics, but Judith came highly recommended, so I developed a wait-and-see attitude. I got far more than I anticipated from the outcome of her visit.

                                                                        A quartz crystal
 

Judith began by walking through the parlors and kitchen to the back door, holding the crystal before her. She went to the electrical box, and saying nothing, reversed course and went up the front stairs. I waited expectantly to see if she'd mention Frank, but she didn't. Instead, she stopped in the front bedroom, Ceridwen's room. She said that she felt a strong negative energy in the room--not an active haunting, but something residual. Judith said that the room had been a "discipline" room for children and that their emotions still pervaded the room.

                                       Young Ceridwen in her first bedroom, the small room over the foyer.

Judith asked Ceridwen if she had any experiences of this energy. I was flabbergasted when Ceridwen told her that as a pre-school child, she had sometimes seen a boy and girl in the room when we first moved into the house. This revelation took me aback because I remembered Ceridwen talking about seeing "Girl and Boy", never realizing that they were not imaginary playmates, but full-bodied, full-color apparitions. Recently, Ceridwen told me that she vividly remembers what they both looked like, a boy around six and his slightly older sister. She not only saw them in her room, but in other parts of the house, most frequently on the third floor. 

As M and I stood out in the hallway at the door to the room watching, Judith laid her hands on Ceridwen  and uttered words to release the spiritual energy trapped there. As she concluded the ritual with a blessing, a most extraordinary thing occurred: M and I felt a blast of energy pour through the door, almost like an electrical charge. As the wave of energy rushed past us, the overhead light in the room turned on for one beat, then went off. The wave only lasted a moment, and was gone. After that, a deep sense of peace settled around us, an unforgettable sensation.

        Haley Joel Osment as the kid who "sees dead people' in the 1999 film "The Sixth Sense"

We accompanied Judith to the front door. The experience of the cleansing had been so intense, I had almost forgotten about Frank and the light. 

"What about the problem with the light?" I asked. 

"Oh, that," Judith replied. "There's a loose connection to the electrical box. Call NSP to come and fix it." 

 Thunderstruck, I told her that someone had come and found nothing amiss. 

"Call them back," she said, "and insist that they send someone out again. Don't take no for an answer."

I called NSP. They resisted my pleas to send a second person, but finally gave in when I told them that an electrician could find nothing wrong with the house wiring. I did not mention Judith.

Anyway, they did send a second technician who, as Judith predicted, found a loose connection and repaired it.

In the end, Judith's visit fixed two energy problems: the loose wire and Girl and Boy. And Frank, in this case, was acquitted.

                                        *                                           *                                          *

    Houdini in the Magic Box, c. 1924. He delighted in debunking mediums. (Photo: Library of Congress)

A word about psychic mediums: I am very skeptical of the claims of most psychics. You see them investigating on ghost-hunting programs, and they are never at a loss for "impressions"--which of course, can't be verified objectively. Worse yet, I encountered a storefront psychic in New York City whose main goal was to do a cashectomy on her clients, a common objective of commercial "psychics." Scary.

Nevertheless, in my collecting of ghost stories, I came across three Twin Cities psychic mediums who proved to be the Real Thing: Judith Dale, Echo Bodine, and Eve Olson. 

Although I have never met Echo, a half dozen people told me fascinating stories of her readings. In a blog post, I've recounted one story of her visit to an 1890's house in the Healy Block Historical District: 

'Shortly after Dan acquired the house, he invited celebrated psychic Echo Bodine in for a tour. She told him that the lower floors had residual hauntings, but nothing active. On the other hand, on the third floor “lived” a little boy ghost, an intelligent haunting. Echo told Dan that the boy had said to her, “Dan doesn’t see me, but Newton does.” This freaked out Dan because Newton was his cat’s name–and the psychic didn’t know that.'

The late Eve Olson was a Spiritualist minister from England who lived in St. Paul in the 1980s. As a minister, she did not charge for readings, although she would accept donations to the church. One evening I brought several of my neighbors to her house for a reading.  When she asked, "Is there a [man's name] here?", a man with that name dutifully identified himself. 

She told him that an older man in soiled overalls wearing a straw hat was sending him greetings. "He's smiling, holding up his right hand, showing that the index finger is missing." 

The man blanched. "That's my Uncle Jack!" he said. "He was a farmer who had lost a finger in a corn picker. He died several years ago."

We were amazed. None present besides myself had met Eve until that evening, and she knew nothing about any of them.

Go figure.

My Haunted House I : Something's Happening Here

                   "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

Steven Still's song isn't about the paranormal, but this quote quite aptly describes what many people think after they witness something that seems unexplainable.

1978 was a banner year for my family. It marked the completion of the exterior restoration of our 1885 Queen Anne house begun the previous summer and the birth of a second daughter in July. In September I interviewed several neighbors about ghostly-goings on in their homes, and then wrote them up in an article for the Wedge newspaper. (Read the article here: "Enter Ghost" "Enter Ghost" Wedge 1978.) 

These interviews led to other interviews and other articles. I talked to Eleanor Steckert, Professor of Folklore at the University of Minnesota, and read the books she suggested. The first was the 1981 classic by Jan Harald Brundvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: America's Urban Legends and their Meanings. I learned that a folklorist does not need to believe in nor try to disprove the claims in the stories they collect. The important thing is to listen, record, and document. Thus I became not a ghost hunter, but a ghost story collector.

In The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Brunvand says that the hitchhiker story is the one he's heard most often in his collecting of urban legends: 

Someone driving at night sees a girl (or guy) by the roadside in distress. They offer her a ride to her home. After they drop her off, they realize that she's left her sweater/umbrella/purse/whatever behind. They go back to the house. When her mother answers the door, she get very upset and tells them that her daughter is long dead. 

There are a number of variations on this story, but they all present the girl or guy as a solid apparition that can be touched, one that leaves physical evidence behind. In fact, I heard variations on this story from two people, one from Georgia and one from New England, stories that they had heard from other people. My daughter Ceridwen heard a Christian version of this, with the hitchhiker as Jesus.

So much for urban legends. But what about firsthand accounts of spooky encounters? These are what I was interested in. Then, in 1983, something happened at our house that intrigued and baffled me. I was in the foyer talking on the phone, and my younger daughter, whom I'll call "M," was in the back parlor, when I heard a loud, metallic "clunk" in the dining room. I immediately opened the door to the dining room and saw, to my astonishment, that the cast iron floor grate had moved from its place against the wall to the rug under the table. Our dog Tessie was standing several feet away near the kitchen doorway, staring at the grate with a "WTF?" look on her face.

How did the louvered grate move a couple of feet on its own? I asked M if she had moved the grate, and she emphatically denied it. She had been sitting on the sofa watching TV in the adjoining parlor. We moved the grate several times from the floor to the rug in an effort to determine what could have moved it. We tested how much force it took to move the nine-pound grate from the floor to the rug. There's no way Tessie could have moved the grate. The openings were big enough only to fit fingers, not large dog paws. The air from the forced-air furnace could barely lift a piece of paper, let alone move a heavy grate.

I applied Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is the best one. At that point, I had heard enough stories to recognize the elements of paranormal activity. Did a ghost move the grate? If so, who was it that wanted to get our attention? It would take a few more incidents over many months and more research to come to some sort of a conclusion.

                                                   The front parlor of our house in 1981

Months passed. Then one afternoon, my younger daughter, M, was by herself in the house, upstairs watching TV in her room over the dining room when she heard a metallic clunk from the first floor. After having witnessed the moving of the grate previously, she recognized the sound. Fearing the worst, she crept downstairs and looked into the dining room. There it was: The grate had once again moved from its place in the floor to the rug. When her father came inside shortly thereafter, he found M nearly hysterical with fear. M had heard me declare my suspicions that the movement was possibly caused by a ghost, and the grate moving again freaked her out.

Witnessing the grate moving was significant, as it was a clear physical manifestation of an unexplainable force. Hearing footsteps, seeing apparitions--these common paranormal incidents are ephemeral and hard to document. Someone wanted to get our attention--and did. The grate never moved again, but it marked the beginning of a decade of sporadic unexplained incidents in the house which I will describe in my next posts.

                                                     

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.

Through a Glass Ornament Darkly

 

 Park Avenue, Minneapolis, 1905, lined with mansions. Photo: Hennepin County Historical Society.

One of my former neighbors used to work for a graphic design firm that occupied a South Minneapolis mansion that had been converted to offices. This house was located less than a mile from the house-cum-office building haunted by the girl in the prom dress. A few people who worked on the third floor remarked that they thought the place was haunted. They told my neighbor that every once in a while they had the uncomfortable feeling that someone was watching them, even though no one else was in the room. This was during daylight hours.

Bill, an employee who frequently had to stay after hours to complete projects, complained of disruptions in the third floor work room. Several times when he was working at his desk, he'd been distracted by what looked like movement reflected in the glass and metal of the office equipment in front of him. A quick glance behind reassured him that he was indeed alone, but he was sure that he'd seen something.

 One night during the Christmas holidays Bill again saw movement behind him reflected in the chrome of a machine. Yet again, no one was there when he turned to look. A little later that evening he was standing by the office Christmas tree when he saw the blurred image of someone moving in back of him reflected in the several dozen glass ball ornaments hanging on the tree. A little unnerved and too distracted to continue working, he decided to make a quick exit. After that incident, Bill tried to complete his work during daylight hours.

This Property Protected by a Watch Ghost

 I've mentioned previously that my family and I lived in a haunted Victorian house in Minneapolis for over four decades. It's a long story, with many episodes. In the early days when we were getting the initial clues that the house was haunted, several others told their stories of spooky experiences at the house.

When we left town, we would ask someone to watch the house. During one longer trip, a friend stayed at the house.  A few days before our return, she called to let us know that someone had broken into the house, but little had been taken.

What apparently happened was this: The burglars had busted through the pine door of the summer kitchen in the back, and had gone directly upstairs to the master bedroom. They had pulled out only one drawer of the dresser, when they suddenly ran down the foyer stairs, unlocked the solid ash front door, and fled--this during broad daylight. They had grabbed the jewel box full of costume jewelry off the dresser, spilling some of its contents as they ran down the stairs. As they fled, they left the front door wide open. There was some cash and a few pieces of gold jewelry on the nightstand in the guest room that were left untouched. 

                                               The thick ash front door with brass doorknob.

What had scared the burglars off? The experience of two of our older daughter's high school friends offered a clue. We had asked the boys to care for the animals while we were away. This is how one of them described what happened:

"We went in to feed the dog. We went upstairs to feed the bird. It was really cold out. We heard the front door open. A blast of cold air came in. We thought you guys had come home early from your trip. We shouted down the staircase [that] it was us. We heard someone slowly walk up the stairs. We waited and spoke toward the sound. We crept toward the stop of the stairs. . .There was nothing there.

The door was wide open.

I am agnostic, but this was a huge event in my spiritual formation."

                                                           The front porch and door

Another couple of teenagers who came to tend to the animals heard slow, deliberate footsteps on the second floor. They fed the dog, practically throwing the food in her bowl, and beat a hasty retreat. 

I heard footsteps once when I came home one morning after walking my younger daughter to Jefferson Elementary School a block away. I came in, closed the door, and heard heavy footsteps in the upper hallway. I called out, and then went directly upstairs, but found no one. On another occasion I was in one of the bedrooms on the second floor when I heard the locked front door open and close. I looked down. The door was closed. When I searched the house for an interloper, I again found no one.

All of these incidents happened during the first years we lived in the house. They seemed to suggest that something paranormal was going on. After doing some research into previous owners, we decided that the likely ghost was that of Frank Cartwright, who had lived in the house until his death in 1942.

                                                                    Frank Cartwright
 

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

Who's That Creeping through my Window?

 In the early months of ghost story collecting, I was having lunch with friends at Tuthill's on Hennepin Avenue in the Wedge. I told a couple of the stories I'd heard recently, then said facetiously, "Of course, there's no such thing as ghosts." 

To my surprise, I heard someone at the table behind me say, "But there are!" I turned to see Larry, the local mailman, eating alone on his lunch break. I asked him how he knew. "Because of my experiences at my new house," he said somewhat defensively.

As is common with ghost story tellers, he started with some background to show that he was indeed a reliable witness: He was a Minneapolis native, a member of the choir at a Lutheran Church, and he had served the community as a letter carrier for over a decade. About a year previous, he had bought a small one-story 1950's house in an inner ring suburb. 

When he moved in, Larry decided to place his bed right up against the window in his bedroom. That night, shortly after midnight, he was awakened by the sensation of something pressing down on his chest. Terrified, he opened his eyes, but saw only a dark mist hovering over him. The pressure increased. He was immobilized, struggling to breathe. As he felt he was about to pass out, the weight suddenly lifted. Gasping for air, Larry tumbled out of bed. 

He turned on the lights. Nobody was in the room. It was summer, and the window was open, with the screen intact. He went back to bed and slept the rest of the night undisturbed. However, the next night the same thing occurred. Larry was very puzzled, but decided that the easiest fix was to move the bed, which he pushed around against the opposite wall. That night he stayed up, lying in bed, waiting to see what would happen. Then, around midnight, Larry saw a dark, filmy shape climb through the window, start across to the door, and then vanish.

As long as the shadow man didn't bother him, Larry decided he could live with him climbing through the window. And so it went for some weeks. But when Larry told the story to his cousin, the cousin scoffed. He declared he was going to push the bed up against the window and prove that Larry was imagining this nocturnal visitor. 

But instead, the cousin had the same experience as Larry: He felt a huge weight on his chest, he couldn't breathe, and he saw a dark mist on top of him. As before, the weight lifted after several moments. 

The cousin became a reluctant believer. He pushed the bed back into place against the inside wall, and Larry had been sleeping in it undisturbed ever since then. Larry had no idea who the nightly visitor was or why he was climbing into that window. But he was certain that ghosts do exist.

Sleeping with the Light On

 

                                                      Colfax Avenue in South Minneapolis

One of the first stories I collected was from two musicians that had rented the first floor of a large converted house on Colfax Avenue in Minneapolis's Wedge neighborhood. Frank had a year's lease on the apartment, and he shared it with his friend David--who stayed there for only five months. 

One night David, who worked nights, came home to find the light on in Frank's room. Frank told him that he was awakened in the middle of the night by a "presence" at the foot of his bed. This presence awakened Frank a number of times during his tenancy at the house.

From the front door to the kitchen stretched a long hallway. David said that when he walked down the hall, he sometimes experienced a "creepy, tingly feeling in the spine" when he passed by the doorway to Frank's room. After he moved out, David wondered if he was hallucinating this feeling because he knew about Frank's experiences. But when he told his wife and another friend about this sensation two years later, they both said that they also had had a creepy feeling in this hallway--although none of them mentioned it to the others.

Both roommates felt that there was a lot of unusual house noise, including a loud unexplained bang in the middle of the night. One night while Frank was in his room with the light on, David tried to lure out the ghost by playing his drum set, but nothing happened.

David asked a neighbor, Jerry Trigg, who lived down the block, about the former occupants of their apartment. Jerry told him that the owners, an elderly couple, used to live in the downstairs unit. Their bedroom had been the room that Frank was staying in, and the wife had died in that room.

Neither roommate saw anything; they only felt a ghostly presence and heard unexplained noises. When he moved out, Frank commented that "there are too many ghosts in this house."

 

The house has undergone an impressive restoration since Frank and David lived there. These incidents occurred many years ago, and it's likely that the haunting has faded or completely disappeared. Nevertheless, whenever I pass by the house, I can't help wondering if the former owner is still hanging out in the first floor apartment. I hope not.

Ghost in the Attic

The Healy Block Residential Historic District in South Minneapolis contains 14 Queen Anne houses built 1886-1892 by master builder Theron Potter Healy. The Victorian houses on the east side of Second Street, sitting on the northbound off-ramp from I-35W at E 31st Street, became well known because they were visible to passersby on the freeway. The houses on the west side had been wrecked in the 1960s during the construction of I-35W. A recently constructed sound barrier now cuts the surviving houses off from view, but they are still there. 

 

The 3100 block of Second Avenue, looking south, 1936. --Photo courtesy Minnesota Historical Society

It should come as no surprise that several people have told me ghost stories about these historic houses. One of these concerns an 1890 house on the Second Avenue block once visible from the freeway. The current owner “Dan” says that he knew the house would be his from the moment he saw it while driving by years ago.  The then-vacant house had been used a rooming house and was in a state of serious disrepair.

Dan called the number on the “for sale” sign out front. The then-owner, who lived out of state, told him that the house was not occupied, and that it would be difficult to get a key to him. Instead, the owner advised Dan to climb in through a basement window. And so he did.

Dan went from the dark, spooky basement, to the empty rooms on main floor, up the formal staircase to the second floor, then up to the third floor. As Dan was looking around the attic rooms, he heard someone moving around on the second floor. Dan froze, thinking that someone had seen him breaking and entering and had called the police. How could he explain that the owner had told him to break in?

However, when he went down to the second floor, no one was there. In fact, the house was completely still. Dan checked the first floor and basement and found no one. Not intimidated by the mysterious interloper, Dan wound up buying the house, which he still owns today.

      Queen Anne houses in the Healy Block Residential Historic District, Minneapolis
  

Shortly after Dan acquired the house, he invited celebrated psychic Echo Bodine in for a tour. She told him that the lower floors had residual hauntings, but nothing active. On the other hand, on the third floor “lived” a little boy ghost, an intelligent haunting. Echo told Dan that the boy had said to her, “Dan doesn’t see me, but Newton does.” This freaked out Dan because Newton was his cat’s name–and the psychic didn’t know that. 

The house has been restored, and the ghosts are still in residence. Dan still occasionally hears footsteps on the second and third floors, but is not disturbed by them, knowing that they are made by a friendly spirit.

                             Porch detail of another reportedly haunted house on the Healy Block

The Guardian

Sometimes you get more than you bargained for when a friend asks you to housesit for them. That's what happened to Linda, a Minneapolis woman, who had previously lived in Iowa City, Iowa. A friend there asked Linda to watch her house, a 1920's bungalow, when she went on vacation to Florida. 

The first night Linda came to stay in the house, however, she felt unwelcome. This feeling of a hostile presence increased as she approached her friend's bedroom, where she planned to sleep. Upon entering the room, Linda felt this hostility increase to a suffocating level.

Overwhelmed by anxiety, Linda retreated to the living room, where she spent an uneasy night. The sensation of someone or something in the house that bore her malice kept interrupting her sleep. Unpleasant dreams disturbed what sleep she got.

The next night she stayed at her own apartment, but hesitantly returned to her friend's house the following night. Once again, she experienced the feeling of being decidedly unwelcome there. Not even attempting to enter the bedroom, she retired to the sofa, with all the lights on in the adjoining dining room. At four in the morning she was awakened by the uneasy feeling that someone else was in the room. 

When she opened her eyes, she saw the figure of a woman standing opposite the sofa, less than ten feet away. The lights were still on; the woman seemed solid and real. She was glowering at Linda in a manner that said, "Get out and stay there." The woman appeared to be in her mid-40s, dressed austerely, in Linda's words, "like a nun." She stood perfectly still, except for one feature: her mouth twitched on one side, like she had a nervous tic.

Although the woman appeared life-like and three-dimensional, Linda knew at once that she was seeing a ghost. Cold fear flooded through her, but despite her terror, Linda felt herself losing consciousness, as if drugged. She struggled to stay awake, but her eyelids fluttered shut and she was instantly asleep.

The next morning at eight o'clock Linda awoke to broad daylight. A vivid recollection of her vision of the scowling woman immediately seized her. She decided to call her friend that evening and tell her about the difficulties she was having in the house.

When she phoned her vacationing friend later, their conversation went something like this:

Linda: We've got to talk. I'm having a hard time sleeping at your house.

Friend: Oh, you've seen her, then.

L (surprised): I think so.

F: The woman with the twitching mouth?

L: Yes! I saw her last night.

F: It's OK. She's just a ghost. She's very protective of me, so she probably resents your staying in my house. Just tell her why you're there, and everything should be fine.

That night, Linda followed her friend's advice. She thought she'd try sleeping in the bedroom. But as she started down the hallway, the feeling of antagonism directed towards her once again overwhelmed her. She stopped short of the bedroom door and addressed the unseen hostile presence. Linda explained that she was a friend of the woman who lived there and that she had been asked to watch the place.

 

The intensity of the negative presence subsided somewhat, and Linda proceeded to the bedroom. Once inside, however, Linda felt the enmity toward her intensify. As she headed back to the sofa, Linda said aloud, "All right, I won't stay in the bedroom. Please don't be upset. Just let me sleep in peace."

For the remainder of her stay, Linda felt only faint remnants of the hostility she originally had faced. And much to her relief, she never saw the unfriendly house guardian with the twitching mouth again.

*            *            *

I've heard stories of other guardian ghosts as well, most famously, the one in the historic Alexander Ramsey House in St. Paul, MN. Frank Cartwright, our resident ghost in Minneapolis, also was protective. He terrorized both intruders and dog-sitters when the family was away. (More on these in another post.)

  I wonder why Linda's friend, knowing about her guardian ghost, even bothered to ask someone to stay at the house. The presence of the twitchy-mouthed ghost was probably enough to scare stiff anyone entering the house in her absence.

The Haunted Hallway

Just for fun, on Halloween I used to tell ghost stories to my students at Normandale College, where I taught English. Inevitably, every year a student or two would share their stories with me. One of the most dramatic was from a young woman who had a very unsettling experience while waiting for her father at his office in St. Paul, Minnesota.

                                      An old photo of houses on St. Paul's Summit Avenue

The office was on the first floor of a Victorian house on historic Summit Avenue. The entire ground floor was office space; the second floor was an apartment inhabited at the time of the incident by a young couple. Emily, the student, had arrived at the office in late afternoon on a cold winter's day. Emily and her father had planned to meet there to go out to dinner together.

The last vestiges of daylight were fading as Emily let herself into the office. She sat at her father's desk in the front room and began to read. She had been reading only a few minutes when out of the corner of her eye she sensed something moving by the door to the hallway. She glanced over at the door just in time to see it swinging shut. Emily's first thought as she rose from the chair was that her father or some other tenant had entered the building and was waiting in the hallway.

Curious, Emily crossed the room, opened the door, and leaned into the hallway. To her surprise, she could hear muffled voices coming from a room down the hall. It sounded like several people were talking and laughing in the room. Yet when she opened the door to that room, it was completely still, dark--and vacant.

Emily stood by the door for a moment, puzzling over the source of the voices. But she didn't have long to ponder, for from the front end of the long hallway she heard heavy, deliberate footsteps coming toward her. Emily stared in the direction of the sound, but could see no one, just an empty hallway. The sound of the footsteps kept coming nearer--slowly, and as it seemed to her, menacingly.

Emily began to beat a hasty retreat toward the back end of the hallway. As she hotfooted it to the door at the end, she kept glancing over her shoulder. The hallway appeared to be empty, yet the footsteps continued ever closer. When she reached the rear door (which led to the basement), the terrifying episode reached a climax. The instant before she reached for the door knob, she could feel the oak floorboards underneath her feet sag slightly, as if someone's weight were pressing down on the boards right behind her.

Close to panicking, Emily pushed open the basement door, hurtled over the threshold, and slammed the door closed behind her. Fearing that the invisible visitor might pursue her, she half-tumbled down the stairs into the basement. With trembling hands she dialed her grandmother's number on the extension phone down there. She was greatly relieved to hear her grandmother's voice on the other end. Looking anxiously up the staircase, she recounted to her grandmother the series of incidents that had just occurred. Her grandmother was very reassuring and sympathetic, and Emily felt calmer simply hearing her voice. While they talked, Emily could still hear the deliberate, ominous footsteps on the wooden floor overhead, slowly crossing and recrossing the hallway and office areas. 

Emily knew that her father was due to arrive any minute, and her coat and backpack were upstairs in his office. Needless to say, under the circumstances, she was not going to venture up the stairs to retrieve them. Finally, after talking to her grandmother for about ten minutes, Emily heard the front door open upstairs and father's quick tread as he entered his office.

Emily hung up the phone and dashed up the stairs and down the hallway. Breathlessly, she poured out to her father the story of the unseen pursuer. However, unlike her grandmother, her father was not impressed. To her dismay, he just laughed and replied, "Well, the next time you run into this guy, please collect rent from him. We can't have anyone hanging around rent-free."

Like many ghost stories, this one has an epilogue. Shortly after this incident, the couple who lived upstairs in the house told Emily that during the few months they had lived there, they occasionally heard footsteps. And on one very scary night, they were awakened to find a tall shadowy figure at the foot of their bed. It vanished when they turned on the lights. 

Emily was crestfallen that her dad made light of her story, but she was heartened that her grandma and the tenants believed her. Since that day, Emily has never ventured back into that old house by herself, nor has she had the slightest inclination of trying to collect rent from the heavy-footed invisible tenant.

Does "Coke Add Life"? Inquiring Ghosts Want to Know.

 

Not all ghosts exhibit conventional ghostly behavior such as turning lights on and off, making sounds at night, or putting in translucent appearances. One such anomalous ghost inhabited the Chicago house once occupied the family of Sara, an executive secretary for a big Twin Cities corporation.

Not long after Sara and her husband moved into a 1920's bungalow with their three children, the first unexplainable event occurred. One Sunday morning the whole family left for church together, and, according to custom, they let out the cat and locked up the house. When they returned a few hours later, the house was still locked, but the cat was inside. They had thought they had left the cat outside, but perhaps they were mistaken.

The family promptly forgot about this incident, but recalled it with a jolt a couple of weeks later when it happened again: they left the house together with the cat outside. When they returned, the cat was inside. Nothing was disturbed, not even the cat, which seemed completely normal.

For a few weeks the family was left to puzzle over the cat's mysterious space transfers. Then an even more curious incident occurred. Because they don't drink much soda, they usually kept only one large bottle of Coca-Cola, from which portions could be poured into glasses. This bottle was stored capped under the kitchen sink.

                                                          A Coke print ad from 1976.

One day the parents and kids once again left the house, returning after a short while. When they entered the kitchen, lo and behold, the pop bottle stood on the table, empty. The parents accused the kids of polishing off the Coke and leaving the drained bottle, but each of the children indignantly denied doing any such thing. The more the parents pressed for a confession, the more irate the kids became. In the end, the subject was dropped, although each member of the family secretly assumed that one of them had done it as a prank.

Several weeks later an even more astounding variation of this incident took place. Again, as a group the family left the house for several hours. This time, when they came home, an empty Coke bottle sat on the coffee table in the living room--with an empty glass beside it.

                                     A 1960's ad. You can't beat the Real Thing if you're unreal. 

Recriminations flew. Someone had to be tricking the rest. But each member of the family denied it in turn. After all, one of the kids pointed out, since they had all left together at the same time, when would they have had the opportunity to drain the bottle, move it, and set out the glass? Moreover, why would they want to? Sara and her husband had to agree that the incident certainly was odd.

Unfortunately, there is no denouement to this story. Over the half dozen years they lived in this house, the strange transferences of cat and bottles happened several times each. After the first incidents, Sara and her husband started to refer to the unseen mover as their "ghost", although Sara (even though she told me this story) still hesitates to apply that label. She feels more comfortable thinking about it as an unsolved mystery. 

Sara brought up a tantalizing question: If a disembodied ghost did indeed drink the Coke, where did the liquid go? And then again, how can a ghost unlock, open, let in a cat, and relock the door?

I propose an answer to this mystery: In their 1976 ad campaign, the Coca Cola Company chose "Coke adds life" as their new advertising slogan. The ghost took this ad to heart, and consumed this presumed elixir of life. As for letting in the cat, you can puzzle that one out for yourself.

                                                        Creepy "Sprite Boy" from the 1940s.

More Balls O' Fire

 The appearance of glowing orbs or balls of fire, as in the Methodist church parsonage, are a common story among ghost hunters. A Google search will show dozens of photos and videos of orbs in allegedly haunted locations.

                 A photo of allegedly ghostly orbs from a debunker website, "American Hauntings"

I heard a story about phenomena similar to the fireballs in the parsonage from Gretchen Quie, wife of Minnesota governor Al Quie (1979-83). She said that in the upper hallway of her grandparents' Minnesota farmhouse, incandescent balls of fire would briefly appear, bounce off the walls, and then vanish. Her description of their size and the eerie glow they emanated resembled the minister's description--except the former made no noise. Mrs. Quie said that the family had no explanation for the orbs, but since they appeared infrequently and didn't disturb anyone, they were mostly a curiosity. 

Another orb-related story, a more sinister one, came from a young Twin Cities journalist. Between jobs one summer he was staying with a friend, sleeping in the attic room of a early 1900's foursquare in South Minneapolis. He slept in the sparsely furnished room only a few nights, but it was a memorable sojourn.

The first night, as he lay on the mattress on the floor in the sweltering heat, a glowing sphere about the size of a baseball suddenly appeared overhead. He watched it curiously as it circled around the room, vanishing after about a minute. The next night he saw it again, an encore performance he would have preferred to skip. The third night he awoke in the middle of the night to see a shadowy figure standing in the corner of the dimly lit room. Afraid to move or speak, the young man lay there in the darkness, watching the motionless figure. After a few moments, the form disappeared.

The journalist left his friend's house the next morning, deciding that it was time to find a place to sleep minus eerie disturbances.

As I was writing up these stories about orbs, it triggered a memory of an experience I had on a trip to Germany in the 1960s. My dad, my cousin George (who was stationed at an Army base in Germany at the time), and I were touring historical sites along the Rhine. 

One night we stayed at a B&B in an 18th-century house. Mine was a small basement room with a narrow bed set between an ancient armoire and a windowless wall.

                               An early 18th century house similar to the place where we stayed.

I climbed into bed, turned off the light via the pull chain over the bed, pulled up the duvet, and closed my eyes. I was dozing off when something prompted me to open my eyes. There, overhead, was a swarm of little glowing orbs, swirling around in a cloud over the bed. I blinked, wondering if I was seeing things. At first I thought they might be bugs, but as I watched the glowing orbs, I grew increasingly alarmed. I'd never seen anything like this weird swarm of lights. What in the world were they? 

Panicky, I sat up in bed, my hand searching in the darkness for the pull chain. It was probably only a few seconds, but it felt much longer before I found the chain and yanked on it. The "bugs" vanished. Looking around the room with the light on, I couldn't find anything that might be the source of the orbs. Fearing that they might return if I turned off the light, I slept with it on.

The next morning I said nothing to Dad and George about the orbs. In fact, I never told this story to anyone until now.

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.