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.

Answering Disservice

 It's October, and time once again to tell ghost stories. This story is among the ones I collected in the 1980s.

Sharon lived alone in an apartment in a Minneapolis suburb. She had two daughters, one of which lived in the same apartment building and another married one who lived a few miles away.

Over the initial months Sharon lived in this apartment, several inexplicable incidents occurred. A couple of times when she was running bath water, the taps were turned off when she was in the next room. On other occasions, burners on the gas range had been turned off or on while she was cooking. Since these incidents caused no damage and didn't seem to be dangerous, Sharon ignored them.

 

Then, something occurred that she couldn't ignore. One evening she left the apartment to visit her married daughter. From the parking lot, she waved to her other daughter who happened to be looking out from her apartment in the same building. While she was en route to her second daughter's house, that daughter called her mother's apartment to remind her to bring something. The phone was answered--at least it sounded like someone had picked up the receiver--but then dropped back on the hook immediately afterward. The daughter tried calling again, but got a busy signal.

Fearing that her mother might be injured or taken ill, she called her sister at the apartment building, who told her that she had seen their mother drive off about ten minutes earlier. The daughter at the apartment building tried calling, got a busy signal, and then dialed the police. The police arrived shortly thereafter and used the daughter's key to get into her mother's apartment. To everyone's surprise, the apartment appeared to be untouched and deserted. All was as it had been--except that the phone receiver in the bedroom was dangling on its cord over the side of the night stand.

The officers searched everywhere in the apartment, through the closets, under furniture, even in the clothes dryer ("in case of very small burglars'), but found nothing, no person or animal. The windows were  shut tight and there was no sign of forced entry. They all were dumbfounded to explain how the receiver could be lifted, replaced on the hook, and then dropped over the side of the table. As the search ended, one of the policemen began humming the theme from "The Twilight Zone." He had apparently concluded that no flesh-and-blood person had been in the apartment since Sharon had left earlier that evening.

After the phone incident, Sharon started to wonder if she was sharing her place with an unseen person, a person who was getting miffed at being ignored for the past several months. Sharon decided that possibly the ghost was saying, "Hello, I'm here, Now you know for sure."

 

Good Morning, Mr. Ghost

When you move into a new space, do you wonder if it might be haunted? I never did until I lived in a haunted house. When I sold my parents' house in Pittsburgh, the buyer asked me if it was haunted. He explained that as a child he was visited often at night by a ghost of a man in steelworkers' overalls. When he told his parents, they scoffed and insisted he remain in that room. I told him I doubted that my parents were hanging around, but if they were, I'd come over and tell them to move on. I didn't hear from him again.

When Donna moved into her first house in a St. Paul suburb, it was after living for decades in apartments. A modest 1950's Cape Cod house, it had two bedrooms upstairs. That her new home might be haunted never crossed her mind. She quickly settled in, enjoying the luxury of a place of her own. Nothing ruffled the domestic tranquillity for several months.

Then, late one summer night as she was, as usual, sleeping in one of the two upstairs bedrooms, the double-hung window in the room slammed shut with a crash, breaking both panes of glass in the sash. Donna, rudely awakened by the sound of shattering glass, slid out of bed and groggily turned on the overhead light. 

As she crossed the room to examine the window, the light went off. Unnerved, Donna anxiously groped her way back to the switch and turned it on again. She flipped the switch a few times; it worked perfectly, as before. She then went to check the window. It was roped and weighted, opening and closing smoothly as she pushed it up and down.

Having never experienced two such curious events in sequence before, Donna was perplexed. She would have been content to attribute them to a fluke, were it not for her dog's reaction. The mongrel terrier, who had been sleeping peacefully next to her bed before the window slammed shut, leaped up and tore out of the bedroom like a shot.  The dog high-tailed it downstairs, ears pinned back, for the rest of the night. After this incident the dog could not be coaxed upstairs for any reason. Until the day she died, the dog spent all her time on the first floor.

These incidents were odd, but not as explicitly "ghostly" as what took place one Saturday morning around 6:30. An out-of-town friend was visiting, sleeping in the guest bedroom upstairs across from Donna's room. Donna awoke at dawn and went down to the kitchen to brew coffee. She greeted her friend as she returned to her room. He was awake, but still hadn't stirred from bed.

As they prepared to start the day, Donna and her friend, in their respective rooms, heard a man's voice downstairs say genially, as if talking to household pets, "And how are you two this morning?" Donna and her house guest were astounded, for they both knew that no one was downstairs. A quick trip down the stairs revealed to them that only the dog was on that floor.

Her friend was in fact very distressed, so much so that, after acknowledging at the time that he had heard the voice, he has since refused to discuss the incident.

At Home in the Afterlife

                                  “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
                                                    ― William Faulkner

For Halloween, here's one of my favorite stories. It involves a deceased owner hanging around, haunting her former home in Duluth, Minnesota. 

                                                    A street in Duluth's East End

In the late 1990s, I stopped by to visit a friend who was restoring a spacious 1905 Craftsman house in Duluth's East End. Knowing that I was collecting ghost stories, she introduced me to Marie, who lived with her family in the house across the street.

                                                            A 1910 Craftsman House

Marie had quite a story to tell. The 5,000+ square-foot house that her family occupied was built in 1911, designed by a prominent architect who had designed a number of notable houses, churches, and civic buildings, some now on the National Register. In 1917 a well-to-do young couple bought the house and moved in. The house was so large, the family had a live-in maid to help manage it for the couple, and eventually, their two children. The wife--whom we'll call Mrs. Smith--lived there until her death in the late 1960s.

At that point, Marie and her husband Paul acquired the house. On their first night in the house, Marie and Paul heard someone walking around above their second floor bedroom. Their dog heard it, too, following the sound of footsteps around with his eyes. Paul decided to check it out, but the dog was very reluctant to accompany him. Paul had to drag the dog up to the third floor with him. But no one was there. All was quiet. 

As the weeks went on, they regularly heard footsteps on the third floor. Paul and Marie learned that Mrs. Smith had had a liquor cabinet on the third floor over the master bedroom. Was it merely coincidental that the footsteps were heard in that area? They also heard someone walking around in what had been maid's room over the kitchen. Those weren't the only unexplained noises. From the kitchen they sometimes heard the crystals tinkling on the chandelier in the foyer, as if someone had opened the front door; they occasionally heard the back door open and shut. 

Three years after Paul and Marie moved in, their son was born. Marie took leave from work to care for him. One day, Marie was doing laundry in the basement. She loaded the washer and crossed to the stairs. As she walked past it, a large door with a window insert that had been propped against the wall since they moved in fell behind her with a loud crash. She had not so much as brushed against it. Terrified, Marie dashed up the stairs and scooped up the baby. Hot-footing it to the garage, she strapped him in his car seat and drove off. Marie drove around Duluth and environs for several hours, fearing to go back into the house alone. When her husband got home from work, they found the door still lying on the basement floor, and nothing else had changed.

Six years later, their son, now with his own bedroom, took to using the bathroom in the master bedroom suite at night because it was closer than the main bath. One night as he came into the darkened bedroom, he was startled to see a luminous blue form moving around his parents' bed as they slept. He ran back to his room and hid under the covers for the rest of the night. And that was the end of his visits to the master bathroom.

 

As the months passed, the odd noises continued. Sometimes a clap-on-off table lamp in one of the first floor rooms would go off, or on, when no one clapped or turned the switch. Marie and Paul had the opportunity to buy a large Persian rug that was original to the house, and they got it and installed it. Mrs. Smith--if that's who it was--calmed down somewhat after that, but paranormal activity never stopped completely.

One evening, Paul and Marie went out to attend an event. They came into the house through the back and walked through to the living room. As they came into the room, the babysitter and her friend looked up in surprise. 

"Did you just come home?" asked the teenagers--who freaked out when they heard the answer. A half an hour earlier, they had clearly heard the back door open and close and had assumed that the parents had been in the kitchen since then.

As time went by, stories about the house began circulating around town.  Sometimes when Marie was at a party, she would overhear someone relating a story about their house. It came as no surprise, as a number of people had witnessed strange goings-on there, and the family did not attempt to keep the incidents a secret.

The strangest incident of all happened one day as Mrs. Smith's son was driving down the street with a friend. As they approached the former Smith home, the friend said, "I've heard stories that your mother is haunting the family abode." 

"Rubbish!" exclaimed the son--just as the engine cut out right in front of the house.

 

                                                            Spooky black willow
 

Stories of hauntings by former occupants are among the most common ghost stories. As someone who lived for four decades in a house haunted by an owner who had died in 1942, I can relate. As Marie found, activity can be sporadic with long, quiet intervals between incidents. For the most part, the incidents were not scary, and our family learned to accept the occasional unexplained event, just as Marie's family had. 

    Halloween decorations at my old house

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 Most Haunted House in Minnesota

 

                                               A dining area in Forepaugh's before it closed.

We're coming up on October, and it's time to resume telling ghost stories. A couple of weeks ago a story was circulating online naming Forepaugh's Restaurant in St. Paul as the "most haunted" house in Minnesota.  The story was out of date, Forepaugh's having been permanently closed in 2019 after the tragic death of their executive chef from the flu at the age of 32.

                                                  The exterior of the 1870 Forepaugh House

Nevertheless, I will not quibble with the assessment that Forepaugh's is haunted. The architectural researcher who wrote up the history of the house for the owners when it opened in 1976, told me of a weird experience he had in the upper room allegedly haunted by a maid: the smell of perfume, guttering candles. When he gave me a tour of the place, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary, but I admit parts of the place felt uncomfortable to be in.

Plenty of ghost stories have circulated about the restaurant, which was named after the first owner of the 1870 mansion. (You can google them if you like.) However, if we are to judge how haunted a house is by the number of stories told about it, one house immediately stands out: the 1883 Chauncey Griggs House at 476 Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Tenants were telling about ghostly experiences back from the time it was an art school. But one owner, Carl Weschke, publisher of books on the paranormal, put the house on the "most haunted" map.

                      The literally spooky Chauncey Griggs House (Photo: Marriot-Bonvoy Tours)

During the winter of 1969, Weschke invited three skeptics from the St. Paul Pioneer Press to spend a night in the house to investigate the rumors that the place was haunted. They didn't last the night.

The newsmen, two reporters and a cameraman, set up two cameras and a tape recorder at the top of the stairs and fourth floor hall, where a lovelorn maid had hanged herself decades before. When the men each went out into the well-lighted hall, they became inexplicably overcome with fear and quickly retreated to their room. From there, they heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. The bravest of them crept down the hallway and looked down the stairwell. Although he could see nothing, he was overcome with the sense of a strong presence. Even though they had several hours to go with their vigil, the newsmen decided they'd seen (or not seen) enough and beat a hasty retreat down the stairs with their equipment. 

                                The lower part of the infamous staircase in the Griggs House.

As with Forepaugh's, stories about the house are legion. The Chauncey Griggs House (not to be confused with the 1874 Burbank-Livingston-Griggs House further down Summit Avenue) is always included on the haunted house tours of Summit Avenue. Apparently, there were many ghostly shenanigans in the 1950s when it was a art school. Students reported hearing footsteps, doors opening and closing, lights going off and on. 

The stories I heard firsthand were at a gathering at the Weyerhaeuser Theater in St. Paul in the 1990s. People were invited to tell ghost stories to assist playwright Lance Belville, who was writing a play about a haunted old house. Architectural researcher Jim Sazevich and I warmed up the group of 25 or so gathered on the stage by telling some of our stories, and then the audience was invited to tell their tales.

Three people told accounts of incidents at the Chauncey-Griggs House. One person told of what felt like a gloved hand being pressed against her throat in the middle of the night when she lived there as a student. Another said that his uncle, who lived in a basement unit, told of many nocturnal disturbances, such as whispering and the sound of footsteps.

The firsthand account by a man who lived in the neighborhood in the 1960s was the most memorable. One day he and two friends, twelve-year-olds eager for adventure, decided to explore the Griggs House carriage house. Although it was daylight, when the boys entered the barn, they immediately felt gloom surround them. They crept along, peering into the darkness. When he reached the end of the passage, the boy turned around. To his horror, he saw a tall black figure in a cape blocking out the sunlight from the entrance. His friends were behind the figure, and they fled the way they had come in. He, however, was trapped between the apparition and the hay mow door behind him. There was a single-story drop to the ground from the hay mow. Should he try to get by the towering dark figure or jump? He jumped. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured in the fall, but after that, he and his friends stayed well clear of the Chauncey Griggs House.

I've heard other stories about the house besides the ones told at the Weyerhaeuser. One of the most chilling stories I've heard, period, comes secondhand from a former owner of the Griggs House. One night she decided to stay up reading in the library while the rest of family was upstairs in bed. It was a winter night, very still. She was puzzled when her reading was interrupted by what sounded like someone breathing softly. As she sat curled in her chair, the sound of breathing grew louder. She tried to ignore it, but it swelled until within a minute or so, it sounded like the house itself was breathing. Terrified, she threw down her book and ran up the stairs to her bedroom without stopping to turn out the lights.

A Ghost Story from Powis Castle, Wales

Whenever I visit an historic site, I try to ask the docents if they've heard any ghost stories about the place. I specifically ask for stories, not if the site is haunted. Sometimes this doesn't turn out well, as during a tour of Split Rock Lighthouse on Lake Superior's North Shore. I knew that there were well known stories of the place being haunted by a past lighthouse keeper, but wanted to find out if the people on site had any stories to tell. But when I asked the docent, he nearly blew a gasket. "No!" he huffed. "No ghosts." End of inquiry. I deduce that he had had about enough of would-be ghost hunters asking about the haunting and wanting to do investigations. I can understand his irritation.

However, when I asked the docent at Powis Castle, Wales, if she'd heard any ghost stories about the palace, her response was quite different. According to the National Trust, which owns the property, the castle and garden you see today reflects the changing ambitions and visions of the Herbert family, who occupied the castle from the 1570s. The oldest parts of the castle were built by a Welsh prince - Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn - (c1252), so it's no surprise that ghostly legends have sprung up about it. 

The most famous is the story of an old woman who stayed in one of the bedrooms in 1780. There are several variations, but the basic story is that she claimed a man in a gold-laced suit entered her room and led her through the castle to find a hidden chest and key. Hidden treasures and ghosts, what could be more exciting in a legend? 

                        The  rather spooky state bedroom at Powis Castle, not available on AirBnB

But I wanted to know if the people who worked there had any stories to tell. Yes, she said. The ballroom, which is located in the 1741 addition, was apparently haunted.  Several castle employees, including herself, had clearly heard footsteps sounding in the ballroom after hours. When the castle is open to visitors, many people walk through the rooms on tours. But when it's closed, especially after dark, she said it was unsettling to hear the footsteps sounding in the huge, empty ballroom. Also, people have reported that they heard the piano being played in the ballroom, and once, the piano had been moved several feet during the night when no one was in that building.

                                                     The ballroom. Photo: National Trust

These recent stories are not nearly as detailed or exciting as the old legends, but they reveal that ghostlore is still alive and well in the 21st century.