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

Wait Till the Midnight Hour

                                                Old Dakota Country Courthouse, Hastings

Hastings, Minnesota, a town near the confluence of the Mississippi, Vermillion, and St. Croix Rivers, has many historic buildings, including the second oldest courthouse in the state, built 1869-71, and the Gothic Revival LeDuc House (1860). Hastings also has a downtown historic district containing dozens of  buildings. It's no surprise that at least one of these would be reportedly haunted.

                                                                The LeDuc House 

Second Street consists of a row of designated historic commercial buildings. The structure formerly occupying this land was that curious invention of Victorian boom towns, the portable frame structure. This ingenious building--which in this case housed a stable--was moved back and forth from lot to lot on log skids to avoid the spring quagmires inevitable at riverside locations.

In 1902 the Meyer (not their real name) family bought an 1886 building on Second Street to house their grocery and butcher shop. In the 1980's, Martin, of the second generation of Meyers, began researching the building because of a strange experience he had there one midnight. Previous to this experience Martin had spent thousands of hours in the building, but only during shopping hours. When his father and uncle ran the business, nobody ever worked there at night except the uncle. The pressures of running a market during the 'Twenties and 'Thirties were too great for a shopkeeper not to work outside business hours, and the uncle took up this task.

                                            The front of the former grocery and butcher shop.

The uncle used to say matter-of-factly that the building was haunted. These comments were shrugged off by the rest of the family. They considered the uncle rather eccentric, and his stories were written off as hallucinations. But the fact remained that the uncle was the only one bold enough to work in the store late at night.

Several decades after the uncle's nocturnal labors, his nephew Martin found himself in the position of needing to stay late at the store. It was the week before Christmas, and many special orders of sausage and cold cuts for holiday parties were waiting to be filled. So, one cold December night Martin decided to stay in the closed shop to finish making sausage. Except for the noises he made moving around the shop, all was still as only a winter night can be.

All went well until shortly before midnight. Martin was in the back of the shop running the sausage machine when he thought he heard a noise up front. As he walked into the front room, he heard a dull metallic clattering. He glanced around, trying to discern the source of the sound. He soon realized that it was coming from inside the chimney.

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end as he heard the unmistakable sounds of heavy chains being dragged against the bricks. The sound was loud and harsh; it swelled, it grew, it seemed to fill the entire building. For a few seconds Martin was paralyzed with fear. What in the world could be making this ghastly racket?

In a burst of speed, Martin grabbed the sausage meat and literally threw it into the cooler. The chains kept rattling, ever louder. Grabbing his coat as he ran to the back door, Martin slammed off the lights, and left the building. He hastily locked the door and sprinted to his car. When he reached the car, he looked back at the dark building. No movement was visible inside or out. An earthly silence filled the winter night.

Not until he arrived home and told his wife about his experience did Martin recall his now-deceased uncle's insistence that the building was haunted. Martin realized that his eccentric uncle was not hallucinating after all. The heavy ominous chain-rattling, reminiscent of the Ghost of Christmas Past's visit in the Dickens' tale, seemed real to Martin, real enough, in fact, for him not to try any midnight sausage runs again.

It's impossible to know who or what was doing this scary chain-rattling--someone from before the town was built, or from the stable, or from the 1886 building. The story of chains being dragged inside a chimney was reported to me by two other people I collected stories from, although these were in houses, not a commercial building.

                   Frank Finley as Jacob Marley in the 1984 version of "A Christmas Carol"

Although it might seem a cliche today, the story of ghostly chains can be found in stories from ancient times. The Roman writer Pliny the Younger 'wrote to his friend Sura that "In the dead of the night a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of fetters; at first it seemed at a distance, but approached nearer by degrees; immediately afterward a phantom appeared in the form of an old man." ' [Wikipedia, Jacob Marley]. 

*          *         *

A tip of the hat to the late Hazel Jacobsen-Theel, Hastings historian, for providing historical background and introducing me to "Martin", whose family owned the butcher shop.

Blast from the Past

Lynn, a Minneapolis real estate agent, related this story about a friend who works in a local hospital. One day when she was visiting the hospital, she saw her friend Paul sitting in the cafeteria with three co-workers, his left arm in a cast and sling. When she joined them, she inquired about his injury. He explained that he'd slipped and broken his arm. The conversation then turned to other topics.

Ten minutes later, however, after the other people had left the table, Paul brought up the subject of his broken arm. "Lynn," he said in a low voice, "I didn't slip on the floor. But what did happen is so bizarre, I can hardly believe it myself. You're an open-minded person, unlike some of my medical colleagues--and I've got to tell you how I really broke my arm."

Paul went on to say that the month before, he and his wife had bought a business from the estate of an eccentric old antiquarian. For a couple of weeks he had gone over to the shop, trying to complete inventory and sort through the former owner's papers. These papers, however, were in such a state of disarray that he decided to pack them into an old wooden box and bring them to his house, where he could go through them at his leisure. He brought the heavy box home and lugged it up to his study on the second floor.

He lived in a spacious bungalow with his wife and two teen-aged children. The kids slept on the second floor, and the parents slept in the master bedroom at the back of the ground floor in a hallway off the dining room--a layout common to Craftsman bungalows.

The night that he had carried the box home, Paul and his wife were asleep in their downstairs bedroom when they were awakened by the sound of someone stirring overhead in the study. Their first thought was that one of the kids had gotten up to go to the bathroom, but no, they heard the sound of footsteps coming down the upstairs hallway from the study. The tread was heavy and decisive, like that of a man's boots.

As the footsteps reached the top of the stairs, Paul and his wife sat up in bed, staring wide-eyed at each other, then toward the sound. Down the stairs the boots came, deliberately and (they felt) menacingly. No burglar could be stomping like that, Paul thought. The footfalls sounded angry.

To their horror, the steps kept coming toward their bedroom--through the dining room and down the short hallway. The couple sat bolt upright in bed, clutching the covers in terror. The footsteps reached the closed door. In the dim glow of a nightlight, they saw the doorknob turning. 

 

Then, wham! the door flew open, banging against the wall. A flood of frigid air burst into the room. At the same time, husband and wife both leaped out of bed, he to the left, she to the right. As Paul sprang up, however, he lost his balance and fell heavily against a chest of drawers.

At this point the teenagers came racing downstairs, for they, too, had heard the footsteps. To the family's relief, after the burst of cold air, all went quiet. Paul's wife drove him to the emergency room to treat his broken arm. Not eager to face skepticism and possible ridicule from his colleagues, he decided to make up the story about slipping on the floor.

In the morning Paul and his wife dragged the box with the old man's papers back to the shop. And thereafter they slept in peace.

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 Phantom of the Organ

 Organ music (like Bach's "D-Minor Toccata and Fugue") has been often used for spooky effect in film and on radio. One of the best known examples is the phantom playing the organ in "The Phantom of the Opera."

                  Claude Rains playing the organ in the 1943 version of "The Phantom of the Opera"

Of course, in that story, the phantom is not actually a phantom, but a live person. I've heard, however, of a real organ-playing ghost in an old Minneapolis church.

Joyce Memorial Methodist Church (cum Joyce United Methodist Church) sits on the corner of Fremont Avenue and W. 31st Street in South Minneapolis. Built in 1907, it was named after a Methodist Episcopal bishop who died in 1905. In 2020 the church, no longer used as a place of worship, was designated a local landmark. Designed by architects Harry Downs and Harold Eads, the California Mission Revival style church looks somewhat out of place in this snowy northern city.

                                                        Joyce Memorial Methodist in 1953

Back in the 1980s when the building was still being used as a church, one of my neighbors, a member of the congregation, passed on to me stories that the custodian and members of the church council had told her.

One night as the custodian was alone in the church, working in the basement, he was startled to hear  organ music burst from the sanctuary. He doubted that it could be mischievous kids because the instrument was being played with great skill and confidence.

He couldn't imagine who had gotten into the sanctuary without his knowledge, so he bounded upstairs to find out. The instant his hand touched the door to the sanctuary, the music stopped dead. The empty church was in darkness; all was still. The puzzled custodian flipped on the lights and went to check the organ console. It was closed and locked. No one could have had the time to turn it off, lock it, and leave the sanctuary in the few seconds between when he opened the door and turned on the lights. A few months later, the same thing occurred. The custodian heard similar bold, vigorous organ music pouring from the sanctuary, which was locked, dark, and deserted. 

He wasn't the only one who heard the music. Several parishioners had also reported hearing pipe organ music from the street as they were leaving the church after a meeting at night. The sanctuary was in total darkness at the time.

My neighbor and other older parishioners speculated that the phantom organist was the clergyman the church was named in honor of, Bishop Isaac Wilson Joyce. They said that Joyce was renowned as a superb organist, although music remained an avocation throughout his life. He had the hymn "No, Not One" from the 1896 Methodist hymnal translated into Chinese and Japanese in an apparent evangelical effort.
 

                                                           Isaac Wilson Joyce (1836-1905)

No one knows for sure who the ghost was who played the Joyce Church organ, but the story passed on by the church elders fits as well as any.

Click for the piano version of "No, Not One!":

Piano version, "There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus. No, not one"

Down the Hatch

 Some people are reluctant to tell their personal ghost stories, even upon request. For whatever reason, they will acknowledge that they have a story, but will refuse to tell it. Perhaps they don't want to add to their confusion or fright by trying to articulate what they experienced; perhaps they wish they hadn't experienced it and are trying to block it out of their memory.

In some cases this is probably for the best. One man complained to me about midnight disruptions to his sleep after moving into an 1890's house in my Minneapolis neighborhood. But he refused to give details, explaining that he really didn't want to think about it. Unbeknownst to him, neighbors had told me that several years previous to his moving in, a landlord had settled a rent dispute with a tenant in the house by blasting him with a shotgun, killing him instantly. Eventually, the new owner learned of the incident from the neighbors, who were initially reluctant to spook him with the story. A couple of decades later, I had my own experiences in that house after it was acquired by new owners.

                                            

The reportedly haunted historic Gibbs Farmhouse in St. Paul

Another reluctant storyteller told me his story, even though I never met him in person. One winter afternoon in early 1980s after I had posted a notice in local libraries soliciting ghost stories, my phone rang. The voice on the other end was a man's. He sounded harried and nervous. He gave his name, adding that he was an attorney who worked in downtown Minneapolis. He had seen the notice in the library during a lunchtime visit that day. As it turned out, his main concern was not, he said, telling his story, but getting some relief from the uncanny incidents occurring in the house that he and his family had moved into earlier that year.

 Their house was an old farmhouse in a far western suburb of Minneapolis. The family liked the house and everything about it--with one exception: the hatch covering to the attic kept coming open. It was a standard hatch cover which fitted over an opening just large enough for a person to climb through. During the summer months he and his wife often found the cover slightly off-kilter. They'd put it straight, only to find it askew a day or two later.

When the days grew cooler in the fall, he filled the attic with insulation in preparation for the long Minnesota winter. When the heating season started, he and his wife began to get annoyed, then upset, when they'd repeatedly find the hatch open, allowing heat to escape into the attic. It became routine for them to make sure the hatch cover was shut tight before they went to bed. Despite this precaution, in the morning, they frequently found the cover askew. They never heard a sound; they never actually saw it move. But there it was, partially open, virtually every day.

After going through this futile exercise for several weeks, the man decided to nail the cover shut. That would fix it, once and for all. He attached the cover to the molding with a series of long, sturdy nails and went to bed happily expecting never to have to deal with this cover movement again. Needless to say, he was aghast when he found the hatch in the upper hallway open, just as before.

It was then that he and his wife began to entertain the idea that the cover was being moved by something paranormal. They wondered if their house might be haunted by a ghost that didn't care a tinker's damn about big heating bills.

At this point the man's brother, who lives a great distance from Minnesota and whom he hadn't seen for ten years, phoned. His reason for calling was startling: The brother told them that he felt they had a "presence" in their attic, and that he was going to exorcise it for one year. But despite the brother's assurances, the cover to the attic refused to stay put.

Shortly thereafter, they had an unannounced visitor whose mysterious innuendoes changed their irritation to alarm. One weekend a man appeared at the front door. He appeared to be in his 30s, an unkempt and disheveled character. As they chatted on the front stoop, he told them that he had lived in the house as a child, and as he happened to be in the neighborhood, he decided to stop by. Then, with an insinuating smile, he asked if "it" was still there.

 The sly inquiry upset the attorney, who pretended not to understand. The visitor went on to say that when he lived there, a "thing" inhabiting the attic had caused his family distress. As a child, he was so impressed by this unseen thing's activities that he felt compelled to stop and ask them about it.

The attorney was shaken by the man's story, for it confirmed his suspicions that something paranormal was at work. He resolved that the "thing" had opened the hatch once too often, and that he was going to get rid of it--although he didn't know where to begin.

As if in answer to his need to banish the "thing", he had found my notice in the library. Could I help them? Reluctantly, I told him that I am a story collector, not a ghost buster. Hearing this, the man was crestfallen. He had poured out the story to a stranger who couldn't do anything but listen. He hung up.

I feel bad that I didn't try to help them. If he had called a year later, I would have been able to suggest resources to check out. When people ask me what they can do about their haunting, I tell them that the first thing to try is to talk to the ghost. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. In this case, I suspect it wouldn't because the "thing" had been around for so long and seemed malevolent.

                                                         Who you gonna call?

Firestarter: The Pyromaniac Desk

 One of the most bizarre stories I've heard (although some might deny its ghostly aspects) came from a student while I was teaching at the University of Minnesota, Duluth in the late 'Sixties. This story involving a late Victorian desk is so striking that it was picked up by the Associated Press.

                                                 A late Victorian highboy secretary desk

Adorned with turnings and carvings, the highboy desk had been acquired by the family twenty years before the incidents occurred. The family had bought a house that had originally been built as a church in Cloquet, a town about 20 miles southwest of Duluth, and the desk came with the house.

Seventeen years after the family moved in, this house was gutted by fire. Only the desk and three other pieces of furniture survived the blaze. One of the sons took the desk to his house near Duluth. A year later the son's house went up in flames, but not the desk, which sat unscathed among the ashes.

All was quiet--or should I say "cool"?--for a few years. The man then asked his brother-in-law if he would temporarily take the desk to their house. The brother-in-law agreed, and the desk was moved to the hallway of their house. Six months later, fire broke out in the hallway where the desk stood. As in the other instances, the desk suffered no marks from fire or smoke, even though the room where it stood was completely charred.

That was enough for the man's mother, who pleaded with him to get rid of the desk immediately. She was concerned that three conflagrations around the mysteriously fireproof desk had to be more than mere coincidence.

But the man found it difficult to accept any connection between the fires and the handsome old desk. So when his new house in Duluth was completed (you may recall that his other house had burned to the ground), he decided to take the desk to his new home. Less than a week after he moved in, he was awakened in the dead of night by the smell of smoke. Racing into the kitchen, he encountered a wall of flame engulfing the room only a few feet from the desk. Damage to the kitchen was extensive, but there sat the desk, untouched.

Investigators determined that the fire had been kindled from a short in the wiring. The man and his family, however, thought otherwise. The wiring was brand new, and it had been carefully inspected before they moved in. With growing alarm, they became convinced that the desk, survivor of four major house fires, in some terrible, inscrutable way, had been the incendiary.

They decided to sell the desk, but not surprisingly, no offers were forthcoming. While the idea of a desk starting fires seems preposterous, the track record of this particular piece of furniture did not encourage prospective buyers to test their luck.

At last report, the desk was being stored in a fireproof concrete structure near Duluth. This was over 50 years ago, and I sometimes wonder what eventually happened to the desk. Did it give up its incendiary tendencies? Is it still in storage or was it destroyed? We probably will never know.