Haunted Houses

by Nancy Roberts

  “One November afternoon I wanted to complete a project at work, and, without noticing it, I worked on well after everyone else had left. When I realized that it was time to leave, it was dark outside, but I’ve never been afraid here.”

  Outside, the lanterns on the tall posts along the street cast their warm, yellow light on the buildings and gave the restoration life. One could imagine women in these houses engaged in meal preparation, and the lawyers had doubtless just left their offices and were somewhere sipping a glass of sherry before supper. Just as autumn is a time between summer and winter to pause and reflect, so, too, dusk is a time of day to pause and ruminate by the hearthside upon the day’s events.

  Inside the Historic Properties office, Terry put the papers she had been working on to rest. Arising from her desk somewhat stiffly, for she had been sitting there for a long time, she slipped into her dark blue coat and was ready to leave. Standing on the porch outside, she could smell the woodsmoke from someone’s fireplace, and then her sensible, low-heeled navy pumps were crunching along on fallen leaves, noisy as tissue wrappings. The sound was a satisfying one, nature shedding its garment from the previous season.

  Terry approached the lamppost in front of the tiny, gambrel-roofed house in which President Andrew Johnson was born in 1808. This early-nineteenth-century environment had become so real to her that sometimes modern street-lights could be jarring. She had left late like this before, but tonight, at the edges of her mind, she was aware that something was different.

  What could it be?

  Then Terry became aware of a light. Had a lamp been left on that should have been turned off in one of the buildings, or was there a glow through the crack of a door that should not have been left ajar? Were a car’s parking lights reflecting in a window?

  She felt uneasy. Was someone else here on the square tonight, and was that person carrying a flashlight or a lantern? This thought caused her to stop, for if that were the case, she would stand back beside the office building in the darkness until the person passed. Whoever it was would likely walk along from the direction of Mordecai House, past the stone marker in front of the Andrew Johnson Birthplace, and head toward the street.

  She heard the furtive rustle of leaves and shrank back against the building. The sound grew closer, and she could feel the thump of her heart. Then there was a sudden flurry in the leaves just a few feet from her, and she almost ran. Instead, she stayed perfectly still. More rustling. Perhaps whoever it was had seen her and knew that in a moment she would be flushed out like a frightened bird from its hiding place.

  Suddenly, something white darted from the blackness past her. She almost fainted until she saw with relief that it was only a large cat, probably chasing its prey. She stepped back on the path, and it was then, for the first time, that she looked squarely at the single downstairs window in the tiny house that was the birthplace of the seventeenth president. In that window was the source of her uneasiness.

  Suspended there, as if held in the center of the small window by an invisible human hand, was a candle, its bright flame silhouetted against the blackness of the room within. It seemed to hang there interminably. Terry stood staring at it. There was no reason for anyone to be inside that house with a candle. Then, with the flame appearing ready to go out at any moment, the candle began to move away from the window, and within seconds it was gone. But not for long—a moment later it reappeared, this time in the second-story window.

  Terry was genuinely frightened. Someone or something was in that house. She turned and ran toward the safety of the street. When she had reached it, she looked back, just in time to see the candle, until then burning steadily in the tiny upstairs window, go out as suddenly as if extinguished by a hand.

  Was it a ghost? If so, Terry had seen enough.

  That is the only time anything has happened to me that was eerie or out of the ordinary. I was later told that realtors had seen the same thing.

  “By the way,” continued Terry, “Rosa Burt has an unusual story, if she will tell it. Rosa is the housekeeper at the Mordecai House.”

  Mordecai House dominates the square. It was built in 1785 by a planter named Joel Lane, but it acquired its name and fame from one of the first Jews to settle in Raleigh. A gentleman of education and means, Moses Mordecai married the Lanes’ daughter, Ellen.

  Mordecai and his bride retained William Nichols, a noted Southern architect, to remodel the house. Behind a Greek Revival double portico is a double-doored entrance hall and five large rooms. It was the earliest example of this type of architecture to be built in Raleigh.

  Most historic homes are furnished with pieces donated or purchased that are compatible with the period of the house, but the furnishings here were actually the belongings of its early families. They lived daily with these portraits, pictures, books, and furniture. Perhaps their attachment to some of these things may be the key to Rosa Burt’s unusual experience.

  Rosa is not a superstitious person, but she will never understand an experience that she had one morning at Mordecai House. There is a long hallway down the center of the house, and at the end of it is the library. On the right of the hall is the parlor; on the left, the dining room. She remembers exactly what happened.

  “I was there one afternoon, cleaning when the house was closed to visitors, and I was just finishing up in the dining room. There I stood in the doorway, wiping down the woodwork, when I saw what I supposed to be one of the docents [guides] walking up the hall toward me from the library. The lady wore a long, black pleated skirt and a white middy-type blouse with a black tie.

  “I stood and watched, puzzled, because they don’t usually come on days when I am cleaning. She didn’t even look over at me as she came down the hall. I remember thinking that she might at least nod her head or act like I existed, but she didn’t. She came walking along just like she owned the place, head in the air and looking straight ahead. Then, when she was right opposite me, she turned and went through the parlor doorway across the hall.

  “While I was out in the hall working, I think I was expecting her to make some noise or come out. But all was quiet, and she did not reappear. Finally, I decided to see what was going on. I walked over to the parlor door and looked in. When I did, there wasn’t a soul in there. That room was empty as it could be. This gave me a real start, for I knew I had seen her go in, and, if she had come out, she would have had to pass by me. There wasn’t any other way out.

  “You can imagine how this stayed on my mind. I knew all of the women who were guides, and she certainly was not one of them. But even though she wasn’t one of the guides, I knew her face was familiar.

  “Finally, I thought, why, she looks just like Margaret Lane. She was a pretty thing, and I’d seen her picture many a time when I was cleaning.” Margaret Lane was an early resident of the house.

  “Sometimes, even now, I find myself going over and over it in my mind, thinking, how did it happen?”

  Rosa looked down the hall in the direction of the library. “All I know is that she went into that room and never came out of it. Mmm. If I saw that sort of thing often, my nerves wouldn’t take it!”

  Rosa still wonders: Will she ever again see the apparition of the woman who lived here more than two centuries ago?

  The Mordecai House and the Andrew Johnson Home are at 1 Mimosa Street, in the heart of downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Tours are held on the hour from 10 am to 3 pm. Visit www.raleighnc.gov/parks/content/ParksRec/Articles/Parks/Mordecai.html or call (919) 996-4364 for details.

  BEWARE THE LIGHTS OF LOUDOUN

  LOUDOUN HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

  Loudoun House, built on a hill over the bodies of Revolutionary War soldiers, has its own strange story.

  It was in the early 1940s, just after Miss Maria Dickinson Logan died, and yet I remember it as clearly as though it was only a few months ago. My wife, Elizabeth, and I occupied a room in the house while I was looking after the place. I don’t think either of
us will ever forget the nights we spent there, when I was a temporary caretaker.

  If you are familiar with Loudoun, you know that it is the house with four white columns across the front and that it stands at the top of Neglee’s Hill, where Germantown Avenue passes Apsley Street. Miss Logan willed the house to the City of Philadelphia to be maintained as a museum.

  One night, about the middle of December, my wife was awakened by a feeling of intense cold and the sense of a strong breeze blowing full on her face. She sat up in bed and saw to her great amazement a tall column of cloudy white light extending from the foot of the bed straight up to the ceiling. Staring at it, spellbound, she noticed that the light fell across the bed so that she could see the pattern of the spread; it also illuminated the dressing table and mirror. She was extremely frightened, pulled the covers up over her head, and lay there petrified. Eventually, she gathered enough courage to look out; when she did the room was completely dark.

  When I woke up, Elizabeth described the column of light to me. I could hardly believe this, and she was worried that I might think it was either a dream or something that had occurred in a half-wakeful state. But she seemed so certain that I told her to awaken me immediately if she saw the luminous column again.

  A few weeks later I woke up early in the morning to find her calling to me.

  “Hurry! I want you to see it.”

  “See what?” I was still half asleep.

  “That thing is here again.”

  I rose up in bed and looked in every direction, but the room was extremely dark, and I saw no sign of light. We then turned on the lamp, and my wife said that while I was asleep, just before she woke me up, there had been a bright, globular light at the foot of the bed. At first it was the size of a child’s rubber ball, and then it began to increase in size until it must have been three feet in diameter and was taller than the bed. Again, there was a filmy appearance, and the inside glowed as if there were a light in it.

  She had tried to awaken me but could only elicit a groan, as I seemed to be in a deep slumber. All the while the light was directly at my feet and partly over the edge of the bed. Afraid that it might grow into something dangerous, Elizabeth shook me vigorously. The light kept on shining and growing larger, but when I finally did wake up and answer her, she said that it collapsed at once and sank down into strange-looking folds, similar to those of an accordion. This time I took her story much more seriously, and, after I turned out the lamp, we watched together until daybreak. The light did not reappear.

  I was walking back to Loudoun one day when a neighborhood boy stopped me for a few minutes to talk. It seems he delivered newspapers early in the morning, and on several occasions in the winter, while it was still dark, he had seen lights flashing on the darkened front windows of the house. I think he really wanted to know whether I had seen anything. I didn’t let on that my wife had.

  Elizabeth and I both came to share the feeling that there was a presence in the house. Whether it was that of Miss Maria Logan or her brother, who lived here with her for many years, or even some earlier owner, we had no way of knowing. My wife thought it was Miss Logan, and sometimes, when she would find a book or magazine out of place, she would say, “I wonder if this is something Miss Logan was reading.” When she would say that, it always gave me an eerie feeling.

  A month or so must have passed, and we had begun to think that whatever had happened was an isolated event and would occur no more. Then, late in the summer, I woke up to my Elizabeth’s hand gently pressing my shoulder and her whisper, “It’s here.”

  “What is it?” I asked. I rose to a sitting position, and there, at the end of the bed before me, was an awesome cloud of glowing light about four feet in diameter, suspended in the air. It was only a few feet away. As I watched it began to float upward like a gas-filled balloon, and I thought that it would hit the ceiling. It seemed to go straight up, but when it reached the ceiling, rather than stopping, it went right through it. I know I cried out, but it was an exclamation of wonder rather than of fear.

  I checked the room to see if light was coming in from any source, and there was none. Passing the door, I tried the night latch and found it secure. I said to Elizabeth, “Tell me from the beginning what you saw.”

  “I first woke up when I felt the bed vibrate due to a shock, which may have been under it, or it may have come from someone striking the surface of the bed,” she said. “There at the foot sat an elderly woman in a white dress, looking very calm. Her clenched fist rested on the footboard, and I had the feeling that she had just hit the bed. She sat there bathed in light, a light so bright that it illuminated the room. I tried to wake you, and when you first spoke, the figure began to dissolve into the luminous cloud. First the head went, then the body, and a moment later the cloud drifted up to the ceiling and disappeared.” The last part of her story was exactly what I had seen myself.

  On the next occasion the figure of the woman stood by my side as I slept. My wife roused me, and as I woke up, it vanished with a flash of light as bright as the flare of a match.

  After my wife and I left Loudoun, for our services were no longer needed, we came back a few years later and stopped to talk with the caretaker. He had seen lights on several occasions but never anything as distinct or as close to him as Elizabeth and I had experienced.

  Mrs. John W. Farr, who was head of the Friends of Loudoun, relates, “Some of the neighbors say that Miss Logan is guarding the property. Children tell of seeing someone sitting on the sun porch, most often a little old lady. And, I must say, a number of things have happened for which there are no explanations.”

  On one occasion Mrs. Farr’s committee members arranged some heirloom plates in a china closet in Loudoun House. Returning several days later to continue their work, they found that there were no plates in the china closet. The plates eventually turned up on such a high shelf that it took a ladder to reach them. Both the china closet in which the plates had been arranged and the house itself had been securely locked.

  When she was ready to leave the house one day, Mrs. Farr discovered that the large pocketbook she had left in the drawing room was missing. A search through the house proved fruitless. Two days later, though, there was the bag, in plain view in another room. Nothing was missing from it.

  The late Dick Nicolai, author and former promotion director of Fairmount Park, heard a story that could account for the missing bag. A playful ghost called Willie, a member of the Armat family who died quite young, is said to return and move small objects about.

  The live-in caretaker had never had a problem with break-ins, and neither did the caretaker before him, who was on the premises for twenty-seven years. That record is unusual. But it is possible that fewer people try to break into houses said to be haunted.

  Might more than one spirit live on Neglee’s Hill? During the Battle of Germantown in November 1777 wounded American soldiers were carried to the top of the hill on which Loudoun now stands. Many were dead or dying. Some were removed in wagons to Philadelphia, but some—not even dead, just comatose—were buried there while they were yet alive. Is it possible that, when winter winds make dried leaves rustle, the restless spirits of those unfortunate young men rise and walk again?

  Loudoun was built by Thomas Armat in 1801. He named it after the county in Virginia from which he had come. The house is reminiscent of those of Virginia, and he must have had many pleasant memories of his early years in the South. Armat, a distinguished philanthropist and a man of strong faith and inventive mind, was one of the founders of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. The house museum, containing much of the home’s original furniture, is open to visitors on Sunday afternoons. It is located at the northwest corner of Germantown Avenue and Apsley Street, in the historic Germantown section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The mansion underwent restoration following a fire caused by lightning in 1993. Further information may be obtained by contacting Philadelphia Parks and Recreation at (215) 683-3600.

  T
HE HERMITAGE

  NEAR MYRTLE BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA

  The Hermitage at Murrell’s Inlet, near Myrtle Beach, is haunted by one of the state’s most famous ghosts.

  There are few people alive or dead who are more famous in South Carolina than lovely young Alice Flagg. She once lived at a house called The Hermitage in Murrell’s Inlet. The number of visitors to her grave is amazing, since it was more than a century ago that the sixteen-year-old Alice went to school in Charleston, studied, danced, fell passionately in love, and died a tragic death.

  Generations of young people have visited Alice’s grave under the moss-draped oaks at All Saints Waccamaw Church. To this day, people say that the ghost of Alice still appears at the cemetery and roams the marshes of Murrell’s Inlet.

  Dr. Allard Belin Flagg built the house in 1848, choosing a point of land surrounded on three sides by tidal marshes. He placed it within a grove of live oaks that at that time were at least one hundred years old. They are still in the spot where The Hermitage once stood. A new development is being built here currently. Although it was never a Gone With the Wind–style antebellum home, the first impression of The Hermitage was of a house with character and serenity on a green lawn and surrounded by huge oaks. Across the front porch were immense white columns, each carved from a single tree.

  Reilly Burns, a serious young engineer who visited the house from out of state, related his own experience.

  Often after my arrival in Myrtle Beach, the story of Alice would come up, and each time I would make a skeptical or sarcastic comment. Finally, I decided to investigate for myself and see if there really was an apparition of a girl named Alice.

  When I arrived at The Hermitage, the Willcoxes welcomed me as cordially as if I had been an invited guest rather than someone who had arrived unannounced. Clarke Willcox and his wife, Lillian, were warmly hospitable and seemed to enjoy showing me around the house. The flooring of beautiful twenty-foot lengths of heart pine and dowel trim, expertly done by slaves, decorates the front parlor. Upstairs over the front porch is an unusual round-hinged window with curved spokes and a central eye.