Chasing Ghosts, page 14
The house she’d spent more than $5 million building (that’s roughly $75 million today) was emptied and auctioned off. After all her efforts and investments, the home was valued at a bargain basement price of $5,000. Auctioneers didn’t think such a meandering architectural behemoth would be desirable.
The Winchester Mystery House lives on as a popular tourist destination.
Fortunately the purchaser didn’t share their myopia. The new owner, Thomas Barnett, had the good sense to lease his new home to John Brown, who had the even better sense to open the house to the public. After all these years of whispers and gossip, people could finally see inside this weird and wonderful place.
On June 30, 1923, just over a year since Sarah’s passing, the newly named Winchester Mystery House was open for business. Curious neighbors coughed up a quarter to roam the lonely corridors, climb the strange steps, and watch for doors with sudden drops. For a couple extra coins, they could do it all with a hot dog and an ice cream cone in hand.
“Brown was looking to run it like an amusement park,” said Natalie Alvanez, director of marketing and sales at the Winchester Mystery House. “He wanted a Ferris wheel and a carousel and all this other stuff on the land. Then he realized quickly that the house was the star.”
Regardless of the ghosts it might or might not have been truly designed for, people claim to see them today. In fact, the mansion has earned a reputation as possibly the most haunted in America. Ghost-hunting shows galore have explored its cavernous innards, as have numerous psychics and swarms of paranormal fans. The mediums agree that any spiritual energy they’ve sensed has been positive. Were the ghosts pleased with the house Sarah built them? And willing to forgive that whole getting-shot-by-a-Winchester-rifle thing? Or were some of the spirits Sarah’s former maids, gardeners, and other domestic helpers who were treated well and happy to stick around?
Whoever the ghosts are, people have detected their presence in different ways and places. Footsteps have been heard on the main staircase when no one is there. Cabinets have opened on their own. Loud bangs have sounded with no cause. Various apparitions have been spotted, including many of a man pushing a wheelbarrow in the basement as he works on the furnace or in the grand ballroom as he tends the fireplace. A recent employee filmed a video of her last goodbyes to the house. As she left Sarah’s séance room, she heard the door creak and a faint voice say, “We’re all here.”
Who they are, why they remain in the house, or if they’re even there remains a mystery. But regardless of the answers, the questions and widespread curiosity sparked by the never-ending construction have given Sarah the immortality her medium allegedly promised. Just in a different form.
The Winchester Mystery House has its history, its lore, and clearly a peculiar appearance inside and out. But what is it about other places that give them the appearance and feeling of being haunted? If you were to picture a typical haunted house, it would likely be a large, slightly decaying Victorian home outlined against a gray October sky. The air would be cool and crisp, and dying leaves would pepper the lawn beneath naked tree branches. As you walk inside, you would sense the echoes of generations of stories, cracked and stained like the home itself. Stories about the terrible things that happened to the people who once lived there. We can’t help thinking this way. Movies, books, and TV shows have trained us to conjure this specific image—and to read all manner of spooky things into it. It’s how we process and control something we know very little about.
But hauntings happen in perfectly normal places, too—and even in broad daylight.
The Ghosts of the Battle of Gettysburg
Just before the Winchester repeating rifle began its reign as the “gun that won the West,” Union and Confederate soldiers waded through a bloodbath across the North and South for four years during the Civil War. All told, 750,000 people died, with an average of over 500 deaths a day. Death collected its highest three-day body count during the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1 to 3, 1863, with roughly 50,000 soldiers losing their lives. If ghosts hang around because they’re unhappy or not ready to go, then it’s no wonder the small southern Pennsylvania town seems to be overpopulated with them. The battlefield was littered with bloodied bodies left without proper burials.
Whatever you believe about ghosts, visiting a place where so much trauma occurred leaves an impression. As I stood where the soldiers once did on a recent trip to Gettysburg, it was hard not to let the image of thousands of mercilessly slaughtered men enter my mind. Some visitors have reported seeing apparitions and hearing phantom groans of wounded soldiers. As such, Gettysburg has no shortage of ghost tours—and most of them got their start at one of the most haunted locations in town: the Farnsworth House Inn.
Farnsworth House Inn is the center of many Civil War–era ghost stories in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Riddled with bullet holes still visible in its brick wall beneath the garret, the bed-and-breakfast is located near Cemetery Hill and the historic battlefield. When new owners purchased the inn in the early 1970s, their eldest daughter, Patty, discovered she had a sensitivity to ghosts and began hearing their stories in her dreams. She invited the paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren to inspect the inn and give her a crash course in the supernatural. Warren detected a malicious presence in the basement and painted a cross on the door to keep it contained. Perhaps Patty saw this cursed space as a blessing. She opened a séance room in the cellar, dressed as a Confederate widow, and started sharing the stories she’d gathered. And thus, a Gettysburg ghost tour industry was born.
“There are a lot of reasons for this place to be haunted,” says Niki Saunders, a paranormal investigator and employee at the Farnsworth. “I mean, there was literally blood rolling down the street. A lot of bodies and piles—a lot of death here.”
Of the tens of thousands who died in the battle, one of those bodies belonged to the lone civilian casualty. Jennie Wade was minding her business, kneading dough in her kitchen, when a Confederate sharpshooter perched in the Farnsworth’s attic fired a shot that pierced two doors and zipped through the twenty-year-old’s kitchen, striking her dead. Wade is known to haunt her own house—in fact, visitors can still see a floorboard with her blood on it—but she has also appeared before guests at the Farnsworth. Perhaps she’s been looking for the man whose rifle took her life; the soldiers who holed up at the inn are allegedly still there. The sight of blood and its coppery scent have been experienced by guests, as have the sounds of gunshots, bodies dragging across the floor, and soldiers stomping back and forth through the hallways. Their ghosts have even been known to tie people’s shoelaces together to make them fall. It sounds immature for a soldier, but those soldiers weren’t much older than boys. Or maybe they learned from the ghost of a little boy who died at the inn.
Jeremy, age six or seven, found out the hard way that playing chicken in the street with a horse and carriage is a bad idea. After a devastating accident, he was picked up by an adult on the scene and brought to the Farnsworth’s main bedroom, where a staff nurse, Mary, cared for him. Someone fetched his father, who raced over and held his son in his arms as he passed away. There at the inn, as the tale goes, he stayed forever.
“Jeremy is one of our most beloved ghosts,” says Vivian Vega, the housekeeping supervisor and ghost tour guide at the Farnsworth. “Everybody likes to bring him toys.”
He’s been known to move objects, knock on doors, throw things in the room to get people’s attention, and, yes, play with the toys people bring him. Vega has had her own interaction with the ghost by giving him a ball and some blocks.
“‘Okay, Jeremy, if you’re here go ahead and jump those blocks,’” she has told him. “And three times that ball jumped over blocks. So I know that he’s here and loves to play. People seem to enjoy communicating with him.”
Nurse Mary, who attended to Jeremy, might’ve stuck around too. Guests with headaches have felt a soothing, massagelike feeling on their temples. Another guest felt a similar sensation on his foot shortly after having surgery on his leg.
At least fourteen known entities are believed to haunt the Farnsworth, and so the site has attracted eager ghost hunters who expect some form of experience. For the most part, the ghosts at the inn are known to be a little nosy and prankish, but they’re not malevolent. Not unless you give them a reason to be.
Vega recalled two particularly disrespectful guests, a man and his wife, who ran a blog about paranormal activity. During a late-night tour the man had antagonized the ghost of a former owner of the inn, Mr. Sweeney, in hopes that he’d make an appearance. The tour guide grew so disgusted with the guest’s behavior that she ended the excursion and suggested he and his wife both return to their room.
“The next morning I’m waiting for him to come for breakfast. I was going to give him an earful,” Vega said. “He comes in through the front door, from outside, not down from his room. I said, ‘You were up early?’ He said, ‘No, we didn’t stay here last night.’ I said, ‘And why not?’ ‘Well, we went on the tour, and I was being a dick to Mr. Sweeney. When I came back to my room I tripped over the doorway and fell on the floor and my face hit the floor on top of a rug. For ten minutes I couldn’t get up, like my head was being pushed into the floor. My wife started to scream. As I looked up, my wife was being yanked by her legs like someone was pulling her. It scared the crap out of us and we went to stay with a friend an hour away.”
Ghosts don’t like rude people. Tour guides don’t either, particularly when guests complain about a lack of sightings.
“I always tell people when I’m doing my tours here, we don’t have a contract with the entities,” says Saunders. “It’s not like a TV show. If they choose to do something, we feel like we’re getting a gift.”
The appeal of seeing, hearing, or sensing the paranormal continues to support a robust industry of ghost tourism. Though results aren’t guaranteed, sometimes a place’s morbid history is enough to entice lovers of the paranormal.
“People say it doesn’t happen, but yeah, it does. They’re here. I can tell you that. Clanking in the kitchen when no one’s in the kitchen, apparitions appearing and walking through walls. Images of shoes and boots appearing on the main entrance stairway. Yeah, it happens.”
—Vivian Vega, housekeeping supervisor and tour guide at the Farnsworth House Inn, in July 2020
LaLaurie Mansion
For those with a dark curiosity, the LaLaurie Mansion in New Orleans’s French Quarter does not disappoint. Louisiana aristocrat Madame Marie Delphine LaLaurie purchased the three-story Creole home at 1140 Royal Street in 1831 and outfitted it with elegant furniture, fine art, plenty of gold and silver, and a veneer of evil. It was said her manners were “sweet, gracious and captivating” as she played host to frequent parties, where lavish meals and flowing champagne made the house the social headquarters for the upper crust. But when the guests went on their merry way, the beautiful host turned into an ugly human who took pleasure in whipping and flogging slaves in her attic. There, she kept them chained to walls, wearing iron collars with spiked linings, and left them to starve. As an 1883 article described, LaLaurie would “amuse herself by cutting off their ears, tearing out their nails, and cutting out their tongues.” I’ve spared you some of the other horrors.
Murmurs of Madame LaLaurie’s sadistic ways spread. After all, how could people not hear or see the depravity through the ostentation? Sadly, guests and neighbors were afraid to interfere. The horrific stories were revealed only after a fire sent the house up in flames in 1834 and volunteer firefighters found seven of her tortured slaves dead and chained to the wall. LaLaurie fled the scene and escaped to France, where she lived out the rest of her days.
The home briefly became a school for girls later in the nineteenth century. Students complained of scratched arms and bruises. After the structure was reinvented as tenement apartments, horror struck again with the murder of a tenant in 1894.
Now known simply as “The Haunted House,” the mansion is believed to be plagued by the restless spirits of the house. Moans and screams from the attic, along with a discomfiting presence, have been reported for more than two hundred years.
In 2007 these paranormal reports became selling points for the actor Nicolas Cage, who purchased the home for $3.4 million. “You know, other people have beachfront property; I have ghost front property,” he said in a 2009 interview. He grew up a fan of Disney’s Haunted Mansion and bought the New Orleans version to live out his childhood fantasy. Cage didn’t experience any ghost encounters, but he did go bankrupt shortly after his purchase. Of course, that may have been due more to splurging on two European castles and a private island than to malevolent spirits.
Today the house is a fixture on New Orleans ghost tours and has gained renewed interest since becoming the subject of American Horror Story season three.
Eastern State Penitentiary
If hauntings seem to happen in places where bad things have happened, it’s no surprise that prisons have their fair share of paranormal activity. It’s also not a shock that America’s oldest penitentiary, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, is considered the most haunted of them all. Standing outside its imposing thirty-foot stone walls and medieval-style turrets—complete with battlements designed purely for show—it’s not hard to see why. Covering eleven acres and consuming a full city block, it’s a step into a dark and evil past.
Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was known for innovating solitary confinement in the nineteenth century—and torturous punishments that gave the prison its dark reputation.
The prison began with the best of intentions. Before its grand opening in 1829, criminals were subjected to pillories, whippings, and other methods of reform that should’ve fallen under the “cruel and unusual” category of punishment. It’s why Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and Bishop William White founded the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons in 1787.
Eastern State Penitentiary was going to revolutionize the prison system. The big idea? Place all the prisoners in solitary confinement. Each would get their own tiny claustrophobic cell, allowing them all the time in the world to reflect on their wretched deeds and be penitent. Hence the name penitentiary. A single skylight in each cell served as God’s peepholes to his penitents. Guards got a good view, too, through Eastern State’s innovative radial design. It allowed the spoke-like corridors to be easily visible at all times from a central rotunda.
The first prisoner in this system was a farmer who dared to steal a watch from the local magistrate. He, and each of the prisoners that followed, entered the penitentiary with a hood placed over his head to prevent him from gaining any sense of his surroundings. There was no talking to other prisoners and no visitations. Inmates stayed in their cells twenty-three hours a day. Despite the Philadelphia Society’s efforts to alleviate misery, plenty of it remained.
Placing hoods over the heads of prisoners was just one of several extreme disciplinary tactics at Eastern State Penitentiary.
Beyond the hoods and isolation, there were disciplinary tools like the “iron gag” that made things even worse. One prisoner died in 1833 from the iron gag pressing on his jugular vein. The device, as described in 1835 by a Pennsylvania legislator, was “a rough iron instrument resembling the stiff bit of a blind bridle, having an iron palet in the centre, about an inch square, and chains at each end to pass round the neck and fasten behind.”
The “mad chair” was another form of torture. It looked like something you’d sit in at the barber shop or dentist’s office, but instead of merely getting a bad haircut or a root canal, inmates were strapped in tightly for days until their circulation was cut off. Sometimes it led to the amputation of limbs; other times, to insanity.
When Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842, he made two stops: Niagara Falls and this place. He got a glimpse at nature’s sheer beauty and man’s utter ugliness all in one trip. Though the establishment of the prison aimed to fix the system, Dickens was not impressed, stating “those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing.” Regarding the individual prisoners he stated, “He is a man buried alive, to be dug out in the slow round of years, and in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair . . .”
Disease was its own form of added torture. In 1886, of the 1,713 convicts at Eastern State, hundreds suffered from bronchitis, syphilis, tuberculosis, or gonorrhea. Thirty-nine were writhing from “masturbation to injury.” No further details were offered on the latter, aside from part of the “injury” being mental. The other ailments may have started from activities outside prison, but in time led to thirty-four deaths that year.
Suicides were not uncommon. In 1940, a prisoner hanged himself in his cell after he and nine other long-term convicts were caught digging a thirty-eight-foot tunnel when they were just two feet shy of its completion. An escape from life seemed preferable to further punishment.
In addition to aforementioned causes of death, murders, life sentences, and death row pushed the count to thousands of inmates within the twelve-foot-thick perimeter walls before the penitentiary’s closing in 1971. If tales of ghostly figures and disembodied phantom heads seen by inmates and guards are to be believed, many prisoners were never freed from Eastern State Penitentiary, even in death. Then again, some of those sightings may have been influenced by the levels of insanity that were prevalent. But since the prison’s reopening as a historical site in the early nineties, tourists have had similar experiences.
