Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf (3 page)

The first piece they found was a skirt made of pink, green, and white plaid. It had a velvet strip across the waistband with two metallic snaps. “It had occasional holes and stains littering the fabric in spots,” Francis said. Next they found the top portion, a sleeveless blouse with delicate embroidery around the neckline and one button in the back to clasp it closed. The next two pieces they found were so worn, they were nothing more than rags.

“One piece was a large square of material with red and white stripes. In the white stripes was some type of floral screen print, and more of the dark blotches and stains were visible,” Francis said. “The last piece was a long strip of heavy white material that had some sort of tie on one end. This piece had the largest stains of all the pieces, but their regularity on the piece seemed to suggest that the stains occurred after the item was folded into a smaller square.”

Francis sent photos of the dress pieces to Linda White, owner of Linda White Antique Clothing in Upton, Massachusetts. White has been in business for almost 30 years, and her area of expertise is period clothing ranging from the 1830s to the 1970s.

White’s belief was that the pinafore, sized for a child or young woman, was sewn on a sewing machine and was almost certainly from the Victorian era.

“The pinafore was in very good condition,” Francis said. “A detailed report written by the Boston and Albany Railroad said that Mary was killed instantly after ignoring a flag man and running in front of the engine. If she had been wearing a pinafore at the time of her death, chances are incredibly remote that it would have made it through the ordeal so well-preserved.”

White also said that the skirt itself could not have belonged to a young girl of 10, because the waist measured approximately 30 inches.

“She could also find no evidence of a waistband, and it appeared that the top section of the dress had been cut off to convert it into a crude skirt,” Francis said. “And a close-up of the hooks that held the waist together revealed that the hooks and eyes were from the 1940s.”

Francis, intrigued by White’s analysis, eventually was able to bring her the actual remnants of the dress. White confirmed the original observations she made based on the pictures, but she was unable to identify the other pieces. However, she believes the grapes and swirls printed on the striped piece of fabric date it to the Art Nouveau period of the early 1900s, and that it is likely a remnant of a tablecloth.

“So we have two identifiable pieces, both from varying eras and belonging to two different women of different ages, and though we aren’t sure just who the pieces belonged to, we can be almost 100 percent sure that they didn’t belong to Mary Smith,” Francis said.

If not Smith, then whom did these scraps of clothing with apparent blood stains actually belong to? Francis said they could have belonged to any number of people who stayed there during the many decades that the house offered lodging, including those traveling the rails, transient workers spending time in the area, and even prostitutes, although there is no concrete evidence to support that.

“There is reference to a ‘cow yard’ during John Stone’s ownership, which is an old American euphemism for a brothel,” Francis said. “Other than that, we have no concrete evidence to support the claim, other than the location of the hotel and its transient clientele offering a wonderful opportunity for any women who wanted to make some money in that capacity.”

Although the actual owner of the dress may never be determined, it appears the garment has a spirit attached to it, nevertheless. It may not be Mary Smith, but whoever the ghost is, she clearly doesn’t want her clothing removed from its final resting place in the attic of Stone’s Public House.

Never a Bride

Just about every girl dreams of someday being a bride, of having that special wedding where she can be joined in matrimony to the man she loves.

But what happens when an overbearing father forbids his daughter to marry that man and ruins her perfect day? At the Baker Mansion in Altoona, Pennsylvania, it caused the wedding dress picked out for that ill-fated occasion to take on a life of its own.

Prominent local businessman Elias Baker owned the mansion at the time. According to legend, Baker’s daughter, Anna, sought to marry one of her father’s employees, but Baker refused to let her marry a common working man.

In truth, the wedding dress belonged to Elizabeth Bell, the daughter of another wealthy merchant in the area, who wore it on her wedding day in 1830. But as Maxwell Scott said in the film,
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So the dress has forever been associated with the forlorn lover Anna Baker. It is said she was so upset with her father that she never spoke to him again and never found love again, either.

When the Baker Mansion became the headquarters for the Blair County Historical Society, the dress was discovered and placed on display under glass. As the story goes, the dress began to move under its own power, swaying back and forth under the glass. The historical society volunteers blamed the movement on loose floorboards that caused the case to shake and the dress to flutter.

The dress is no longer on display because, according to rumor, it began to shake so violently it nearly shattered the glass case. The official line is that the dress was put away because the fabric was deteriorating. Those who believe in the undying nature of true love know the truth.

The Little Girls’ Dresses

Sometimes ghosts can return in different forms to the same location. They may knock on doors, turn lights on and off, and even be seen from time to time. Some believe ghosts return to a familiar location to connect to the living world, perhaps to regain some sense of their own humanity. Are their loved ones still thinking about them? Are they still remembering them?

The house on Allen Street, where the two girls died.

Others believe spirits never leave, that something traps them in a location; with an emotional anchor in place, they wander places that were once familiar to them until their energy dies or the location changes so dramatically it forces them to move on.

There can be an emotional link between a ghost and an object, particularly if the ghost once owned it. This link was formed before the person died, and is the foundation of the idea of a haunted object.

Children, for some reason, are the one exception to that rule. Ghosts of children, who play with toys that do not belong to them and throw tantrums when they are taken away, plague many haunted locations. Investigators often bring toys to investigations as a means of making contact with children.

With all the hauntings in Chuck and Dodie’s house on Allen Street, the dress in the upstairs guest room might have gone unnoticed. The property has seen much tragedy, and the night two little girls died in a house fire may have invited more spirits inside.

By the time Chuck and Dodie and their family moved in, the little girls had been dead for almost 20 years. During that time, people had moved in and out of the house, never staying long. The spirits of the young girls had been known to play with and steal tools from the men who worked on the property after the fire. A girl who lived next door always kept the shade pulled down in her room because she had seen the ghost girls across the yard too many times. The police officer who owned the house before Chuck and Dodie said he was selling it because of the strange activity there. Chuck and Dodie only had an odd sense something was wrong and misunderstood the sideways glances from friends who knew the house’s history.

But there were more than the spirits of the girls in the house. Over the short time they lived there, Chuck and Dodie saw floating balls of light and dark figures, and objects disappeared and reappeared more times than they could count. The ghost girls were the most active, though. Their daughter’s boyfriend spotted them on the landing of the third floor, where they died. They could be heard giggling when they pulled practical jokes, including turning lights on and off when male guests were taking showers.

The most lasting connection to the house took place in the room where the girls died. The newspapers had glossed over the details of their deaths, so as not to disturb readers, but unlike the quiet and painless deaths reported, the girls actually died of smoke inhalation, coughing and screaming before they passed out, according to bystander reports.

Immediate and prolonged suffering may be enough to leave something
behind where it happened, and that seems to be the case on Allen Street.

Before they knew what happened on that night of the fire, Chuck and Dodie turned the room into a guest room. Dodie, who was interested in paranormal activity, didn’t have a problem with the room at first.

“When we first moved into the house, I slept up there sometimes and found it a quiet, comfortable room,” she said. Even after she found out what had happened there, she continued to use the room as storage, while still furnishing it with odds and ends.

“It was always hard to tell [if] what was happening [was] because of what piece of furniture [was there],” she said. “We had a great collection of what we called our Dead People Furniture. Whenever someone died, we got new furniture.”

Dodie decided to hang some old dresses in the room for character.

“The dresses were handmade by Chuck’s aunt for Chuck’s sister,” Dodie said. “She wore them as a child. There were two or three of them. When I had my daughter in 1986, his mom passed them on to her. I thought they were beautiful and hung them on hangers on the wall in a spare bedroom when we bought the house in Salem. Although all that was in the room was an air mattress and an old bureau, they looked cute hanging there.”

The little ghost girls found ways to interrupt the everyday flow of the house and although they never did anything to threaten or upset the family, they seemed determined to make themselves known. Maybe because of their beauty or because they reminded them of dressing up, the dresses became the focus of the girls’ activity.

“Everyday when I got home from work, I would make all the beds and pick up. No matter how many times I fixed the airbed in that room and puffed up the dresses, I would come back to find the bed a mess and the dresses smoothed down,” Dodie said.

This ritual continued over time. Although the other things happening in the house were scaring them, the dresses remained just a sad reminder that not all moments from the other side are spooky.

“One day we were going out and I ran up to get a jacket. As I walked in the bedroom, I noticed the bed was a mess and the dresses smoothed down. I walked over and fluffed the dresses and turned to make the bed, muttering to myself because this crap was getting old fast,” she said. “When I turned to get the jacket, I watched as the dresses were smoothed over right in from of me.”

As Dodie fluffed them up again, she distinctly saw an impression large enough to be a person on the bed.

Until that moment, she had thought the activity almost funny. It always happened when she was not around and so she only saw the aftermath. But this was a bit too intense. While she wasn’t scared, it proved too emotional for her.

Strain on the family, partly due to the hauntings, eventually made her leave the house and Chuck was forced to put it up for auction in 2009. By that time, he was no longer living in it, either.

“It was bought and redone. It’s beautiful. From what I hear, the residents have been asking if the place was haunted,” Dodie said.

Other family members continue to have experiences outside of the house, including ones so disturbing to Dodie that she brought in people to conduct a Native American blessing. Of all the things she experienced there, Dodie continues to return to the mystery of the dresses.

“There was never a feeling of fear surrounding the dresses, just aggravation that I liked them one way and an invisible hand liked them a different way. Chuck’s aunt had passed by the time the dresses were handed down, so if it was her or the spirits that were already in the house when we moved in, I don’t know. The dresses went back into storage, and I haven’t heard anything more about them.”

The little girls may have found something else to play with and perhaps they will someday be able to move on and find the kind of peace they once heard about in bedtime stories.

For her part, Dodie can only hope that the darker, scarier things in the house never interfere with the sweet souls of two lost girls who had the bad luck to get caught in a closed room during a fire. While living in the house, she saw dark spirits appear on computer screens, shadows float throughout the bedroom, and heard her children wake up screaming at things only they could see. Of all of the spirits that made that house their home, the little girls never seemed to want to scare as much as play or make themselves known. They may even still be there, hoping someone else will fill the closets with pretty new clothes to wear. Dress-up can still be a young girl’s favorite game, even if she is no longer alive.