Growing Up In A Haunted House

In honor of the Halloween season I'm re-publishing an essay that my uncle wrote a few years ago describing the house I grew up in in St. Augustine, FL and the strange occurrences that we were sometimes privy to.

In most cases that my uncle, the author, mentions a nephew he is speaking of me.
Enjoy!

 Growing up in a haunted house- The house at 272 St. George St.

My family moved to St. Augustine from my hometown of Daytona Beach in 1966 when I was six years old. Our first house was on the island in Davis Shores, but we were very cramped, with nine people in a 3 or 4 bedroom house. We had only been there a few months when a local lawyer, Mr. Weinstein, suggested he may have the ideal house for us, and invited us to have a look.

So one evening our parents loaded most of us kids up in the car, not telling us where we were going, and we went down to St. George St., the oldest street in the United States, lined with large old houses, many of which dated to the Flagler era. We pulled into one leaf covered drive of a huge, three story house, where my folks revealed they had been offered the house and we were going to go through it.

It seemed like home from the first. Us kids excitedly chose our rooms. Built in 1892 in the Queen Anne style, the old place had been an inn, so most of the rooms had bathrooms. After living ten people in a three bedroom house in Daytona, the luxury of it all was amazing. 6 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms (one more of each, if you counted the servants space up in the attic), 3 fireplaces, completely furnished with many fine antiques, all for just a tad over $20,000, even in 1966 dollars an astounding deal. My parents jumped on it, and in a few days we were moving in.

It wasn't long before we heard that we now lived in a haunted house. The previous owner was a woman from New York named Helen Firestone. She had bought the place around 1950, running it as The Old Magnolia Inn. She had a reputation as a good inn keeper, known by critics for her accommodations and fine cuisine. But she also had an equal reputation as a crusty character.

Finally, in the early 60's, depressed, she went to a neighbor and asked a rhetorical question. If a person wanted to kill themselves, what did he think was the best way. He replied that for his money the old garden hose from the tail pipe into the closed car just couldn't be beat. Obviously she agreed, because soon after she did just that in her garage.
The stories that her ghost haunted the old house started soon after. One man, a well respected local judge, would spend the night there on occasion after her death. He woke one night in the master bedroom to see Mrs. Firestone standing at the foot of the bed. I'm told he speaks of the experience to this day. I witnessed first hand local school children who would not walk on the sidewalk in front of the house, crossing to the other side till they were past. There seemed far more than the ordinary incidence of something coming up missing, and the house being torn apart, only for the thing to turn up in the middle of a table in plain site. (Maybe Helen bought a night in the White House). Lights seem to go on and off by unseen hand. We started to speak to Helen, only half in jest.

THE MASTER BEDROOM/DINING ROOM-This is the room where the judge saw Helen, and it became my parent's room. One night in the late 60's or early 70's my father, a baker, was getting up at his accustomed 12:30 AM. He was in the kitchen getting a cup of coffee before going to work. My mother was half asleep. Suddenly she heard a light thud in the room. It was enough to wake her. She turned on the light, looked around, and saw nothing at first. Then she realized something was most definitely wrong. There is a fireplace in this room, and atop the mantle my mother had wall-to-wall glass knickknacks, a good 8 inches deep. Above this hung a large mirror with an ornately carved frame, very heavy. Somehow this mirror had fallen, coming to rest propped up in front of the fireplace. Neither the mirror nor anything on the mantle was broken. The wire holding the mirror was not frayed, but appeared to be cut clean through.
Not long after, my sister Karolee was staying home sick from school. As was custom, she stayd in my parents bed. That evening, she told us a story. My father had placed a board in front of the hearth to blunt drafts. My sister swore this barrier had, on a windless, quiet day, begun to rock violently for several minutes before stopping. Of course we all chalked it up to an overactive imagination. But some years later, after the house had been remodeled and that room had become the dining room, I was home sick from school. In those days my friends and I had a Strat-O-Matic baseball league. I played all the games solo, and that day I was feeling better later so I decided to play some. I was sitting at the dining room table doing just that, on a sunny, calm day, no machinery running in the house, no heavy trucks running nearby, when the same divider, just a few feet from me, began to rock, slowly at first, then more violently. It did this for several minutes, then the rocking slowly faded and ceased. Perhaps Karolee wasn't full of shit after all.

MY ROOM-At first I shared my room with my brother Gary. In the late 60's he would go out with his high school buds on weekend nights. Typically I would read in bed for awhile, then go to sleep. The door to our bathroom was right by my bed, the knob was brass and glass cut to look like crystal. It was old, and very noisy in action. One night as I lay there reading, I heard the noise of this knob turning very slowly. I looked from my book and actually saw it turning. Then it stopped. I waited and watched, unable to look away from it till my brother came in some time later, but there was nothing and no one in the bathroom.

Years later, graduated from high school, one Sunday afternoon Karolee and I were the only people in the house. Again it was a sunny, calm day. I was sitting on the crapper in the same bathroom doing my business, taking my time with a good book. Suddenly over my head in the attic I heard the cliched sound of a ghost. If you've been to the Haunted Mansion in the Magic Kingdom you've heard it. Ooooooo. It was laughable. Then I heard what sounded like an empty mayo jar rolling on its side across a wood table, slowly at first, then picking up speed. Then an instant of silence, then the sound of breaking glass. By now I know Karolee is jacking me big time, so I shout, "All right, asshole, I know it's you up there!" She answers me from downstairs, and I know when she's bullshitting me, and this time she's not. We went upstairs but found no trace of broken glass.

More years later, and I'm sleeping, and I wake in the middle of the night. Now I know when I'm awake, and when I'm asleep and dreaming, and I was definitely awake. My bed was positioned so I could look out into the hall, where a big green mirror was framed on the far wall. There was a light on in the hall. As I watched, it looked like someone was fading the regular light down, and fading up a red one. I saw a mist clinging to the wall, drifting from both sides till it covered the wall thickly, except over the mirror. Then, after a minute or two, the mist pulled back and the light returned to normal.
OUT OF TOWNERS-Early on my cousin and her husband arrived for a visit from Louisiana. The husband is a big, burly guy who went on to be a New Orleans cop and is currently a federal agent. But he's also an old Mississippi country boy, and we told him the stories, and we laid them on thick, so he was primed by the time he went to bed. Well, the next morning found them packing to go, ahead of schedule. He told us he'd never sleep in the house again. We asked why, and were told that during the night he watched the door on the guest room open and close of its own accord. We told him it was only a draft. He asked if it was a draft that lifted the bed. True to his word, he never slept there again.

Many years later the same cousin was coming through town, this time with her mother (my aunt), and her husband's cousin, a 13 year old girl no blood kin to me. Again, I told the stories and laid them on thick, plus she's heard them from her cousin, so by the time I showed her to her room she was good and primed, too. I took her upstairs, showed her where the towels and toilet paper were, then left her to go to my room. She headed back downstairs. A moment later there was an ear-piercing scream. My mother hollered from downstairs, "Dean! What did you do to her?" I proclaimed my innocence. We find her a quivering mass. To get downstairs she had to pass a dark landing leading off to my brother Dennis' room. She swore she had seen a pair of red eyes glaring at her from back in the darkness. That night she would not even sleep in a bed alone, bunking with my aunt, and the next day she was gone, which brings us to...

THE "SPOT" ON THE STAIRS-Even as very, very young children, I and my next two sisters were scared to walk by this spot at night. To go upstairs in that house, you went up two steps to the first landing, then 13 steps (for you numerology freaks) to the next, off of which led a small, dark hallway to Dennis' room. He says he never experienced any uneasiness there, but he was never there too long, and besides, I think you had to be a child to really feel it. Me and my sisters would arrange to go to bed together so we wouldn't have to go past the spot alone. It's almost comical to contemplate it now, the three of us sitting up late, watching a TV show, then looking to each other, "So, you ready to go to bed?" "Yep, how about you?"

My nephew, who grew up in the house, also experienced this uneasiness at that spot, as did nearly all of the grandkids, regardless of whether they had been told any scary stories or not. And I know for a fact I never told any "spot on the stairs" stories to the young girl from Mississippi.

COMMENTS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY-Got an e-mail from my sister Karolee after she had checked out this site. She wished to make some corrections and addendum’s, which follow herewith. First, she claimed she fearlessly walked past the "spot" on the stairs, though the rest of us, as well as her children, cowered in fear. Seems some of Karolee's best friends are spooks.

Then she went on to add some more personal anecdotes.

"I was home alone and watching TV up in my room, and all was quiet. When all at once someone called my name out, quietly at first. I hollar down, "What!" and no one answers, and I go back to watching TV. Again someone calls out my name, and again I called out "What do you want!" and nobody answered. I figured that somebody had come home and was just pulling my chains. So I ignored it and kept watching TV. Finally my name was called out very loudly and like it was being called this time from the stairs instead of downstairs, I get mad and jump off of the bed and start to scream at whoever is calling my name and at that very moment the ceiling over my bed crashes down onto the exact spot that I was lying on. If I hadn't moved I could have been hurt badly or killed, according to Dad. There was NO ONE in the house except me, everyone was either at the bakery or school."

"The same sort of thing happened to Dennis, I think, he was showering in your bathroom and someone called his name out and he got out of the shower to see who it was and the ceiling fell into the shower, again nobody was in the house except him."
"And finally just before Anders and I got married and I had taken Charlene and Eric up to Wisconsin. Anders had come down to St. Augustine from the Coast Guard base in Jacksonville and get some music that he left in my room. He decided to take a shower before he went back to Jacksonville. I started to get ready for his shower and had shut the door and the windows and he had turned on the bathroom light. Suddenly the bathroom light shuts off and the windows open and finally the bedroom door flies open. He figures that it is an old house and it had settled or something and he recloses the door and windows and again turns on the bathroom light. The light this time goes on and off continually and the windows slide up and down and the door to the room slams open. Anders then stands in the middle of the room and yells, "What the hell is this! I have the right to be in this room, Karolee said I could be in here!" Slowly the door closes and the windows stop going up and down and close and the light in the bathroom comes on and all goes quiet. He showered and then headed back to Jacksonville and I get to hear about the story 2 weeks later when we came back home."

Also, my brother Dennis reminded me of an incident a few years back. He, my nephew Eric, and a few other people whom I don't recall were sitting in the living room with me, watching TV during the reception after my father's funeral in the summer of 1994. I turned from the TV to speak to someone, and my eyes fell on the dining table in the next room. I had to do a double take, because I could clearly see waves rippling through the heavy oak table top. I said aloud something like, "Look at the damn table! There are waves in it!" Everybody turned and looked, saw nothing, and began to look at me very strangely, but I could still clearly see these waves, which looked like sine waves. Now the logical explanation would be I was under severe stress, and that watching TV had somehow effected my eyes. But I'd only been watching for a few minutes when that happened. And later that day, also while sitting watching TV, all of us clearly heard someone outside on the street shout my father's name "Ralph!" very loudly. We ran outside, but saw no one on the street.

THE OWL AND THE OSPREY-This, for me, is the final episode of life in a haunted house, at least this particular one. The yard of the house was filled with many beautiful trees, and was always a haven for myriad birds. A few months before the passing of my father, a large owl suddenly appeared. It would sit like a statue til dusk, then fly off. My father became very interested in this bird, and he would take his binoculars out and look at the bird. All very cool, aside from the mess of his crap, which looked like big
chunky globs of white paint with bones and hair in it. Then my father passed away, and the owl was seen no more.

A year or so after my father passed away, I began to hear a peculiar bird call, a sort of a skreeling noise. Finally, I saw the source. An osprey had begun to use the tallest branches of the various trees, often eating its catch on high. This had not been a good time for me, but somehow the appearance of this bird made me feel better. For some reason I almost identified it with my father. During this time I would often take an afternoon nap at the house, rather than drive back to my place in the country. Many times, as I lay in bed, I could look up through the window and see this osprey sitting quiet in the top branches of the old pecan tree. Sometimes it would not be seen for stretches, but it would always come back.

Then came the time when my mother's health deteriorated, and finally she passed away, almost three years after my father, and I tell you I never saw or heard that osprey again, even though I was often at the house in the months after. I am a Christian, and I know my parents are in heaven, where one day we will be reunited, but I'm not a slave of dogma, and no human can limit the methods God uses to bring comfort.
(PS-I despise the song "Wildfire"!!!)

 EPILOGUE-In later years the odd occurrences pretty much came to an end, as far as I know. We all moved away, and my parents passed away, necessitating the sale of the house. The new owners are well along in remodeling it, something it desperately needed. Bought for a bit over $20,000 fully furnished with antiques in 1966, it sold in run down condition, unfurnished in 1998 for over $200,000. Ghost stories no longer depress the value of a house, and school children no longer avoid walking in front of it. But from time to time a person with a copy of a book from a few years back about haunted places will walk up to look. And sometimes I wonder if the new people have kids, and if so, will they feel uncomfortable walking by that spot on the stairs?

Copyright 2000 Allen Dean Peterson