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Your Neighborhood Haunted House

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David In Indy:
It's Halloween! So I thought it would be fun to discuss haunted houses in our cities and neighborhoods. We could even talk about that creepy old house down the street when we were kids. :)

Did you have such a house in your neighborhood when you were growing up? Do you have a haunted house in your city or in your neighborhood now? What are some of the rumors about the house? Did you ever sneek inside to investigate it? If so, what did you see or hear?

Let's talk about scary haunted houses!

David In Indy:
I posted this in another thread, but I'll re-post it here.

The House of Blue Lights - Indianapolis, Indiana





It was built by Skiles Test a big real estate tycoon here in Indianapolis back in the early 1900s. He owned much of the land that now makes up northeast Indianapolis, including the neighborhood I grew up in. In addition to being extremely wealthy, he was also a bit eccentric. And it was because so many people viewed him as a crazy old man that so many rumors were sparked. He did do some rather odd things though. One year back in the late 1940s he hung blue Christmas lights along the all the eaves of his house and in the trees. He enjoyed them so much he decided to leave them up permanently and turned them on every night for decades. It was the blue Christmas lights that gave the house its nickname.

He also had a three story guest cottage with an elevator and a two story bath house with a diving board attached to the top  level of the building. The diving board hung over an olympic size solar heated swimming pool. He was a huge animal lover and owned dozens of cats. I believe he once owned 150 of them. I remember seeing the cat cemetery out in his back yard. There was also a series of tunnels running from the house to various locations on the property. Two I can think of is the tunnel entrance just off Sycamore Hill (the road that leads up to my childhood home) which was built into a hill side. This tunnel led to the cellar of the mansion. Another tunnel connected the mansion's cellar to the detatched garage and care taker's house about 200 yards away.

The legends of the house included his wife being buried in a glass coffin and buried under the swimming pool. The legend goes that when his wife died, he placed her in a glass coffin and kept her in his living room with blue lights surrounding it. Then after a period of time, he buried her in the back yard and installed the pool over her grave. This of course is false. I believe both Mr. and Mrs. Test are buried at Crown Hill Cemetery.

Also supposedly a curse was attached to the property. If you trespassed, Mr. Test's spirit would haunt you until the day you died. I have never seen his ghost though and I went up there plenty of times! At least I don't THINK I've seen him. Sometimes when I'm at Dad's house I can hear strange noises coming from the location where the mansion once stood, but I think those noises are probably coyotes and other animals. It does sound very creepy though.

Another legend was the appearance of blue lights in the windows of the mansion even after it was abandoned. Now I do remember seeing those blue lights. Or at least I THOUGHT I'd seen the blue lights several times. It looked very odd, almost like a blue candle flame glimmering in some of the windows. But it could have been my imagination.

Anyhow it was a very interesting place and I was sorry to see it torn down.  :'(

David In Indy:
The Hannah House - Indianapolis, Indiana



We also have the Hannah House here in town. It's still standing. The home was built by an abolitionist family back in the 1840s and it was used as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Legend says that one night while a large number of slaves were hiding down in a remote part of the basement, a lantern tipped over and the slaves burned to death. And now from time to time you can smell the scent of burning flesh and the sounds of screams coming from the basement. Also doors are known to slam on their own, furniture moves of its own accord and shadow people are seen moving throughout the house.

They sometimes hold "murder mystery" dinners at Hannah House which are very popular. Also each Halloween a large haunted house is created (yes! a Halloween haunted house in a REAL haunted house) which takes you through several rooms of the house and also the basement. I've been there during Halloween and I remember feeling "presences" there on a few occasions! :o

David In Indy:
Willard Library - Evansville, Indiana





And then there's the old Willard Library in Evansville which is supposedly haunted by "The Gray Lady". Willard Library was the closest library to my house in Evansville and I went in there all the time. It's a beautiful building and I must admit a bit creepy but I never saw anything unusual.

Many others HAVE though. So many people in fact that the Sci-Fi channel's Ghost Hunters (TAPS) made a special trip to Evansville to investigate the ghostly activity. They really didn't find much though. :-\

The Discovery Channel was also there, but I can't remember what they said they found, if anything. Web cams have been installed at the library and people all across the world watch them to see if they can spot the Gray Lady. Several convincing image captures have been posted on the library's website, so who knows really? ;)

http://www.willardghost.com/?content=ghostcams

Marge_Innavera:
I voted "other."  Don't remember any haunted houses in our neighborhood when I was a kid but I've worked in haunted buildings -- twice -- and for a few years when I was a student, I lived in a pre-Civil War neighborhood where haunted houses were quite common.  People basically just got used to it.

One thing I can say, that I'll bet not many people can, is that I once spent the night in a haunted building by myself.  It was a log cabin at the Living History museum where I was working, my usual work station in fact; and once in awhile we'd do a project where we actually lived there for a little while, anywhere from a weekend to a full week.  On one of the weekends, the other people who were to sleep in the cabin cancelled and I stayed in it alone.  It wasn't actually scary, as I'd had a number of incidents there and none of them were frightening but I definitely did sleep lighter than usual. 

At dusk, people would often see lights in the attic of the cabin and find nothing there, but a strong smell of candle wax.  I'd often hear someone walking up behind me and turn around to find nobody there, and once on a cold day when the door was locked some invisible person knocked on it.  A few of the volunteers and Parks Department staff people wouldn't go into that building, but most of us were used to it.  It had a great setting for a haunted building -- right on the edge of "town" and surrounded by big old shade trees whose branches sometimes cast spooky shadows during the full moon.

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