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| The Baltimore Sun, 16 March 1974 |
My upcoming novel
Chapel Street was inspired by my experiences growing up in a "haunted" house at 21 St. Helens Avenue* in the Northeast Baltimore neighborhood of Lauraville. This series of blogs will examine the actual haunting that inspired the book. My previous blogs dealt with the history of the house and its previous occupants and the history of my immediate family. Now, it's finally time for us to move in.
Things were definitely getting crowded at home at 5507 Hamlet Avenue. The house had three bedrooms -- well, more like two and a half. My parents occupied the big bedroom in the front of the house. My brother
Dougie and I shared the adjacent bedroom. When my sister
Laura was born, she was given the small bedroom at the back of the house. My brother
Mark was the next born. He moved in with Dougie and me. Dougie and I shared bunk beds. Mark slept on a small single. Then my sister Jeanne was born. She was relegated to a bunk bed in the back room with Laura.
The girls' bedroom was tiny. More like a closet than a bedroom. In fact, the last time the house was on the market, I attended the open house. I was not surprised to see that the girls' room was being used as a closet. Needless to say, something had to change. Our growing family needed a bigger home. And my mother found it, via the advertisement in the Baltimore Sun shown above, in 1974.**
Despite the obvious need for change, I personally looked at the prospect of moving with dread. Not out of any fear of the supernatural. I just didn't want to move. I really liked the neighborhood. I knew everybody. I liked everybody. I also liked my school. I was currently in the seventh grade at St. Dominic Elementary School, and I didn't want to switch.
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| Find me, if you dare. |
I didn't have to worry about it. I was relieved to hear that the new house was only about seven blocks away from our current home. I would remain at St. D., which was actually closer to our new house than our old one. Also, my friends in the old neighborhood were only a quick walk or bike ride away. I actually got excited about the move. I was soon quizzing my friends in school who lived by the new house about the street. I also found myself biking by it on occasion.
The sale of the house was conducted by Mariam Mayfort's cousin
Gordon H. Witherspoon, Sr., a prominent lawyer and politician. My father Douglas had previously met him at the University of Baltimore Law School. I believe I am the first of the kids to actually step inside the new house. I went there with my mother one afternoon prior to the estate sale. Mr. Witherspoon was offering my mother first choice of any item that interested her. I only remember being on the first floor, and it left a strong impression. The Mayfort furniture seemed old and oversized and the house itself was very dark. Not in a spiritual sense. In a strictly physical manner. Although it was bright outside, thick curtains held back the light. However, I wasn't afraid. Nor was I overly excited. Looking back, you would have thought I would have taken that opportunity to stake out my bedroom, but I didn't. I don't even remember going upstairs.
Before we go any further I want to give you the physical layout of the house. The geography of the house is important to understand the haunting.***
On the first floor, the front door opened into an entrance hall. We would eventually put an upright piano in that room against the outer wall under one of the many stained glass windows. A stairs from the entrance hall led to the landing between the first and second floors where Miss Miriam was said to have tumbled to her death. (She may have indeed tumbled, but she ultimately died in the hospital.****) A set of stairs in the middle of the landing led to the second floor. Another set of stairs at the end of the landing led back down into the dining room.
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Our piano teacher, who was also a talented expressionist
painter and WWI veteran, Alfred A Kirk with my late sister Laura. |
Heading back from entrance hall, you walked past the door to the basement into the large dining room. I won't bother with the basement since I don't recall hearing of any phenomenon down there. (So much for radon, skeptics.)***** A tiny little kitchen extended from the southwest corner of the dining room. To the left of the dining room was the family room, which was diminished by the addition of the first floor half bath. Really cool pocket doors separated the living room from the family room on one side and the entrance hall on the other. Originally, my parents intended the living room for formal use only. However, that plan only survived a few months before we moved the television in from the smaller family room. Before long, my mother purchased an antique church pump organ and put it in the family room, first up against the wall of bathroom and later the inner wall that separated it from the dining room. (Hint: The organ would loom large in the haunting.)
My mother remembers hearing that Miss Mariam used the family room as her bedroom near the end of her life to avoid always walking up and down the stairs. (In retrospect, a very wise idea.) My mother also remembers a day bed in the room when she took her first tour.
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My surviving sister Jeanne playing the organ
when it was located against the bathroom wall
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When you walked up the stairs to the second floor, the first door on the left led to Bedroom A, Front West. (I will identify the bedrooms by letters since the occupants of the various rooms would shift over the long decades our family lived at the house.) This bedroom, which looked out onto St. Helens Avenue, was the smallest of the three on the second floor. However, it featured a nice bay window on the front and one side window and a closet. Directly across from the top of the stairs was Bedroom B, Front East. It was large and square, and had three windows but no closet. Bedroom C was adjacent to Bedroom B. It was the largest bedroom in the house. I'm sure it would be considered the master bedroom today. It had a bay window overlooking Harford Road. It also had the only door leading to the large, enclosed sunporch, which was added sometime after the original construction of the house. The room also featured a large closet. That closet would prove to be the most interesting feature on the second floor.
The full bathroom sat across the hall from Bedroom C. They shared adjacent closets, separated by a thin interior wall. There was also a connected linen closet between the two rooms that opened onto the second floor hallway. Strangely, however, there was a window at the end of the closet between the bedroom and the bathroom. The window was still functional, but now opened onto the sunporch. It was obvious that these three closets were once a single room prior to the addition of the sunporch. But what kind of room? It seemed too small to be an adult bedroom.
We speculate that it was once a nursery. If so, it was probably never used as intended. To our knowledge, my youngest brother John was the first infant to live in the house. The main reason I went to visit the Mayfort graves in Loudon Park Cemetery before I started writing these blogs was to make sure there were no infants in the family plot. The purpose of that discarded room, and who might have lived in it, grew in importance to us. Over the years, we came to believe that those closets were the cold, dark heart of the house. Whatever lived there with us, lived in those closets.******
There were also two bedrooms on the third floor. The back one, with a wonderful view of the city stretching from the Inner Harbor to Sparrow's Point, was the largest of the two. I'll just call that one my room, since I was the only member of my family who ever lived in it. The front room, which overlooked St. Helens Avenue, had many occupants over the years. We'll call that one The Hell Room. Although the entity seemed attached to the closets on the second floor, for a period during the mid-to-late-1980s, it made its presence felt very strongly in that room. Trust me, you don't earn the moniker of The Hell Room for nothing!
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My lovely wife Deborah in the Hell Room
during the auction of the house in 2013. |
I might have been the first one of the kids to step inside the house, but I missed the move entirely. I had always been very allergic to poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac, and I was suffering from the worst case ever in my life at the time. I had poison sumac all over my face. If I slept on my right side, the liquid under my skin would pool on the right and puff up that side of my face. The reverse was true if I slept on my left. I was pretty gross to look at. So, during the move, I was sent to stay at my grandmother's house on Evergreen Avenue, where I slept upright in a chair in the living room. I was disappointed to have missed out on the move, but, in retrospect, I can console myself that I managed to avoid a great deal of physical labor!
My sister Jeanne often said moving to the house at St. Helens Avenue was like moving to a castle. Not only was it larger than the old house on Hamlet Avenue, there were many nooks and crannies and cubby holes to explore. It was an adventure. My older brother Dougie and I thought, since the old owner had died without an heir, that there was probably money hidden somewhere around the house. We searched for it in vain. Fun.
Despite the fact that the house had five bedrooms, my parents maintained their old three bedroom mindset.******* They took bedroom A for themselves. They assigned us boys bedroom B where we had the same arrangement as we did on Hamlet Avenue. Dougie and I slept in bunk beds and Mark had his own bed. Dougie, however, did not tolerate the situation long. On his own initiative he claimed the front room in the attic -- The Hell Room. Not be outdone, I claimed the back bedroom in the attic. Now, Mark had bedroom B to himself until the arrival of our baby brother John.
Still, despite the fact that I had my own cool bedroom in the attic, I must admit I was a little envious of my sisters. Perhaps because they had been relegated so long to that crappy little room on Hamlet Avenue, my parents gave them the largest bedroom. I didn't necessarily envy them the bedroom. I envied them the sunporch, which I considered the coolest part of the house. It was essentially theirs. You could only access it through their bedroom.
But it was just as well.
A day or two after our family moved into house, my sister Laura was out in the backyard. She looked up at the sunporch to see a woman looking down at her.
So it began.
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| The sunporch |
Notes:
*21 St. Helens Avenue was the original address of the house when it was built. The street name and number changed over time, but I use the original address to protect the privacy of the current owners.
**My mother actually heard about the house from a friend: Amelia Darrah. I will not be correcting the text itself.
***My niece Marion is working on getting the original blueprints. I will include them when she finds them.
****Conversations with older neighbors after the posting of this blog confirmed that Miriam Mayfort died on the landing in the house. She must have only been "officially" declared dead at the hospital.
*****Since publishing this blog, I have learned there were incidents in the basement. I am not correcting the text because this is good example about how little we discussed the haunting among ourselves.
******After my family left, the next owner of 21 St. Helens Avenue started remodeled the house. However, right before he moved out, he tore out the walls in the master bedroom -- and the closets -- with a hammer.
******My father apparently had plans for the third floor. He originally wanted to turn my room into a library and turn the Hell Room into his study. Near the end of his life, he would walk up to the Hell Room late at night to talk to someone or something.....
Additional blogs about the haunting:
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 1, An IntroductionThe Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 2, The HouseThe Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 3, This Is UsThe Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 4, ArrivalThe Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 5, MethodologyThe Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 6, Clara's Tale, Pt. 1The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 7, Clara's Tale, Pt. 2The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 8, My Tale, Pt. 1The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 9, My Tale, Pt. 2The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 10, My Tale, Pt. 3The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 11, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 1The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 12, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 2The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 13, John's Tale, Pt. 1 The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 14, John's Tale, Pt. 2The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 15, Come Inside!The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 16, Marion's Tale, Pt. 1The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 17, Marion's Tale, Pt. 2The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 18, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 1The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 19, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 2The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 20, Lisa's TaleThe Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 21, Recap, Pt. 1The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 22, Recap, Pt. 2The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 23, Recap, Pt. 3
My novel
Chapel Street was inspired by the haunting. You can currently buy the Kindle and paperback at
Amazon and the Nook, paperback and hardcover at
Barnes & Noble.
Learn more about the book, click
Here.
