The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 5, Methodology

The Murphy Family, Christmas 1986*

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 house and its occupants up to the time of our arrival. Now it is time to deal with our actual paranormal experiences within the house.

It was a hopeful gesture on my part to start writing these blogs. To realistically tell this story, I needed the cooperation of my mother, my siblings and my nieces. Considering our long reticence to talk about the haunting, there was no guarantee they would cooperate. Fortunately, my sister Jeanne broke the ice. After reading the rough draft of my book, she requested a meeting of the siblings to discuss the haunting. In that meeting we all learned things we never knew before. We all had our secrets, and we haven't revealed them all yet.

Over the next of couple of weeks and/or months, I will be interviewing people with first hand experience of the paranormal activity within the house. The question that plagued me was how to arrange the material.

I am a professional writer. If I had my choice, I would tell this story narratively in a chronological manner. Unfortunately, I really don't have that option here. As I have said repeatedly, this wasn't one haunting, it was a number of separate hauntings going on more or less concurrently. Aside from one brief period when the poltergeist activity was at its peak in the mid-1980s, we never discussed the phenomenon with each other in any detail. Also, no one took any contemporaneous notes. Not even me. Therefore, we are relying almost entirely on memory -- and forty-five years have passed since we first moved into that house. It would be a fool's errand to try to reconcile our individual memories in a single narrative timeline.

As a result, I plan to let my family members tell their stories separately. I will interview them, or let them write up their own experiences. This approach will also allow the reader to gauge the credibility of each individual separately. As I said earlier, the members of my family all came into this experience with wildly varying viewpoints regarding religion and the supernatural. When you're finished with all of the accounts, you will probably find someone with a similar worldview to your own. And that will probably be the person you find most credible. Considering the fact that I wrote a memoir called The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God, where I say I believe I have heard the voice of God, I doubt skeptics will find my story very credible. Hopefully, you will find someone else more to your liking.

Clara, 1974

I plan to interview my mother Clara first. She's the obvious person to start with. She was the owner of the house. So, technically speaking, it was her entity. She also had the most paranormal experience prior to our arrival at the house. Next I hope to interview my sister Jeanne. In the last blog, I credited my late sister Laura with the first paranormal experience at the house. However, I think Jeanne may have had her beat by a day or two. Jeanne had a rather harrowing experience that I didn't learn about until quite recently.

I'll tell my story next. You might find it surprising, but I was the skeptic of the group. I was completely dismissive of any talk of ghosts until things blew up in the mid-80s. Some rather harrowing events, that inspired a major plot point in my upcoming novel Chapel Street, made me a believer very quickly. I hope my brother John will be next. He is a unique case in the family. He grew up entirely at 21 St. Helens Avenue, and we pointedly never discussed the entity around him. Sadly, our desire not to frighten him left him alone and unprepared for some of the worst physical phenomenon that any of us experienced in the house.

The House auctioned in 2012

I am also attempting to locate the family that bought the house from my mother. I am very curious about their experiences. Sadly, they do not seem readily accessible online but I will keep looking. I will not reach out to the current residents. (They would, obviously, be easier to find!) As I said in an earlier blog, I suspect a "haunting" like this one is often partially transactional. Certain people seem more attuned to paranormal activity than others. Therefore, if the current residents are not experiencing anything, I have no desire to discuss the haunting with them and possibly trigger activity.

I will not be interviewing my older brother Doug for the blog. Doug left and moved in with my paternal grandparents after only a few short years at 21 St. Helens Avenue. He has absolutely no memory whatsoever of any paranormal activity. I am not surprised. I lived in the house for ten years before I experienced anything myself. If I left when he did, I'm sure my skepticism would remain intact today. (My father was also a skeptic, and I was very surprised to hear the effect the entity had on him -- but we'll get to that later. I consider him to be the third suicide.)

The question that remains, for me, is what to do next. I originally intended to deal with the suicides of my siblings next, and then go to the testimonies of my nieces, one of whom lived in the house for an extended period of time. That would make the most sense chronologically. However, now I am leaning toward telling all of our individual stories first before we deal with the deaths.

I teach writing at Towson University. I often warn students when I read an early draft of their work if I fear that their arguments don't justify their conclusions. I might be guilty of that sin too. I suspect I will never be able to prove to a skeptic that the entity was responsible, in part, for the suicide deaths of my siblings. However, I hope, after you read our stories, you'll understand why some of us suspect it.

Jeanne and Natalie, circa 2012.
Natalia is about to give birth to her first daughter.

That said, I am not writing these blogs to convince anyone about anything. These blogs represent a journey within our family to finally deal with the lingering legacy of our experiences at 21 St. Helens Avenue. In a sense, we all still live in its shadow. Yesterday, I interviewed my niece Natalie about her experiences at the house. She was glad to do it. She felt it was finally time to reveal all of our secrets.

I agree.

Give me a little time to do some research. Until then, enjoy a little glimpse of the Murphy family at 21 St. Helens Avenue. If our home movies are any indication, it seemed like it was always Christmas there....

Most of the footage was shot in the living room. Of course, after learning that the funeral of John Clayton Mayfort was held in there, now I like to call it The Coffin Room.

Notes:

*This photo was taken on Christmas day 1986 on the front porch of my grandmother's house on Evergreen Avenue. I believe this could be the last photo taken of all my siblings and my parents together. There might be another one, but I don't seem to have it....

**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.

Additional blogs about the haunting:

The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 1, An Introduction
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 2, The House
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 3, This Is Us
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 4, Arrival
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 5, Methodology
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 6, Clara's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 7, Clara's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 8, My Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 9, My Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 10, My Tale, Pt. 3
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 11, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 12, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 2
The 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. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 15, Come Inside!
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 16, Marion's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 17, Marion's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 18, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 19, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 20, Lisa's Tale
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 21, Recap, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 22, Recap, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 23, Recap, Pt. 3

The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 24, Bad News Betty

The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 25, Joe's Tale

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.

Listen to me read some chapters here:

Chapel Street - Prologue - My Mother
Chapel Street - Chapter 1 - RestingPlace.com
Chapel Street - Chapter 2 - Elisabetta
Chapel Street - Chapter 3 - The Upload
Chapel Street - Chapter 4 - The Kobayashi Maru

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