SeanPaulMurphyVille: January 2020

Thursday, January 30, 2020

The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 16, Marion's Tale, Pt. 1

Marion and her mother in the living room
of 21 St. Helens Avenue, circa 1987

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. This entry consists of the first half of an interview with my niece Marion.

Marion differs from my previous interview subjects because she never actually lived in the house. She only remembers spending a few nights there when she was very young. That said, she did spend a great deal of time at the house over the years.

This interview details a phenomenon I didn't anticipate when I began this oral history. My first book, The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God, detailed my ability to hear the voice of God after my religious conversion. God often told me of future events that came to pass. Only one didn't -- and that was the subject of my book. What I didn't realize until now was that other members of my family were experiencing similar phenomenon by different means.

My mother claims to have heard repeatedly from a guardian angel, even before moving into 21 St. Helens Avenue. The angel would warn her of impending tragedies. My sister Jeanne claims that her first encounter with the entity at the house awakened a clairvoyance in her. I haven't had a full interview with her yet, so I do not know the parameters of her "gift." My niece Marion seems to have inherited a similar ability from her mother. That's what she talks about here, and how it intersects with events at 21 St. Helens Avenue.**

To my knowledge, none of my relatives sought this ability. It is just something they had. It seems to be an inherited trait. My mother says one of her grandmothers -- she doesn't remember which one -- was said to be "born under the veil." Medically, that means the child was born with part of the amniotic sac covering its head or face. According to folklore, babies born in this manner often have supernatural gifts. I am not endorsing this folklore. However, the number of people in our family who claim to have had these experiences seem to fall outside of any statistical norm. And it seems something worth exploring in relation to the events at 21 St. Helens Avenue.

As I said in an earlier blog, I believe experiences between people and spiritual entities are often transactional in nature. Although I no longer believe any of us triggered the entity out of some dormant or inactive state, I do believe that the intensity of the activity one experiences might be a result of how attuned the person is to the spiritual realm. This interview is an examination of that theory. Although Marion never lived at the house, her sensitivity allowed the entity to loom large in her consciousness.

Here's a clip from the interview.

Forgive me for the quality of the clip. I talked with Marion in a Google Hangout and filmed her off my computer monitor. If anyone has a better idea how to record video interviews remotely, please leave a comment below. My niece Emily transcribed the interview. It has been edited for clarity.

SEAN: So Marion, you have the distinction of being the first person we're interviewing who did not actually live at the house. But you did spend a lot time at the house during your life, is that not correct?

MARION: That's correct.

SEAN: Yes. How many nights would you say you spent at that house?

MARION: Emily and I spent the night when we were really little I think a couple of times. I really only remember maybe twice.

SEAN: And when you did spend the night there, where did you stay?

MARION: We stayed in the master bedroom. I would sleep on the left side of the bed, so facing the closet.

SEAN: Yeah.

MARION: And Emily would sleep on the other side, on the floor.

SEAN: Was your grandmother in the room with you at the same time?

MARION: She was. She had like a single bed, so we would sleep on the floor.

SEAN: You slept on the floor? They didn't have the other bed there?

MARION: No.

SEAN: Now, can you tell me your first impressions of the house and any experiences you had there?

MARION: When I was really little, I don't remember being terribly creeped out, but as I got older, it got a little creepier. Like, I remember when I was really little, we would play outside a lot, we'd play out in the front yard. Grandmom had these big yew trees in the front yard and we'd kind of like play around in there. This would be me and Natalie and Emily playing around in there and go under the porch, and I was always a little creeped out down there, and so I was really happy when she tore out the yew trees, for some reason.

We used to play like hide and seek in the house, we'd play in and out of the closets and stuff like that. I do -- Natalie brought up in her interview -- as disclosure, I did watch all of the videos, so hopefully they didn't taint my memory. But Natalie and I used to play a lot, like kind of hide and seek stuff where we'd pretend that we were sleeping on the landing, and when we got older it was kind of creepy when we kind of found out the family lore, or the neighborhood lore about the former owner dying there.

But it was always kind of a cool house when I was really little because it was really big, there were lots of places to hide. But it was once I got older that it kind of took a turn for being really creepy.

SEAN: Now, why would you say --

MARION: It was especially after the house was renovated, when Natalie moved back in. The living room for instance, was closed off, and it got kind of more alcoved shaped rooms, and that's kind of when it started to get a little creepy for me.

SEAN: Why would you say it was getting creepy? Were you aware of the stories at that time or is this more organic?

MARION: I know that we would occasionally kind of refer to the house being haunted, but I was kind of used to it, so it wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary. It just felt like it got darker. It seemed like there just weren't enough lights on. To get into the living room, for instance, I used to play in there a lot when I was really little, but then I kind of would have to like hold my breath to go in if I had to get something out of the living room. In my memory, it's always really dark, as opposed to when I was really little, it was kind of just like a normal house.

But I did know that it was supposed to be haunted, and we all kind of agreed that it was haunted, but we also had kind of had an understanding that we're not really supposed to talk about because if we talk about it, then it will make it stronger. So we would just not really talk about it.

SEAN: Now, did your mother tell you anything about the incident which sort of kind of drove her and your father from the house?

MARION: She told me about it when I was I think like a senior in high school or something, so it wasn't until I was a lot of older and had already kind of expressed that feeling uncomfortable in the house and having some experiences. But she never went into a lot of detail. She kind of just alluded to like -- she would refer to being in there and a creature coming out of the closet.

SEAN: This was the Hell Room, right?

MARION: I'm sorry?

SEAN: This was in the Hell Room.

MARION: Yes. And also we usually always called it the Hell Hole, so I can switch my jargon if you like, but...

SEAN: The younger generation called it the Hell Hole.

MARION: Yeah, so there you go. There's a little cultural change there.

But yes. My understanding was that she was in that room with my father when she was still pregnant with me. A creature came out of that closet, like one of the closets that's in there, and scared them out of the house. And she was never -- she didn't really go into detail about whether it was a dog-like creature or a cat-like creature, but I do know that it had red eyes. That's the story.

And Natalie later talked about -- I overheard her talking to one of her friends about seeing red eyes in that closet, too, but I never saw anything. I never saw any red eyes in the closet.

SEAN: Okay. So eventually you started having some sort of experiences of your own, correct

MARION: Correct.

SEAN: Could you tell us about that and how it happened?

MARION: When it came to things that I actually witnessed while I was awake, there would be things like constantly hearing footsteps upstairs. Basically no matter what floor you were on, I could always hear footsteps upstairs, sound like furniture was moving around. There was always kind of like a light murmur like there were people talking. I would always just kind of hear that going around in the background, and it was always better if there were a lot of people talking because I wouldn't hear it as much. If I, like, went up to the -- to the third floor, I think one time I went up there to get -- there was a lot of -- Grandmom used to be in a makeup club, Jafra, and so I would go in there and get some of the makeup for it to give to my friends, and so that was in your old bedroom. So when I went up in there, I would always kind of see stuff out of the corner of my eye and hear things that kind of sounded like shuffling or like sheets moving around, is kind of what it sounded like.

SEAN: You say you've heard furniture moving, but did you ever and not necessarily see it move, but become aware that it actually did move, or was this all just auditory?

MARION: It was just auditory. I never saw it move, I just kind of heard it. It sounded like somebody was upstairs kind of like pushing tables around or something like that. But I never went up and looked for it or said anything because, again, we're not really supposed to talk about it because that would make it stronger.

And kind of later, I think in 2005 or 2004, I was a freshman at MICA, and I had a friend who wanted to have sound effects for a project, for an art project, and she wanted to get sound effects of people walking on wooden floors. But we didn't really know anybody who had a wooden house down by MICA, and I was like, Hey, my grandmother has a house that has wooden floors, so we could go over there. So we went over there and it was kind of -- it was at night, and I told Grandmom I wanted to do this, and she was like, Okay, why don't I go to the store and you guys can stay here. I'll be like an hour or something like that.

And so as soon as she left, the house got really dark looking. Like, it seemed like none of the lights were on anymore. It just kind of became this, like, impending, just scary kind of malicious feeling. But I was like, that's okay, I'm wearing a cross necklace, it will be fine. And so I was just like, okay, we'll go upstairs, we'll go in the front room, which I think is what you're calling Room One, the one with the --

SEAN: Yeah, Bedroom West. It's where Pops used to sleep, right?

MARION: Yeah.

SEAN: But he was already gone, he had already died.

MARION: Yeah.

SEAN: Okay.

MARION: Yeah. But I decided to go in that room because I always felt like that one was the least creepy room. Basically I didn't want to be kicking around in that master bedroom. I think Natalie was still living there so I didn't go in her room either. But so we were just kind of walking around in there, just taping our feet walking on the floor, and we could always kind of feel like there was something, like, right behind us. And I was like, that's okay, we'll just keep going, we'll get the sound effects. I think I even said out loud, like talking to it, "We're just here to get sound effects. We're not really doing anything else."

So we walked around and she could hear like banging in the middle of the room, but I just thought it sounded like someone was on a bed, like shuffling sheets around. And so we were like, okay, we got all the sound effects. We'll just go downstairs and we'll listen back and make sure that it's okay.

And so when we went downstairs and we were listening to it, it just sounded really strange, the tape that we had made. There was like this bad hissing noise that kind of sounded like it was, like, trying to come through the tape. It was really, really scary sounding, so we just turned it off. And then Grandmom came home, and all of a sudden, like the clouds lifted and it was just like a normal empty house, and it was perfectly fine. And my friend was really creeped out but I was like that's not that abnormal for here, and we just went on our way.

So that was one -- that's kind of a long story just about a thing that I actually witnessed there. But most of the times when I would have experiences in the house, they were more psychological rather than actually ever seeing anything.

SEAN: Okay. Now this is something that I want to explore here. You claim to have some sort of clairvoyance.

MARION: Yes.

SEAN: As your mother also claims. And your grandmother claims, if you've seen the interview, that had an angel that would warn her of things also.

MARION: Yeah.

SEAN: Which is another kind of clairvoyance, if you ask me. I'm assuming your clairvoyance is something more inside you going out, that's more internal, but in the case of your grandmother, it was definitely something external coming in. And I also had similar experiences as well. I guess you would call it in evangelical Christian circles, "word of knowledge," where you get, like, a couple words, something, you know, messages, messages from God or the Holy Spirit. And this was not something we discussed amongst ourselves at all. Most people didn't even know until I wrote my book about it, The Promise or The Pros and Cons of Talking to God, now available in most quality book sellers everywhere.

Baby Marion with her late aunt Laura

MARION: Always be plugging.

SEAN: Yeah, always be plugging.

So this is kind of a thing that has kind of surprised me as we started this journey of looking through the house and talking about the history. But so can you tell me how this kind of manifests itself in you, but also around what age it was and when it started?

MARION: So like what age the clairvoyance started?

SEAN: Yeah.

MARION: Or what age that Grandmom's house started getting into me?

SEAN: Well, let's say the clairvoyance first, and then Grandmom's house getting into you.

MARION: Okay, I think the most memorable, early memory of it would be I was five or so and I was in our house, sitting at the table. It was the middle of the day or something. I may have been four because I think it was -- I may have been in kindergarten or something. My mom was reading the paper and I was on the opposite end of the table, and I looked down, and on the table, across the whole table were these, like, weird kind of like wispy smoke, steam things coming up, like about 25 of them. They were about three or four inches tall. They were just kind of rising off the table. And I said to my mom, I was like, What is all that? And she was looking at and she's like, I don't see anything. And she saw that I was kind of freaking out, and she was just like, Uh, it's probably just a guardian angel or something. But I think we both kind of -- because my mom doesn't refer to that event, too. We both kind of saw it as like a -- well, it wasn't necessarily a guardian angel, but it was some sort of, kind of like a weird spirit that I was seeing, but there were multiple of them. And they were these really strange shapes that kind of looked like the -- is it caduceus? Is that what it is?

SEAN: What's that?

MARION: It kind of looks like a staff with, like, snakes around it. But then it kind of turned into this, like, human figure. It was very strange.

SEAN: So there was a human figure with it or you just saw the staff with the snakes around it

MARION: I saw -- it was sort of like a staff with snakes around, and then it turned into, like, kind of a human figure.

SEAN: Now, male or female?

MARION: You kind of see -- you have weird things that you imagine when you're a kid, but that one always kind of stood out as like a real thing that had happened. And then after that, I would see -- like, maybe starting around that same time, when I was six or so, I would see these weird like water droplets that would form in doorways and windows. And I would see it fall to the ground and I'd hear it splat, and I'd go and try to touch it and it wasn't wet and the doorway wasn't wet either.

And the first time it happened, I went and got my parents to come check it out because I thought that the ceiling was leaking, but it ended up not -- there was nothing there. And I still see that. Like, that still periodically happens. But then I recently have kind of kept an eye out for it because that's usually around -- if I see that, there's usually some other kind of ghost that I will encounter. So that was kind of an early manifestation of that, too.

This stuff is really trippy, and I don't really talk about it very much because it's pretty weird.

SEAN: Well, I'm glad you're taking the time to tell us, because I think anyone looking over at the entire phenomenon would have to look at our family and these kinds of experiences we had. Which for example, say it's not active with the people who are there now. It may be because they're not like us, like this.

MARION: Right.

SEAN: They might not have had these kind of previous paranormal or religious type of experiences. So did this mature in any way? Now, do you see ghosts and spirits or do you see like human -- do you see like ghosts or do you see spirits? And by ghost, I'm defining ghost as like human spirits.

MARION: I would say all of it. Like, I don't normally see them head-on, but I can kind of see them out of the corner of my eye, or I can kind of basically take a mental picture of it and then refer back to it and see them that way. Sometimes they're human. They're not always human.

Again, this is all kind of trippy and you know, I don't really talk about it very much, but yeah. And it has gone through various periods of being stronger or kind of being in a hiatus, but it's active still.

In fact, I was just at Josh's parents' house. I saw a thing there, too. And I kind of told Josh about it, and he was like, well, okay. He believes me, obviously, but he's kind of used to it.

Josh and Marion

SEAN: Well, Josh has had a lot of experiences like this in his past.

MARION: Yeah, he has.

SEAN: Now, did this give you any sort of foreknowledge or warnings, or anything --

MARION: Yes.

SEAN: Okay. Give me an example of that, if you could.

MARION: I could usually -- I would oftentimes get a weird -- like a dream that would kind of tell me that usually, like four months from now, somebody was going to die. Usually it would be older people, so it wouldn't be that surprising. But usually I would have like a dream where a relative that I haven't seen for a while comes and talks to me, or I would have a dream where -- like with Uncle Butch, for instance. Before he died, I had a dream that he drove over to our house and said that he was really happy now and he was -- his legs didn't hurt anymore. And then -- but he obviously eventually died, but it was kind of a weird sort of vision rather than just a dream.

So I would get kind of foreknowledge that usually like a relative was going to die. I think I got foreknowledge of Emily when she was getting sick the first time, too. I would -- I can oftentimes have a dream of a place before I've been to that place and know what's going to be there.

SEAN: I think your mother has that, too --

MARION: Yeah, she did.

SEAN: -- as well. So you have this predisposition. How does it end up reacting with the house?

MARION: I often would get nightmares of Grandmom's house. Like, when I was really little, I would get nightmares all the time. But once I got older, I was kind of paying more attention to what the nightmares were, and I was trying to write them down, too. And they were always Grandmom's house, and it got stronger and stronger, that I would eventually see a thing that's following me around. It would be this, like, dark, kind of black hidden thing with like a cloak that would like follow right behind me or be right in front of me.

SEAN: Did it have eyes and a face?

MARION: Yes. It had yellow eyes, which I thought was extremely strange, because I've never before or since seen anything like that. It was a face, like I could understand it was a face because it had eyes, and it sort of had, like, a chin and everything, but it wasn't a very -- it didn't look like one of my dead relatives or like a ghost. I understood it as something much worse.

SEAN: Could you attribute any sex to it? Male or female?

MARION: Um, not really, no. It was kind of an amalgamation. I think it was trending more male, but that might just be its kind of power, kind of had more of a male-ish tone, but I didn't get the feeling that it was a ghost, so I didn't get the feeling that it was like a human. So it didn't necessarily need a gender.

SEAN: Okay.

MARION: But in these dreams, it would just follow me from room to room, always be right behind me. It would get worse and worse, and it started getting really, really bad because I couldn't sleep at all.

SEAN: Where did it get worse?

MARION: Oh, it was when I was dorming at MICA***, Maryland Institute, is what they call it. But then it would keep me up all night. I would never get a full night's sleep. I tried to run away from it in my dreams. I tried to run to the parts of the house that were newer, but then it eventually was able to seep into all those places. I'd try to run into the backyard, and then the backyard would be transformed into this huge like expressionless face, which is really trippy. But it was always this Entity that was like also there. And so yeah, and so I dreaded sleeping because it was always going to be this nightmare.

SEAN: Now, did you get the sensation that this was a guided nightmare, that it was something interacting with your mind --

MARION: Yes.

SEAN: -- or whether it was internal?

MARION: I thought it -- because for a while -- I mean, because you know dreams are supposed to be your subconscious kind of working through problems or something like that. And I kind of wrote it off as that for a while, but them it really seemed like it was something that was coming to me in my dreams, like an outside thing.

SEAN: Did it ever speak to you?

MARION: Yes. Well, a lot of times it would kind of just be hinting at, because I knew that it wanted something from me, but then sometimes in the dreams, I'd be like hiding somewhere and I'd close up a room and I'd hide in it. And then I would hear my mother's voice calling me to go outside and I'd go out and I'd see that it was it and I'd close the door again.

SEAN: So it was like mimicking your mother's voice?

MARION: Yeah. So it would mimic -- yeah, mostly my mother's voice. I also had this other dream that I was in the master bedroom and I had the door latched and something was trying to get into it, and it ended up being this horrible creature that was like made out of bones, like these gristly bones, and it smelled like rotting meat and it was just trying to get underneath the door in the master bedroom. And so that's when I kind of started being like, okay, there's something bad about this closet. Like, in real life, I was really -- I was always really afraid of that closet, eventually. Because I mean, that's what the dream was doing, too.

SEAN: So were the dream centered around the closet? W as the center of activity for it?

MARION: Sometimes it was the closet. A lot of times it was the attic. Like the Hell Hole or Hell Room, according to whatever generation you're in. Yeah, so those were kind of in my head, were the main epicenters. So it was usually this, like, huge gaping stretching mouth that was sort of the house, and it would have all these awful yellow teeth and lighting and all this kind of like horror movie stuff. But I was not influenced by horror movies for it because I was too afraid, ironically, to watch horror movies when I was a kid.

SEAN: But you never saw any sort of thing like that at the house itself on St. Helens Avenue?

MARION: No. I never saw the Entity. That's what I've been calling it. I've never actually seen it firsthand when I was there. It might be because I never really spent the night. Like I said, I could kind of hear things, I could feel things. There was like a blackness that would kind of be pervasive, but I never saw it, but it was always very clear inside my head.

SEAN: Now, you heard furniture move in my room as well, right?

MARION: Yeah, it was -- because like I said, basically everywhere you were, you could always kind of hear something thumping on the ceiling. But when I was actually in your room, I could hear like shuffling. Like something kind of being dragged around, like scooting.

SEAN: Yeah.

MARION: Like cloth, basically.

SEAN: Because I am reasonably certain that while I was still there, after my initial very active time that, through prayer, that room was sealed off. It's interesting that I left there was activity up there again.

MARION: Maybe it was just sealed off from -- well, this is speculation -- obviously, it's all speculative, but maybe it didn't -- maybe it was just sealed off from you.

SEAN: Yeah. Because other than between the mid to late '80s, when I considered it at its peak, up until the very last day, it was very quiet around me. It was still bothering people all around the house. It was just quiet around me. And I really feel bad about that because I assumed it was dormant, not doing much.

MARION: Right.

SEAN: I'm sure it was still there, but I thought it was back into a nuisance stage.

MARION: Right.

SEAN: But it never was in a nuisance stage. I haven't interviewed your mother yet, but from the beginning with her, there was no nuisance stage. It was full blown. Which is one of the reasons I'm not afraid of triggering it, because I don't think it needs to be triggered.

MARION: Right.

SEAN: And I'm not sure it can even be cast out because it seems like it potentially exists in more than one house there. If you got it out of that house, it would still be just eight feet away.

MARION: The other thing too is that even though we didn't live there, at Raspe Avenue, we would have a lot of weird stuff happen, too, that would be classified as poltergeist activity there. Like light bulbs would be unscrewed randomly or things would be flipped upside down, or things would just go missing for days at a time and then show up in a really prominent place. One time when I was in high school, because I used to do painting -- I was doing painting class, and one time I was in the basement, and I was trying to paint this still life, and this ladle that I had set up, every time I looked over at it, it would be facing directly toward me, which is annoying when you're trying to paint a still life because it's supposed to be still.

SEAN: Yeah.

MARION: So I'd keep moving it back, trying to put it in the same place, and then every time I looked over, it would move back. And then -- just like in a half second, it just kept happening over and over again. It was really spooking me out. But I mean, like --

SEAN: You didn't actually see it move, but you would like turn away and it would be moved?

MARION: It would be in the matter of me looking at my easel painting and then looking back again and it had moved. And it wasn't like it wasn't like on a wobbly table. It was on cloth, it wasn't like slippery or anything like that. And so it was kind of like, well, okay, there's another kind of poltergeist thing. And my teacher noticed that I painted that one really badly, too. So he was like, it looks like it kept moving around when you were painting it.

I recently have been also thinking about, during the time when I was in a dorm at MICA, we had a lot of ghost stuff there, too. Like, we would hear stuff on the ceiling, we'd hear paper shuffling around. I'd get this sense of foreboding. All my friends, all our roommates, would hear -- like, it sounded like one of our roommate's rooms being ransacked when there was no one in there. There would be like this sound -- it sounded like someone dropping a ball, like (makes ball bouncing sound) over and over again, all night long. So much to the effect that our RA who lived underneath us near the end of the year came up and he's like, What is happening? Why do you guys keep doing this? We're all like, That's not us. It's been happening this whole time.

SEAN: Many people heard that then? It wasn't just you?

MARION: No, it was not just me. No, everybody heard it. It was really strange. So I've always kind of thought, well, that's just because there's ghosts everywhere, but thinking back, some of those kinds of things are things that we would hear at Grandmom's house. And so I wasn't sure -- and this was around the time when I was getting the really bad nightmares, so I'm not sure if it was, like, influencing me there to the point that we were getting kind of poltergeist stuff there too.

SEAN: Well, that was going to be my next question. Do you think that the poltergeist activity was possibly the Entity?

MARION: It could have been, yeah. I hadn't ever considered it, but I've been thinking about it recently, and especially with some similar attributes of things moving around upstairs when there's no upstairs, it's just a roof.

SEAN: Yeah.

MARION: And the fact that it's always happening when I'm around and not when other people are around is kind of problematic, too, for other people.

SEAN: So it did not happen around the other people?

MARION: It was when I was there. So no one else would say, Oh, man, when you were gone, something was totally knocking stuff over in your bedroom. It was always when I was there, everybody was hearing it happening in somebody's bedroom.

SEAN: I'm not an expert and there's no science here, but they say one of the key ways you can tell whether it's a demon or a ghost is if it moves with you. If it goes other places with you it's a demon.

MARION: Right.

The interview continues here: The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 17, Marion's Tale, Pt. 2

Emily, Jeanne and Marion

Here is a clip from the interview:

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.

**Subsequent to this interview, my niece Natalie mentioned that she also experienced clairvoyant events. She did not mention them in her initial interview, but hoped to discuss some of them in her upcoming interview about her mother's death.

***Charles Immler, Sr., the son of the first owner of 21 St. Helens Avenue, also attended MICA. So did Walter Bohanan, of 23 St. Helens Avenue.

Additional blogs about the haunting:

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

Let's stay in touch:

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Thursday, January 23, 2020

The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 15, Come Inside!

21 St. Helens Avenue

I have also found some items which should give you a better picture of the internal geography. Sadly, we have very few photographs of the bedrooms where most of the action took place during our time at 21 St. Helens Avenue. (I'm talking paranormal action.) Fortunately, my brother John provided our first visual aid. It is the booklet prepared by the real estate agent when my mother sold the house in 2005. It doesn't show all of the rooms, but the pictures and description should give you a good feel for the house.

For the full history of the house, and its previous residents, click Here.

Wow. Who wouldn't want to live there? It is a great house. Of course, no mention was made in the sales material of the non-material resident(s). I suppose we were practicing a don't ask, don't tell policy. Homebuyers out there, here's a word to the wise: Ask!

Strangely, I felt no sense of nostalgia when my mother sold the house in 2005. Unlike when the homes of my grandparents left the family, I don't remember going over to 21 St. Helens Avenue for one last look. I can't even remember the last time I entered the house before the sale. I did, however, go over for the auction when the house sold again in 2013. My mother sold the house for $289,000. The starting price at the auction was $10,000, probably because the owner was unable to complete his remodeling.

I pulled the following photos from the online listing of the house in 2013. They showed more of the rooms. (I am using these photos without permission.)

This is the entrance hall. It is a beautiful room. We always kept an upright piano next to the stairs under the small stained glass window. The stairs led to the platform where Miss Miriam Mayfort was found after a fall. Contrary to the neighborhood legend, she did not die there. She died at the hospital.**

The light hanging from the ceiling is the one my brother John saw swinging -- and stopping -- mysteriously.

This is the living room. I don't like what the next owner did to it. I really loved the original pocket doors which have been removed here. This room was generally a place of refuge. During the height of the haunting in the late 1980s, the entity would drive a person, or couple, from their bedrooms at night. They would end up on the sofa here. John Clayton Mayfort's funeral was held in this room in 1960. I also came within seconds of killing myself while sitting on a chair in front of the rear window in May of 1983. Additionally, my father Douglas Murphy would have strange one-sided conversations with someone or something while sitting in this room late in his life. Incidentally, he would be sitting where I nearly killed myself when he had those conversations.....

This was originally our family room, before the television was moved into the living room. The next owner absurdly expanded the bathroom across the entire back of the room blocking access to the addition my parents built. Now, you could only enter the addition through the bathroom! This became known as the organ room. The old church pump organ reportedly played by itself on occasion. I might have heard it myself. My late brother Mark, believing the organ was haunted, dragged the bulky instrument outside to the driveway and chopped it up with an ax. (My mother, who was away on the Eastern Shore, had given him permission to do so.)

The previous owner, Miriam Mayfort, apparently slept in this room on a day bed prior to her death.

I call this the Front West Bedroom. The bay windows face St. Helens Avenue. Originally, my parents lived in this room, but my mother shifted to other bedrooms over the years. My father remained in this room until his health began to fail and he moved downstairs. The room then became a guest room. There wasn't much paranormal activity reported in this room. However, a friend of my niece Natalie slept there and claimed the bed shook throughout the night.

According to neighbors, Miss Miriam Mayfort slept in this room before moving downstairs near the end of her life.

If I were living in that house now, I would pick this one to be my bedroom! It is the least creepy room on the second floor.

I call this the Front East Bedroom. The window on the left faces St. Helens Avenue. The other windows face Harford Road. Originally, I shared this room with my brothers Doug and Mark. Doug and I moved to our attic bedrooms within a year or so. When Doug left, Mark took his room in the attic. My mother then moved into the room with my infant brother John. A few years later, my mother moved out, leaving the room to John alone. He stayed there until the mid-1990s. Then he moved out briefly before returning to live in the basement apartment built but vacated by my brother Mark. With John in the basement, my niece Natalie moved into this room when she returned to St. Helens Avenue.

This bedroom was the site of a great deal of paranormal activity. Furniture moved. Items disappeared and reappeared. The entity would manifest itself in this room, sometimes as a dark cloud -- or blob -- and other times as a cloaked shadow figure. The entity usually entered the room through the closed door, or came in through the wall from the Front West Bedroom.

The Master Bedroom. The bay windows overlook Harford Road. The door on the right led to the sunporch. Further to the left, out of sight, is the door to the closet. This room's closet was one of three adjacent ones that were probably once a single small room, perhaps a nursery. The general consensus opinion is that those closets were the initial center of the haunting. Originally, my two sisters, Jeanne and Laura, lived in this room. After Laura married, Jeanne had the room to herself. When she left, my mother took up residence here. Natalie joined her in this room during her initial stay. When she returned a few years later, Natalie went to the Front East bedroom instead. She didn't want to go back here.

There was a great deal of paranormal activity in this room. My sisters began experiencing paranormal phenomenon immediately upon arrival at the house. Items disappeared and reappeared. The entity frequently entered this room as a dark mist (sometimes with red eyes) or a shadow person from the closet, whose door would never remain shut -- even if blocked or locked. The entity would get into bed with girls/women in this room and would either touch or fondle them.*** The entity also spoke to people in this room, sometimes in a mimicked voice. This was a bad place.

As you can see, the next owner did not finish his renovation of this room, or the adjacent closets and bathroom.**** Rumor has it that he fell ill after starting. I am not surprised. When I saw this room on the tour before the auction, I assumed that the entity had struck at him for messing with its home. Call me superstitious.

This would be the most frightening room in the house, it it weren't for....

The Front Attic Bedroom, aka, The Hell Room or The Hell Hole. The window overlooks St. Helens Avenue. Out of sight on the right, there is a full-sized, stand-up closet. Out of sight on the left, there is a cubbyhole.

My brother Doug first moved into this bedroom. When he left, my brother Mark moved in. After Mark left, this room became a guest room. My brother-in-law Jon Coe lived here briefly. My brother-in-law Frank also lived here briefly after the death of my sister. My brother Mark's girlfriend Beth crashed here for a few weeks. Afterwards, my mother tried living in this room briefly. After a while, people generally avoided this room at night.

You don't get called The Hell Room for nothing. There was a great deal of malevolent paranormal activity in this room, especially after my mother and her friend Ted tried using a Ouija board in here during the mid-1980s. The entity manifested itself in two different forms in this room. It appeared as a dark shape with red eyes in the stand up closet. It would also manifest itself as a large, malevolent cat-like creature. It also physically attacked my brother John in broad daylight. This is a room that people would leave screaming. The entity also spoke to people in this room, sometimes in a mimicked voice.

The fact that this large cat-like creature was never seen elsewhere in the house, as far as I currently know, makes me suspect that there were at least two entities in the house. The one that seemed to live in the closets downstairs that manifested itself as a dark shape or shadow person, and the one with the red eyes who lived in the closet here that also manifested itself in cat form. I was troubled to learn that my father, near the end of his life, used to walk up to this empty room in the middle of the night from his bedroom on the first floor to talk to something....

I tried staying in this room at the height of the haunting, but, frankly, I was too scared to go to sleep!

The Back Attic Bedroom. From this window, you had a marvelous panorama view stretching from the smokestacks of Sparrows Point, to the skyscrapers downtown, to the now gone Memorial Stadium. Immediately outside of the window was the flat roof of the sunporch. Beyond that was a very long, scary drop. The room seems so small in this picture, but it was quite roomy. I moved into this room in either 1975 or 1976 and stayed until I bought my own house in 1996. After I left, the room remained empty throughout the rest of the Murphy era.

When I lived in the house, there was a radiator at the back room to the right of the window. I generally kept my bed parallel to the radiator with my head at the right side wall. I experienced absolutely no paranormal activity in this room until after the Ouija board incident around 1986. Then I began hearing footsteps on the roof, usually on the sloping part on the right side. Then, three nights in a row, I woke up to find myself climbing out of the window at 3am. After that, I prayed frequently and the entity seemed blocked from entering the room. I did not experience any additional activity within that room from that day forward. However, after I left, people would hear furniture moving in this room -- despite the fact that there wasn't any furniture in it anymore.

The final stop on our tour of the house is a short film I shot for my Introduction to Film class at Towson State University circa 1981. The Uninvited starred Paula Malloy and Amy Slaughter, the girlfriends of my friends and Amway cohorts*****, Jim Jackson and Mike Mazziott. In the film, Paula Malloy is sleeping in the master bedroom when another woman breaks into the house and chases her into the attic. The second half of the film is sadly lost. In the end, the intruder is revealed to be an overzealous Amway distributor. How daring of me to bite the hand that wasn't feeding me!

The film was shot on Super 8mm. It was silent and I added the music and sound effects later.

Here it is:

That ends my little tour of the house. Although the paranormal activity seemed more centered in some rooms than others, many of my family never felt there was a completely safe place. They always felt they were being watched. There would always be footsteps and banging and doors opening and closing.

I wonder if it is still active?

My guess would be yes.

**I subsequently talked to a number of older neighbors at the funeral of a neighborhood matriarch. They all assured me that Miss Mayfort died on the landing. They simply must've declared her officially dead at the hospital.

***I haven't formally interviewed my sister Jeanne yet, so I do not know the true scope of the activity in the master bedroom.

****I have subsequently learned that the next owner did complete his renovation. However, he took a hammer to the walls of that bedroom, and the adjacent closets prior to moving out....

*****Yes, we were idiots.

Additional blogs about the haunting:

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.

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Sunday, January 19, 2020

The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 14, John's Tale, Pt. 2

John, circa 1994

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. This entry consists of the second half of an interview with younger brother John. John is unique because he was, to the best of my knowledge, the first child raised entirely in the house.

Here is a clip from the interview.

My wife Deborah and my mother Clara were also present for the interview. It was transcribed by my niece Emily. It has been edited for clarity.

SEAN: So, at one point you said that wasn't the scary stuff. So what was the scary stuff when you were on the second floor?

JOHN: So there was a time when I think Natalie was in -- Natalie was in, you say the master bedroom. The room with the sunporch, so that's the master bedroom.

SEAN: Yeah.

JOHN: Mom was either upstairs in the front room or in the bathroom, and I was in that bedroom still, and all the doors started banging. And I mean, if you had ten people banging on the door, you couldn't have banged as hard and as fast as the knocks were coming on the door. And it sounded like all the doors on that landing, which there were what, one, two, three, four, five, six doors, were all just, I mean, banging in the hinges. It woke me up in the morning, Natalie was screaming and mom was saying, "Nat, don't open the door." And she -- I mean, that's what I remember hearing, bang, I mean banging at like -- I can't describe that type of banging on the doors.

SEAN: I think that was the same incident that I had.

CLARA: No.

SEAN: I had an incident like that on my last day at the house.

JOHN: And it went on for a good maybe ten seconds.

CLARA: That wasn't the same time.

JOHN: It wasn't the exact same incident, I guarantee you. I don't think you were there anymore. I think you had moved out.

CLARA: Because the three of us were only -- it was only the three, Natalie, you, and I in the house at that time.

SEAN: Yeah.

JOHN: But that was definitely -- that was definitely one of the scarier things. You would get bangs like that sometimes. I was woken up by I'll say maniacal banging on the door a couple times, but that time stands out because it went on, like I say, probably for ten seconds. And when something like that is banging at your door, ten seconds is a long time. Okay. That is -- I mean, if you can count to ten seconds and imagine, you know, the sound of a dozen maniacs trying to break your door down as you wake up out of bed, that's terrifying. So that happened.

SEAN: I know that feeling. It may not have been the same event. Now, did anything ever approach you in the bed or get in bed with you?

JOHN: Like I said, there were times when you felt like you were kind of frozen in bed. I don't know. Again, I've heard kind of around the table type thing that people would feel something sat down or whatever with them and things like that. I don't think I can say that I ever had that happen. There were times when you would kind of wake up and feel like you were just unable to move, you know. Maybe something might be kind of -- you were almost sunken into the bed, and then that's kind of when you would start seeing these, you know, things, hallucinations or whatever for lack of a better word, I don't know.

SEAN: Did you see any other creatures in your room other than that one thing you were talking about earlier?

JOHN: Not necessarily, I don't think so.

SEAN: Okay. Let's go to something you mentioned earlier.

JOHN: It was always the unseen things, I'll tell you that. Like, looking back on this, like I mean, everybody always wants to hear about stories and all that, and it's really hard to put it into words. It was an unseen, like, force that was also just kind of chasing you around almost. And it wasn't -- I don't know, it wasn't always out showing itself. Like, it wasn't -- I don't know. It would be hard to make a movie about it because it's not a real visual thing all the time.

SEAN: So let's go back to the cats.

JOHN: Okay.

SEAN: Now, are you familiar that other people in the house had seen cats other than you and your friends?

JOHN: Yeah, I had heard that.

SEAN: Now, the thing is, if I'm not -- I could be wrong because I haven't interviewed Jeanne yet, but Jeanne saw a cat-like creature apparently up in the Hell Room, and your mother also saw a cat-like creature up in the Hell Room, so until your conversation here, you know, the only cats that people saw were up in the Hell Room. So did you -- where did you see any of these cats? You saw them down -- they saw them downstairs, too, right?

JOHN: People would say that they saw a cat. People would go downstairs to the kitchen. So what, you would go down -- yeah, you would go down through the dining room into the kitchen to get a glass of water, ice, whatever, and they would mention a cat, and I would say, we don't have a cat. You know, maybe, you saw something else.

SEAN: But it wasn't something malevolent, it wasn't like a screeching, demonic cat?

CLARA: A kitty cat, he's talking about.

SEAN: Yeah, that's what you're talking about, like a neutral cat.

JOHN: They would -- it's not -- as far as I know, nobody ever picked it up or petted it or anything, but they would say that they saw a cat down there and they would mention that I never said that I had a cat. And I said, well, we don't have a cat. They said, well, we thought we saw one or whatever. Some of these people are the people that never kind of wanted to come back again.

A lot of my friends would have experiences in the bathroom on the second floor. That bathroom had a lot of bad vibes associated with it. People always felt uneasy. No matter what you did, I don't care who you were, you were not going to take your eyes off of that closet in that bathroom while you were in there. Whether you were watching it in the mirror while you were brushing your teeth or whatever else you were doing, you had your eyes on there because there was something up with that bathroom, with that closet in there. It was just a bad feeling coming out of there.

SEAN: Well, I must say that I occasionally would reach over and make sure that that door was closed.

JOHN: Yeah, yeah, right? Uh-huh.

SEAN: Well, part of it is also, too, it connects to other rooms in a weird way. So did you feel any -- did you feel that there were any places in the house more haunted than others? I don't think the word "haunted" is correct.

JOHN: I think the upstairs front bedroom, as we say, the Hell Room.

SEAN: Yeah.

JOHN: Was certainly the center maybe of it or whatever. There was a short period of time when I thought it would be fun to go up there, and I, you know, took some stuff up there and tried to stay up there a couple nights, but I would always either end up on the couch or camped out back in the bedroom down there. I mean, like as a, I don't know, maybe 12, 14, teenager or whatever. Because it was a cool room. It had the sloping ceilings, you know, and you had the great view of the street from up there. And it was private, it was away from the rest of the house for the most part. You know, I mean, it was quiet up there. But it was definitely creepy up there.

The Hell Room -- Seems innocent enough, right?**
The cubbyhole was on the left.
The closet was on the right.

I don't think I ever spent a whole night up there. Both of those closets up there were terrifying. That little cubbyhole was really scary. Just the fact that -- I mean, it was -- I don't know, it was always just so dark in there in that little corner where the cubby was, and it had another weird cut up into the ceiling that just kind of made that really dark over there.

Yeah, and I had a -- I had a really -- probably the most realist experience I ever had in that house happened in that room. There used to be -- I'm guessing this is before -- it's probably right before Jeanne moved back because I'm guessing they probably would have redecorated it a little bit, but it was basically an empty room. Like I said, I had a little bit of handful of things up there, it was an empty room. It had been painted already because, if you remember, it was painted all --

CLARA: Dougie did that.

SEAN: Dougie painted it with black lines. White and then spray painted black lines.

JOHN: Yeah, it was white and then black all over, and it was like a zigzag crazy pattern or whatever, kind of random pattern on the wall. It had already been painted.

CLARA: To gray.

JOHN: Yeah, it was gray with, like, gray tones on the woodwork and stuff. And then there were -- you had the mirror in the center of the front wall -- I mean, I'm sorry, you had a window and you had mirrors on either side of the window.

CLARA: Mark*** did that.

JOHN: And then on the one side, you had photographs of old sports teams, maybe it was Mark's, Dougie's --

CLARA: Yeah, Mark's.

JOHN: -- Sean's, whatever. Anyway, they were hanging up there. They were old, washed out photos, and I can specifically remember standing there, looking -- I don't know why I was up there, but I was up there, I was young. Like I say, it was probably -- it had to have been before Jeanne moved back, so I was probably 11 or 12. Maybe I was 13, I don't know. I was standing up there, looking at the photos, and I was always trying to find whoever it was, you know, trying to find a person in the photo. It was a whole team of kids, and I remember almost getting, like, hypnotized by the photos and just kind of zoning out for a second, and something, a hand on each shoulder, lifted me and threw me into where the photos were on the wall, like off of my feet, boom, into the wall.

And I remember coming off of it, stunned, and I said, "Sean, that's not funny," and quickly realized Sean wasn't there, nobody was there. Obviously you weren't there, you would probably remember responding to something like that. And I remember seeing -- I remember it all clicked in my head that I could see the mirror, I could see the doorway of the Hell Room behind me into your room where your door was open, so nobody came through that doorway because I would have seen it in the mirror. There was nobody in the room with me. Something definitely grabbed each side of my shoulders, lifted me and threw me into the wall. So that happened.

You know, I was probably, I don't know, at least 150 pounds or something. It's not like I was light. I didn't stumble, wind didn't do it. I don't know. I didn't slip, trip, fall. So that is the experience -- a lot of the other stuff, maybe I could say it's mass hysteria, maybe I could say, you know, yeah, everybody's crazy, maybe I'm crazy too. You know, maybe it is a hallucination, maybe there is a more natural explanation, which is something I've been always looking for, which helps to explain my belief or lack of, maybe you would say. But that one thing really stands out to me because I can't explain that one away.

SEAN: Well, let me say something, because I just first found out about this when we had that meeting over at Jeanne's house, and you said something that I thought was very important. You said that you felt that, had you been a couple inches over, you would have been out that window and everyone would have thought it was a suicide because you were at that age.

JOHN: I didn't think about that until years later. Like I said, this is something that stuck with me. This is the one thing that kind of jumps out and always kind of gets my attention whenever I would think about it. But yeah, it threw me into the wall with enough force where I hit the wall. So if I would have been standing in front of the window looking out and whatever happened happened, it might have been enough to push me through that window. And that's a long way up. So yeah, that would have been bad. It would have looked like I jumped out the window.

SEAN: Yeah. So you know, I kind of got interested in this, and I wrote my book Chapel Street because your mother asked me whether I thought that the entity in the house was in some way partially responsible for the deaths of Mark and Laurie****, and that was further reinforced in my mind by hearing -- you know, by my own experiences of crawling out the window, your mother's experience of her brakes seemingly to go out while she was on the Eastern Shore, and also when you told me this incident recently about you at the window. You know, it seems to me that there are a number of things.

Now, I'm not saying that Laurie and Mark didn't kill themselves. Obviously they killed themselves. You know, I mean, it was not an accident, it was not a manipulation. I mean, it wasn't a physical manipulation in that sense. You know, these were actual real incidents. But do you in any way think that the entity or the lingering affects of the spirit of the entity could have been in any way responsible for those things?

JOHN: I don't know. That to me -- that's a leap I can't make right now. I mean, as far as I know, I barely remember a time that Laura lived in the house. She moved out.

CLARA: You were probably 2 or 3, 8?

JOHN: Six. Well, what, Natalie was -- I think I was 7, so she probably moved out I guess when I was around 6 and a half years old or something. So I don't ever really remember her being there. I can't say that it ever had an affect on her. As far as Mark, I mean, who's to say? You know, Mark was a very complicated character. I can't say that, that it would -- in hindsight, I can't say that.

SEAN: Well, I'll say -- let's talk about Mark for a second because I don't know if you considered Mark your mentor, but I think Mark tried to consider himself your mentor. It seemed like he was always --

John and Mark, circa 1980

JOHN: Mark thought he was, I think, everybody's mentor in some sense.

SEAN: Yeah, so I always felt kind of sorry for you because it seemed like he was always taking you under his wing.

JOHN: Yeah, he gave me a lot of shit.

SEAN: Now, did Mark ever talk to you about things in the house?

JOHN: No, I don't think so. Nothing more than, like I said, I mean, talking about maybe the organ or something going off. More I remember as a kid. But no, I don't ever remember any serious talk with Mark about this. No, I don't think so.

SEAN: Yeah, but you remember, he did cut up the organ. He did take one day when your mother was down and --

CLARA: He asked me if he could.

JOHN: Yeah, he wanted to get rid of that organ.

CLARA: Yeah.

SEAN: And I think it was because -- you know, he had told somebody else what was ever in the house was in the organ.

JOHN: I mean, that could be. I don't know. He may have thought that, I don't know. He -- I don't think anybody really liked that organ. Why did we even have that organ? I don't know if it ever truly worked.

CLARA: Mr. Kirk****.

JOHN: Oh, it was Mr. Kirk who set it up?

CLARA: Yeah, some church.

JOHN: I mean, I know the piano was always --

CLARA: I mean, it was there before the organ.

SEAN: Yeah, it was there before the organ.

JOHN: Yeah, I know. Just as an aside, that was a big old creepy organ. You know, I remember playing on it when I was a kid.

CLARA: It stunk, too.

JOHN: Yeah, it smelled like an old -- I mean, it was just sitting wood.

SEAN: It smelled like dust.

CLARA: It smelled like an old man.

JOHN: Yeah, like an old church basement or something.

SEAN: Yeah.

JOHN: But it's funny because we always had a piano, and the piano was always tuned and it was always able to be played and all, but the organ I don't think was ever truly operational.

SEAN: No.

CLARA: You had to pump it.

SEAN: You really had to pump it. And it's funny that people have said, and I think I heard it once, in all honesty, but no one ever claimed to hear the piano play, that I'm aware of.

Sister Jeanne playing the "haunted" organ.

JOHN: No, I don't think I ever did.

SEAN: It's interesting that people claim they heard the organ play but not the piano.

JOHN: Yeah, right. Yeah, that was always the tale, you know, that the organ was heard. I don't know who said it.

CLARA: I never heard it.

JOHN: Yeah, I don't think I ever -- I can't say I ever did.

CLARA: If anything, it would have been the piano, and I would just assume it was somebody.

JOHN: That was something I remember when I was a little kid, people would say, and I always, you know, who knows, they were just saying it to scare me. But I always remember that being something that was always talked about, that the organ would play at night or whatever.

SEAN: Okay. Now, let's get back to the darkness, as it were, if there was any. Now, do you ever -- did you find yourself in any way, like, spiritually or psychologically oppressed at heights of this thing's activity?

JOHN: I don't know. I don't know what you mean by that.

SEAN: I mean, did you feel like an oppressiveness or did you have suicidal thoughts while you were living in the house?

JOHN: No. No. Like I said, it was always just kind of something that I thought was kind of lurking, you know. But I -- no, I never felt like it was -- what would you say?

CLARA: Like it got in your mind?

JOHN: Yeah, right. Yeah, no, it never got inside of your head type -- or at least not to me. I can't say that that ever happened. You know, it was always something that was outside of myself. It never tried to, like, whisper in my ear things or whatever.

SEAN: Okay. Well, that's an important point. Did it ever speak to you?

JOHN: I never heard it say anything directly, no.

SEAN: You're putting some caveats on that. Like, I never heard it say anything directly.

JOHN: No, I never heard it speak at all, uh-uh.

SEAN: Okay. Well that puts you -- because other people have heard it speak.

JOHN: Yeah, I can believe it.

SEAN: I find it interesting that --

JOHN: A lot of people had a lot of weird encounters in that house.

SEAN: Yeah, so okay. And other than Mark, you were the only other person that I'm aware of who actually lived in the basement.

JOHN: Yeah. So I lived in the basement for I guess six or seven years.

CLARA: That long?

JOHN: Well, I moved in there I guess in '96 until you moved out. So what was that?

SEAN: Ten years.

JOHN: No. Was it? 2003?

CLARA: When did Mark die?

SEAN: Mark died in '99. Pops***** died in 2003.

JOHN: So yeah, that's about right.

SEAN: Butch died in 2005******.

JOHN: In 2002, 2003.

CLARA: That's when I remember it.

SEAN: And in 2005, July 21st.

JOHN: Okay. 2005, yeah, right.

CLARA: That's when I moved out.

JOHN: So it was about ten years, okay, yeah.

SEAN: Now, did you -- was there any activity in the basement?

JOHN: Like I say, you could always kind of hear stuff going on upstairs. I think that it -- as far as I know, it was pretty much -- it was a lot more quiet when I lived in the basement.

CLARA: I couldn't stand it.

JOHN: You know, I don't remember being as, would you say maybe like aware of it all the time as when I lived upstairs at all.

SEAN: So up on the second floor you were aware of it all the time?

JOHN: It seemed like it, yeah. I mean, it was always kind of -- like I said, there was always kind of something in there going across that hallway, going up those stairs. It always just seemed like there was something kind of right on your heels, you know. Something following you, something watching you. In the basement when I lived down there, it wasn't so much, I don't think.

CLARA: Did you --

SEAN: Did you have, like, objects moving or anything?

JOHN: You would get a little bit of that.

CLARA: Did you sleep in that bedroom or did you sleep on the sofa?

JOHN: No, I always kind of slept out on the sofa. I didn't really like that bedroom.

CLARA: Yeah, Mark I know told me he couldn't sleep in that bedroom.

SEAN: So Mark said he couldn't sleep in it?

CLARA: Mark said he could not sleep in that bedroom.

SEAN: It's interesting, because the bedroom, where the bedroom was, that was -- he built a free-standing bedroom there at first, which he destroyed.

CLARA: No.

SEAN: Yes, he did destroy it. I remember he tore it down because he said it was a sound proof room and he felt that somebody was going to molest children in there if he didn't take it down.

JOHN: Well, I don't know about that.

SEAN: Oh, I remember that.

JOHN: No, that bedroom, I didn't like sleeping in that bedroom.

SEAN: Plus there was no -- there was only that little window that was at the driveway level.

JOHN: Yeah.

SEAN: So it was probably a gloomy room. I don't think I was ever in the bedroom once that room was set up as an apartment on the bottom. I was down in the big room numerous times, you know, like the living room/kitchen, but I don't think I ever really went in the bedroom. I mean, I was aware of it.

JOHN: Well, I think part of it for me was that I -- when I was in that house, and I noticed this, I always slept with the TV on when I lived in that house. I didn't like to sleep in the quiet. I always wanted to have the television on when I slept, and so I always slept -- I always had a TV in the bedroom. But when I lived in the basement there, I didn't have the TV in the bedroom, so I think that was a big part of it, that I always had the television on out in the living room.

SEAN: Now, where you live now and where you lived after that, did you always feel the need to keep the TV on?

JOHN: No. Uh-uh.

SEAN: So that was something because of the house?

JOHN: I think so. Like, you didn't want the quiet because you didn't want to hear the footsteps upstairs and you didn't want to hear the furniture moving around. You know, things like that.

SEAN: So here's another question: Do you think there was only one thing in the house or were there -- you think there were possibly more than one entities?

JOHN: Oh, I don't know. As far as I know, there was only one. I mean, it's hard to say. But as far as I know, there was only one. I can't say there was more than one thing.

SEAN: Okay. And you had experiences on the second floor, you had experiences on all floors except the basement, except in a real sense?

JOHN: Yeah, you could say that. Yeah.

SEAN: So did you ever have -- you didn't really have many conversations with Mark about the...

JOHN: No, I didn't. I can't remember him ever bringing it up, and I know that I never brought it up with him. Yeah, he was usually really focused on something that he would come to me about. So if he wanted to talk about it, I'm sure he would have talked about it with me or whatever. I don't ever remember him bringing it up.

SEAN: Well, it's funny in a sense that after the Ouija board incident where we had the family meeting, which we pointedly did not want to discuss with you, but I went to Mark and I asked him -- he was not living in the house at the time. And I asked him, "Did you have any experiences up in the Hell Room while you were living up there, supernatural experiences?" And he said, "I was so high all the time when I was living up there, I wouldn't know if I did or not."

JOHN: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know.

SEAN: But also as your mother pointed out, when he was up there, he suddenly got religious. He started putting up, like, crucifixes and had a Bible and a nativity scene and things like that when he was there.

JOHN: I do remember that. I do remember that, when he had the nativity scene, he wanted to have that set up up there. Yeah, that definitely was a thing, I remember that.

SEAN: It was out of character for him.

JOHN: Yeah, it was. It was. I guess that was after he had come back from Phoenix.

SEAN: Yeah. And Beth his girlfriend stayed there too for a couple of months, if I'm not mistaken, up in the Hell Room, too.

CLARA: At least a month.

JOHN: Yeah, she crashed there a couple weeks.

SEAN: Yeah, that will be interesting. And also I think one of the reasons you were up in the Hell Room a lot was when we got that Commodore 64, our first computer in the house, it was up in the Hell Room, underneath where that light was, with the cubby closet to your right-hand.

JOHN: Yeah.

SEAN: I would write on that. I started -- we got the program Paperback Writer, so I was writing a lot. But there were also a lot of video games.

JOHN: Yeah, I was going to say that too. We spent a lot of time up there, Joe and I particularly, because Joe also had a Commodore 64 and he was in a club, or members of his family were in a club where they would trade games. So we always had new games coming and going. And Joe and I, you know, would spend a lot of time up there playing games, and we were always -- like I mean, it was kind of an inside joke. We were always getting creeped out up there. Because I know you would kind of take over the computer at night, I think it was.

SEAN: Yeah, because I'd get home and I'd write.

JOHN: Right, you would get home and write and we would always be up there, either during the day if it was a rainy day or whatever, sometimes at night we'd be up there. We were always kind of creeped out by stuff up there. Like I say, it was kind of almost an accepted thing, like an inside joke that we kind of both knew it was haunted but we both really wanted to play video games up there.

SEAN: Now, Joe told me he felt -- and I think Joe was mistaken in this, because I was communicating with him on Facebook. He said that he always felt that it lived in the cubbyhole in my room, and that you guys would considered it crazy that I could even live in that room, sleep in that room. But I was wondering if he was confused and thinking the Hell Room or my room. Did you think my room cubbyhole thing was --

JOHN: Well, the cubbyhole, like I said, was always something that got our attention. The cubbyhole was just always super, super creepy. I can't speak for him, but we knew that you had that cubbyhole in there too that was all loaded up with whatever, I don't know. I mean, there was all kind of old junk in there, so we always were like, oh, my God, what could be in there?

SEAN: It was filled with boxes of books. There wasn't room for anything else in there.

JOHN: Oh, well, there you go. Yeah, so it was always just kind of mysterious, the cubbyholes and all. We knew that there was just stuff packed away in there and it was just really creepy. Yeah, I don't know specifically what. It would be good to talk to him about all this, too. See what he remembers.

SEAN: Yeah, I'm going to reach out to him and a few other people. So any final thoughts? You know, what are you -- what is your takeaway from living on 21 Saint Helens Avenue?

JOHN: Well, I don't know. It changed probably the way that I look at a lot of stuff. Like you say, like a belief system or whatever. Like, I've always tried -- I've looked at a lot of different angles to try to explain what happened there. You know, I mean obviously there's a lot of different beliefs in the world, you know, different cultures believe different things. I've tried to maybe look through different explanations, I guess, you know, natural or otherwise, and I don't think there's anything that really defines the whole thing. I mean, there's parts of it you can explain as this, parts of it you can explain as that, you know. I mean, maybe -- like I say, there's some of it could be hallucinations, but a hallucination didn't pick me up and throw me into the wall or whatever. You know? I mean, there's --

SEAN: It didn't bang on your door either.

JOHN: It didn't bang on the door.

SEAN: While other people were hearing it as well.

JOHN: Right, there's other people verifying these things. Carbon monoxide poisoning, you know, radon poisoning, there's -- I mean.

CLARA: It's true.

JOHN: You know, that chimney went up the whole house.

SEAN: Yeah.

JOHN: That chimney could be leaking. All these things are things that I thought about over the years. It had to be this, it had to be that. Because the most out -- I don't want to say outrageous, but the most outlandish and unexplainable thing is that something was haunting that house. Any natural phenomenon would be a more quote, unquote "reasonable explanation" for that than something supernatural. You know, so just looking for a way to kind of figure out what happened there is kind of what led me down the path to believing or not believing what I think of now. So maybe in closing it is a mystery, I think, that maybe we'll figure out, maybe we won't. A lot of things, it might be too late, you know, so... But it's good to talk about.

SEAN: But you did not have any similar experiences when you moved out?

JOHN: No.

CLARA: No.

JOHN: I've been to a lot of places -- I mean, everybody has. I've never felt anything like that any place else. Any place I've ever lived or any place I've ever been.

CLARA: Before you end, let me ask you about when Ben was here.

JOHN: Yeah, right.

CLARA: I know I asked him at breakfast after he was first -- the first night he stayed, and he told me he couldn't -- I said, "How did you sleep?" And he said, "Every time I would fall asleep, something would push my head." Did he say anything to you about anything?

JOHN: Yeah, Ben.

CLARA: I mean, because he was -- he wasn't a neighbor, he wasn't somebody who heard stories. He just --

SEAN: Let me explain, yeah, Ben was an --

CLARA: Exchange student.

SEAN: German exchange student.

JOHN: Ben was a German exchange student. He was probably there for a month and a half or something? Was it four weeks?

CLARA: A couple weeks, yeah.

JOHN: I think it's four weeks that we did, and then I went there for four weeks. Anyway, I had met Ben the summer before when I went to Germany, and so when he came as an exchange student, it was a no-brainer that he would stay with us. So we set up -- what did we have? We had like a little rollaway cot --

CLARA: A cot, he had a cot.

JOHN: -- that we had set up, a little twin size bed for Ben that was kind of at the foot of my bed.

CLARA: By the radiator, it was.

JOHN: Yeah, he was along the wall by the radiator. It fit right in there. And yeah, he was saying that he couldn't sleep and that there was something, that he felt like something was messing with him at night, that something was waking him up, something was pushing him around.

SEAN: Did he think it was you?

JOHN: At first he asked me if it was me, you know, like... But I'm like, no, you know. And then we kind of explained to him what was going on or whatever. I don't know what he really thought about it, but yeah, I do distinctly remember him saying something was pushing him, keeping him up at night, poking him, you know. And yeah.

SEAN: Why do you think it was so hostile to him but not -- like, it didn't physically attack you on the second floor at any point, it never touched you, did it?

JOHN: No, I don't think so. Like I said, there were times when you would wake up at night and you almost felt like a pressure.

CLARA: Yeah, you would feel like you were --

JOHN: But I never felt like I was actually being, like, physically touched by it, no. But see, that's the thing that's so strange, is that you can't --

CLARA: Right.

JOHN: Everything that I saw, everything, whatever happened to me, is completely different. I don't think I was ever touched by anything as far as physically touched while I was in that bedroom, which obviously I was in there a lot more times than Ben, but that was what happened with him. I wish I could ask him about it now, but that was so long ago. But yeah, there was definitely an incident with Ben.

SEAN: And I also want to point out that you have not read the transcripts that are online or you have not watched the interviews with the other people.

JOHN: No. Actually, I didn't want to, I don't know, what do you say, like...

CLARA: Taint yourself?

JOHN: Yes, right. Taint my interview or whatever you want to call it by, you know, hearing somebody else's and maybe having that flavor my thoughts or whatever. I wanted to try to come into this with just a clean slate, as it were, in my mind and try to remember. Like I said, I've been thinking about it the last couple days, trying to get it together. Just if there was anything that really stood out. I actually might watch them now.

SEAN: Yeah.

JOHN: Just to see everybody else's.

SEAN: Well, it seems to me that you'll be surprised. You say everything was different, I think you'll be surprised to see that there's a lot of similarity.

CLARA: Yeah.

JOHN: Okay. Yeah, right, there's definitely a lot of overlaps.

John with his surviving siblings. Sean, John, Jeanne & Doug

CLARA: See, I didn't know that you had the disappearing things.

JOHN: Oh, yeah.

CLARA: My brush would disappear, my earrings would disappear, or whatever, I always put it down right there and it's gone, and you could search the whole house and you weren't going to find it, and then you wake up one morning, there it is right there.

JOHN: I remember very distinctly, and I'm sure if you get ahold of Joe, he could tell you this too. There was a glass prism like that you used to split the light or whatever, that we had, and it was notorious for disappearing. We would actually put it either, like, on top of the television or on top of the doorway or somewhere, and everybody's like, see, we're putting it right here. And then you know, whatever, you go back about, we played a lot of video games, whatever, listening to music, whatever, go about your business, and everybody's like, oh, look, it's gone. Look on top of the door, the prism's not there. Maybe a day later you would look and it would be gone.

Now, there's always a chance that somebody grabbed it and was playing a joke, but I doubt it. Because it would show up again. I bet you I still have that thing someplace. But that was something that was -- I know just because a prism is something you're going to remember, but I remember that we always had that, and I bet you that Joe would remember that too.

Here's another clip from the interview.:

Notes:

**Photograph from the 2013 real estate listing. Used without permission.

***Mark Brendan Murphy, b. 26 February 1964, Baltimore, MD., d. 14 September 1999. Flint, Michigan. Cause of death: Suicide.

****Laura Lee Murphy Valenti, b. 27 September 1962, Baltimore, MD., d. 15 February 1994, Baltimore, MD. Cause of death: Suicide.

*****Alfred Augustus Kirk, Jr., b. 21 May 1891, Cecil, MD., d. 12 January 1982, Dade, Florida. He was our piano teacher. He was a World War I veteran and a respected impressionistic artist. My mother still has some of his paintings.

******Douglas Ernest Murphy, Sr., b. 2 October 1941, Scranton, PA, d. 12 March 2003, Baltimore, MD.

******John Norbert "Butch" Rosenberger, b. 23 January 1917, d. 15 May 2005. A great-uncle on our maternal side. He was a frequent visitor to St. Helens Avenue, and sometimes in his later years would stay at the house when his sister Rita, who cared for him, went on vacation.

Additional blogs about the haunting:

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.

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