Frankly, the lady of the house is tired of talking about the ghosts. She doesn’t believe in them. But with wry resignation, she informed The Rake that she would tell us what she knows, and even invited us over to see for ourselves. She’s used to being pestered like this. Making time for writers seeking a solid ghost angle for their annual Halloween stories is the price one pays for living in St. Paul’s most notorious haunted house.
The building is a Romanesque brick mansion on Summit Avenue, built in 1882 by grocery and timber magnate Chauncey Wright Griggs. The massive stonework turrets are striking. It looks like it should be haunted. And so, inevitably, people claimed it was.
At least seven different spirits are said to inhabit the house. These include a maid who purportedly hanged herself over an unhappy love affair in 1915; she made numerous appearances on the staircase. In 1959, residents reported seeing the disembodied, floating heads of a child and a grown man. In the early 50s, a Dr. Delmar Kolb claimed he’d had two bedside encounters with a black-clad figure in a top hat who touched him with “two dead fingers on my forehead.” This ghost was reported so often in later years that residents wound up naming him “George.”
Between 1939 and 1964, the mansion was home to the St. Paul School of Arts, and ghost sightings were just whispers and rumors told after class. Then it was bought by Carl Weschcke, owner of Llewellyn Publishing, the legendary local publisher of occult books and magazines. Naturally, he spread the word with enthusiasm.
In 1969, Weschcke invited St. Paul Pioneer Press reporters Don Giese and Bill Farmer to spend the night in the room next to the spectral maid’s stairwell. They heard footstep-like noises on the landing, and had “a ‘feeling’ that ‘something’ was on those stairs.” By 4 a.m., rattled and unnerved, they fled. “There is no prize on Earth that could get us to spend a single night alone in that great stone house that seems to speak in sounds we cannot explain or understand,” they wrote. The Rake caught up the other day with Bill Farmer, now an editor for MSP Airport News. With the healing passage of time, he laughed about it. Farmer said what really unnerved him was Weschcke’s decor, which included “kinky witchy stuff” such as leather masks and a coffin. “To spend the night there was enough to give anyone a chill across the spine,” he said. “But phantasmagorical? No.”
The 1985 book Haunted Heartland added a juicy new anecdote to the legend. On a cold February night in 1965, it says, police found a hysterical, near-naked young man staring at a pentagram painted on the basement floor. Over and over he screamed, “I have seen death!” When we conjured Weschcke on the telephone to ask about this incident, he denied knowledge of it. A practicing Wiccan, he did hold rituals in the house. But nothing so dramatic took place there, he said. (St. Paul police records only go back to 1967. It’s not implausible. This was the 60s, after all.)
Weschcke sold the house more than 20 years ago, and the notoriety has dimmed. Nevertheless, it’s a recurring nuisance for the current owners, who asked The Rake not to reveal their identities or the address, and also to discourage uninvited visitors. (You are hereby warned: Stay away!) We can report, though, that the mansion’s current caretakers do have a healthy sense of humor: They keep an “emergency kit” inside the foyer, stocked with anti-vampire wooden stakes, garlic, holy water, and a silver cross. Just so, they’ve never felt anything unearthly in the house, and they fear that encouraging these ghost stories demeans an architecturally significant, historic home.
Presently, the undead do not pose a problem, but reporters and thrillseekers continue to haunt the current owners. When strangers call, they ask about ghosts, and people still drive by and gawk whenever a new story’s published. (Repeat: Stay away, if you know what’s good for you!) On Halloween, the mansion is an irresistible destination. “Last year we had 700 kids. I think they bus them in,” said the householder. “I never have enough candy. And I always buy a lot.”
There is one thing Weschcke and the current owners agree on—that the ghosts, if they ever existed, are probably gone. “Most such manifestations and hauntings, poltergeists and so forth, much of it is a matter of psychic recordings,” said Weschcke, with a nifty post-modern take on the matter. “And like anything else, as time goes by, the media deteriorates.” The current owners said the house was recently given the all-clear by a “supersensitive” visiting clairvoyant. “She was telling me that she feels no vibrations,” said the lady of the house. One of her eyebrows levitated. “Whatever vibrations are.”
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