Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This odd little tale appeared in the “Asheville Citizen-Times, January 6, 1909:

Alleging that burglars or ghosts of burglars, masked figures possessed of demoniacal desire to Invade his home in South Biltmore made his life a torment, Reuben Baldwin, who lives opposite the Methodist church, appeared before the board of county commissioners yesterday and asked that the county officially provide guards for his residence. 

It was almost a remarkable tale that Mr. Baldwin unfolded to the astonished commissioners. He said that the burglars were generally dressed in white like ghosts and wore masks and that they frequently sought entrance to his home and got in despite the fact that he had boarded up his lower story windows. The strange visitors, he said, had bored so many augur holes in the windows and pried the casings to such an extent that he could not get the glass to stay in and when he did succeed they came with diamond pointed tools and cut out sections of the glass. 

The commissioners were much astonished at the boldness of burglars so close to the city and asked Mr. Baldwin for particulars and why the burglars were so anxious to get in. Mr. Baldwin said he did not know why they were so anxious to enter, but supposed they thought the house was an easy mark because he worked at nights and was not at home at that favorable time for house breakers. He had hired a man to stay with his family, but this availed nothing because one might wake up at any hour and hear the miscreants boring or chiseling or cutting at the glass. Often he tried to surprise them, he said, but before he could get into the yard they were gone invariably even though the moon was shining. He had shot at them on different occasions but could not hit them and they did not seem at all alarmed. 

Mr. Baldwin said that these persons were highly dangerous because one night they got into the house and threw a cup of chloroform into the face of the man he had hired to watch and also into the face of his daughter. The last exploit of the masked men, he said, was on Monday night when two of them followed one of his boarders from the Biltmore car and when he entered the yard they set on him and threw him over a fence. Then by some sort of hocus pocus illustration the queer performances of these mysterious individuals he threw one of them over the fence. Mr. Baldwin ran out with his gun; nobody there except the boarder. 

The commissioners decided they could not afford to pay a guard for the place and so Mr. Baldwin went away empty handed to fight single handed against the spooky persons whose movements are as mysterious as those of characters in an Anna Katherine Green novel. 

Those who have studied the matter hazard the idea that the malevolent are but ghosts of dead burglars. It will be remembered that some months ago it was believed that burglars were concealed in the Whitaker house and from their places of hiding tried to blow suffocating fumes into bedrooms.

Interesting place, Asheville.