Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This account of a ghost who really resented sharing its apartment with roommates appeared in the “New York Times,” March 25, 1900:

Within a stone's throw of the headquarters of the Square-Back Rangers, in Cherry Street, is a three-room front flat, which has come near enough to being haunted, so that no tenant has remained more than a few hours within its walls for the goodly space of nineteen years. Tenants have presumed to move in only to hustle out, after finding their furniture turned upside down and their handsome framed chromos turned to the wall by occult influences. 

The “bravest guy" on Cherry Hill five years ago ventured to go into the hallway several hours after twilight.  He could see nothing there, but he got a thump in the eye and also managed to get a swollen cheek. He said it was the nastiest scrap he ever ran up against. 

An old French woman nineteen years ago became agonized with grief over the loss of her husband, who had sickened and died in this fat. One night she took a blanket and a stout clothes line, and with their help hanged herself on the bedroom door. She was found dead in the morning and her body was taken down by the neighbors.

Since that tragedy the flat has been uninhabitable. Cherry Hill lights hesitate to say that it is haunted, because they do not believe that the ghost of the unfortunate French woman ever comes back to the scene of death. But, everybody in the old Fourth Ward knows that there is something the matter with that flat. There were the Ryans, who were just as respectable a family as ever lived in the hill, and they had no skeletons in their family closet to excite the sinister ill-will of a ghost. They moved into the flat--husband and wife and three children. About an hour after they had all gone to bed there was one of the greatest rackets that ever took place in a genuinely haunted house.

The family woke up to see their furniture being thrown all over the flat by some invisible agency. The husband was punched in the face and the wife had her left eye blackened and the children came down with the whooping cough. All this happened in about ten minutes time. Six hours had been used to move into the flat, but it took that family just fifty minutes to get out with all their belongings.

Four or five other families tried their luck, but the hoodoo was too alert and strong. Old Mike Finnegan could not stand it when his stove, which had been securely set up in position, dropped over on its side. Every kind of tenant has tried it except the Italians, and front flats on the hill are not accessible to them. Nobody has ever seen anything in that flat which could cause a rumpus. No ghost has ever been detected.

The flat is known on the hill as the “stable alley," and any spirit, investigator who really wants to see the place can find it by asking the first longshoreman he meets on the hill for directions to the house where Jackie Haggerty lost the last shred of his reputation by letting himself get a black eye from the evil influence in the hallway. Jackie used to cut a good deal of ice in the social firmament of Cherry Hill before he queered himself in the haunted flat. 

Psychical students can get more real information in five minutes spent in that flat after dark about the spirit business than they get now in a whole series of Winter lectures at a lyceum on the way brain molecules have of wagging on St. Patrick's eve and other great spirit occasions of the year. 

There is a man on the hill who has never been out of the Fourth Ward.  He was born in the haunted flat before the evil days came upon that habitation, but he has not crossed the threshold of his birthplace for twenty years, and all the profits of the Gambling Commission could not induce him to visit the scenes of his childhood. He says, though, that he does not believe the flat is haunted.

I have to admit, a ghost that can give kids an instant case of whooping cough is a new one for me.