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| 131 Delaware Street illustration by the late Narcissa Weatherbee |
The following tale originally appeared in the booklet entitled
Ghosts of Gloucester County compiled by Virginia Joslin and published by the Gloucester County Cultural and Heritage Commission in 1987. Wonderful illustrations (see above example) by the late Narcissa Weatherbee, a local Woodbury artist of some renown, appear throughout the book. Reprinted here with kind permission.
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Woodbury is the county seat of Gloucester County, and its
only city; modern of course, with its hospital, its surrounding shopping plazas
and malls. Although Broad Street, the main street in town, is dotted with
specialty shops, historic sites and small businesses, the heart of the city and
its subsidary tree-lined streets still retain the flavor of a provincial country
town. Old Colonial homes stand interspersed with larger Victorian mansions,
both giving way to newer houses further from the town center. There is a sense
of quiet, of permanence, and of community pride.
The House on Delaware
Sweet
Close in, on Delaware Street, stands a neat stucco house,
with a lovely center hall and a stairway curving up to the third floor (a
simpler, cleaner architectural version of the Ashcraft house in Mullica Hill)
Not as widely reported to be haunted as the Glassboro dormitory house, it is,
nevertheless, “the house on Delaware Street,” which the townspeople like to
talk about and ponder over when the subject of ghosts is introduced into a
conversation.
Several years ago, upon questioning members of the family
who were at that time living in the house, we learned that the sections of the
house involved in the occurrences were the master bedroom, the front hall at
the first floor level, and the staircase between the second and third floors.
According to the family, they had been living in the house
for several months (they were not quite certain of the exact length of time)
before anything unusual happened. Then one night the husband and wife were in
bed in the master bedroom. The family pet, a large dog, who was trained to
sleep on the floor at the foot of the bed, began to whimper and tremble. He
jumped into the bed and tried to burrow under the covers between his master and
mistress. With a few sharp words, the man ordered the dog from the bed; and the
dog lay for the rest of the night with its head under the bed, trembling and whimpering
as though frightened.
Everything was quiet and normal for a period of time after
this and the incident was forgotten. A few weeks later, the husband and wife
were in bed again one night when the wife heard a bumping noise. Thinking that
her husband had gotten up for some reason and had stubbed his toe or something,
she reached across the bed to see if he was still there. He was sound asleep.
She sat up and turned on the bedside lamp to see what had caused the sound. She
looked around and saw the hand mirror from her bureau lying in the middle of
the bedroom floor. As she sat there, puzzled, still too sleepy to think
clearly, the hairbrush slowly sailed over and landed on the floor next to the
minor. At this point, she woke her husband and they got up to check the windows
to see if there was a wind blowing strongly enough to blow these items off the
bureau to the center of the room. There was no draft. The room was large; and
she felt that if the mirror had been blown off the bureau, the glass would
probably have been broken.
As is usual in these cases, all was quiet for quite a long
time after this, and the incident faded from their minds. Several weeks later,
the husband and wife were in bed, settled down for the night, when the husband
suddenly sat up.
“There is somebody in bed with us!” he said. They each rolled
out of their respective sides of the bed and turned on the light.
“You know,” one of them said later, “when two people sleep
in a double bed, if there are sags in the mattress, they are down either side.
But, as we stood there that night, we could see the perfect imprint of a form
in the middle of the bed — even the hollow place on the pillow where a head
should have been.”
This is the most dramatic phenomenon they experienced; but
there were other significant occurrences, as reported by the lady of the house:
“There is something about that downstairs front hall,” she
said. “I remember one time in particular, my husband had gone upstairs to take
a nap after lunch. It was a sunny day. The living room was bright and cheerful,
so I stretched out on the sofa to read a book. The dog lay on the rug by the
side of the sofa. I heard a man clear his throat in the hallway. The dog got up
and trotted into the hall. I looked up from my book, thinking that my husband
had gotten up from his nap. I waited for him to come into the room. When he
didn’t appear I called; but he didn’t answer. I went out into the hall to see
what was keeping him. The dog was sniffing around, very confused. The hall was
empty. I. tiptoed upstairs and quietly opened the bedroom door; my husband was
sound asleep. But, both the dog and I heard a man clear his throat in the hall –and
we both responded to it.”
“Also,” she continued, “I will be working somewhere in the
house, sometimes in the kitchen. I will hear the front door open and hear
someone call ‘Yoo-hoo!’ I hurry to greet what I expect to be a neighbor coming
to call. The hall will be empty and the door will be locked. Nobody could have
walked in. We have tried, but we can’t explain any of these things.”
The daughter of the family, an artist, had her studio on the
third floor of the house, where she also slept. She reported that she would
often hear whispered conversation on the staircase at the second floor landing
late in the night.
“The words are almost understandable, but not clear enough
to determine the gist of the conversation,” she said.
The whispers were identified as male, and there seemed to be
two entities. The conversations were sometimes intense, almost like two people
arguing. When she would go to investigate, however, the whispers would stop.
(In the phenomenon of whispered conversation, it is a common
characteristic that the words are almost intelligible. The gender of the
whispered voices is always identifiable, but the words are described as “just
beyond being understood.”
In order to try to capture a whispered conversation, we have
taken cassette taping equipment into a situation, to he turned on when the
conversation was heard. However, except for one instance, we have gotten only
static. Static in a haunting occurrence is, unfortunately, usual. It has been
our experience that a tape recorder, when taken on a research interview, will
play back, with perfect clarity, initial conversation; however, when carried into
the room or area which is reported to be haunted, it will immediately go blank
or will be filled with such static that the tape will be useless.)
The house on Delaware Street has changed hands a number of
times and so has known a number of different families.
At one time, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Talley lived in the house
and, according to Mary Ruth Talley, their experiences began the first night
they were in residence.
“Even though all our furniture had not arrived, and the
electricity was not turned on, or the telephones connected, we decided to sleep
there so that we could make an early start on all there was to be done the next
morning.
“We went to bed that night (in the master bedroom). We were
both sound asleep. Suddenly, the window shade snapped up with a great cracking
sound. We got up, fixed the shade and went back to bed.
“Shortly after this, the phone rang. We were surprised, as
we knew the phones were not yet connected. My husband answered the phone, but
the only sound he heard was heavy breathing. He hung up and we went back to
bed, thinking that although we could not make outgoing calls we could perhaps,
receive incoming calls and that somebody was playing a joke on us. Not long
after we had settled down for the third time -- the phone rang again. My
husband, again, groped around; and this time went downstairs to answer the
phone there. As before, there was nothing but heavy breathing. He hung up and
once more we settled down. We finally slept.
“The next morning the telephone man arrived to connect the
lines.”
‘Is there any way we could have received an incoming call
last night?’ I asked.
“The man looked at me as though I were not quite bright.
‘What do you mean, lady?’ he asked and he held up the stub
of the telephone wire, which was lying loose, nowhere near an outlet.”
The mysteries remain. Who called the Talleys - from where --
and how? Who are the visitors who come into the downstairs hall? Who whispers
on the stairway? Most of all, who was in the bed?
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Joslin, V. (1987). Ghosts of Gloucester county. (pp. 30-33). Cultural and Heritage Commission Gloucester County.
