Another Bicknell Haunting: The Yellow Two-Story House

Date:     Thu, 8 Jan 1998 15:44:40 -0500
From:     Betty Ducharme 
To:        rking@indian.vinu.edu

I was born in Bicknell more than 70 years ago in a two-story yellow house that has long since been torn down. The house was located on Fremont Street, a short, block-long street that turns off the north side of East Fourth Street behind the Central School.

My mother lived there with her mother and her brother and I can remember both Mother and Grandma telling me about the ghosts who were in this house. They never actually saw a ghost but they could feel the presence of someone they could not see.

Mother said she would be sitting in the downstairs living room and would hear doors open and shut upstairs and feel a cool draft of air come down the stairway. She slept upstairs and the doors didn't open and shut while she was up there, only when she was downstairs. Often when she went upstairs to retire for the night, closet doors that had been closed earlier would be standing open. Sometimes the doors to other bedrooms would be open or closed; contrary to what they had been when Mother had straightened those rooms and gone downstairs. She never left me upstairs unattended. If she went downstairs she took the baby with her just as a precaution.

Now, my mother liked to spin a good yarn and could do so with the best of them, but both my Grandmother and my Aunt Ellen, who was not living at the Yellow House but had visited there several times, backed Mother up on this one, so I tend to believe it.

I seldom have a reason to walk down this block-long street, but when I do I always glance over where the Yellow House once stood and wonder where the ghostly resident moved when the house was razed. --Betty Jo.