BARTILSON MANOR
Location: Dark Harbor is a former fishing port on Highway 2 between
Gould City and Brevoort on Lake Michigan. It is now largely a retirement
community. Bartilson Manor is located at 1325 Broadmoor amidst a number of
private homes in a wooded neighborhood. Some references erroneously locate the
house in Cleveland, Ohio.
Description Of Place: A red brick and white three-story mansion,
Bartilson Manor was built for much more grand aspirations. It has fallen into
disrepair over the years, but repairs have keep it intact, while some of the
upstairs rooms remain almost entirely gutted. It has a unique architectural
style incorporating a Georgian Federal facade with front Dorian columns and a
sunken concrete porch and a grand front hallway. The structure includes twelve
bedrooms, four chimneys, twelve fireplaces, expansive attic, garret windows,
gated balconies, hardwood floors and twisting staircases with an eclectic
basement layout and rear garden.
Ghostly Manifestations: The Old Bartilson House is one of those
locations where the oral history doesn't always agree with it's known history.
Legal papers for the house vanished in 1957 after a massive storm took out parts
of town, including the town hall and the chamber of commerce. Dark Harbor has
struggled to survive since then, but many believe the storm was part of a
sequence of events that have plagued the area ever since the first French
trappers camped out here, a phenomenon that has touched most of the town since
it was founded in 1803.
Although the house has long had a reputation for being haunted because of its appearance, stories about the house didn't start until November 1970 when Chris Burkhart lived here with his parents, brother and three sisters. Back then, he recalls the house being huge and overwhelming. His father had acquired the place for less than its full value, but at the time, he just wanted his own bedroom.
"I recall footsteps from the third floor, voices from empty rooms, shadows that dashed out of rooms...." He pulls up his childhood memories. "I'd come home from school and find my toys in the hall way from out of my room, and yet the house would be empty. My dad would be first to leave, my mother would leave with me and my brother and sisters and we'd be first to come home after school. Things never made sense. I mean, I never left anything in the hall, but it always looked like someone was exploring my room when I wasn't home.
"When I was eight, I had the old Big Jim action figure set." Chris continues. "I had Big Jim, Big Jack, Big Josh and the Indian, and I would leave them in the morning sitting in the truck with the two figures asleep in the back, but by time I got home, the truck would be in the hall and the figures camped out on my bed. I harassed my brother up and down not to touch them, and he would swear up and down that he never touched them. He had the G.I. Joes... the big ones... and his guys were moving around too when we weren't there!
"We moved out in 1979 after my older sisters married." Chris continues. He now runs a bottling plant in Chicago. "After we moved out, I never saw the figures again. My mom said they were misplaced in transit, but... I don't know. Those toys are valuable collectors items today; I'd love to have them back, but I get the feeling that if I could get back into the house, I'd find them still perched on my shelf over the window in my room."
Chris's brother, Greg, also had experiences beyond things moving around the location. He described hearing a woman gasping in his bedroom at night, as if someone was catching her breath right next to his bed, and sounds of people talking as if "a television was going in the next room," but he lived in one end of the house next to the master bedroom and across from his brother with empty rooms next to them both. Now a landscaper in San Francisco, he was fifteen when he lived in the house, and he realizes he never had sleeping trouble until he lived there. When he did dream, he'd have images of a blonde girl just a bit older than him talking him on a walk of the neighborhood. She'd also lure him through the woods beyond the house to a lake, but in the real world, there was a fence there and more houses in what was a neighborhood very full of trees and no lake. In some dreams, she'd climb in bed with him and in others, stand in a long white gown by his bed. The dreams reportedly stayed with him a few years but stopped when they moved to Saginaw.
"I was never scared living there." Chris adds. "But my sisters got a lot of flak for telling stories. They'd hear footsteps coming down the stairs, look over and no one would be there. Ashley saw a dark male figure cowering before the fireplace in the dining room. Sara would be brushing her hair and a figure would enter the room behind her. Chelsea screamed and woke us one night about a man trying to climb in her window... It was years later that my parents started talking openly about the old house in Dark Harbor. My father told me this story that he was taking the trash out while he was alone at home, and while he was at the end of the walk, a curtain in a basement window moved and dropped back as if someone was peeking out at him. The way he tells it, it took him an hour to muster his nerve to go check it out. Later, I heard the house had been a funeral parlor and that was the room where the bodies were on display for viewing..."
The Pickett family lived in the old edifice after the Burkharts, but for them, the hauntings took on a more darker quality. Miles and Tricia Pickett were innkeepers trying to open a bed and breakfast, and they did most of the restoration in the house. However, they did not know that renovations annoy ghosts.
"My father got up one night to go to the kitchen, and as he passed the living room, he was terrified back to bed by a gruesome tableau in the living room." Jackie Pickett-Smith is a former model turned history teacher. "From what I understand, he just happened to casually cross by the living room and saw a huge black coffin in there with four or five ghastly faces in white poking up from behind it. He talked about it for years, but like the Burkharts, we didn't know the house had been a funeral home until after we had moved out of it."
Jackie recalls something would invade her room and toss her clothes around the room yet leave her hangers on the closet. Restoration crews would get unnerved by voices and laughter from the top floor when it was empty. Her mother had sounds of someone rattling pots and pans in the kitchen, go on to see who was cooking and find it empty. Patio furniture changed locations. During a Christmas party, friends and relatives watched a young girl come down the stairs next to them in the basement recreation room then vanish into the room at the end of the hall. Not knowing who she was, they went to see who she was if but to notice the room was empty.
That same room was where bodies were left for viewing.
"There was one bedroom that we never used." Jackie continues. "The door was always found open despite the fact that no one used it. One day while I was downstairs, it just started pounding open and close, open and closed, open and closed... over and over. My sister, mother and I watched it pounding itself open and shut for over a minute, but the second my dad entered the house to find out what the racket was... it stopped!"
At that point, Jackie's parents had the house blessed to placate the spirits. For Thanksgiving and Christmas, they had peace for several weeks, but once they opened the house, guests they had never stayed more than a few days. The figure of a young blonde girl stood at bedside in one room, a shadowy specter jumped from room to room or hovered at the top of the stairs to the third floor, a sensation of being watched permeated the house, curious faces peered out from shadows and Jackie found her clothes thrown around a few more times. When they were found shaped on the floor in the form of people, she moved out to live elsewhere.
"The house was sold a few months later." Jackie and her sister, Donna, confided. "Some guy who said he had once lived there said he wanted the house back. He paid just a bit more than the total investment but never lived there. He had a heart attack in a restaurant and died en route to the hospital. His ex-wife had it sold again through a lawyer."
The following family who lived there failed to live with the ghosts too. The next known family to live there were the McGuires, and upon moving in, they found all the former owner's belongings still inside. As Ted and Robin McGuire recalled, "clothing were still in drawers, a bag of groceries was left in the kitchen, a magazine left open in the living room to an unfinished crossword, dirty dishes in the sink, moldy towels on the floor of the bathroom..."Nothing had been taken when the ex-owners moved out of the place, and they never came back for it. Everything was tossed out or sold off. The McGuire's lives in the house without children were uneventful except for footsteps, distant voices and "occasional odd figments of the eye." Robin had a garden, and Ted had frequent parties there for his law firm.
"What gets me is...." Ted told the CGS. "...Is no one could tell the place had been a funeral home while they lived here, and yet, the week after I moved in, landscapers found the old cast iron sign saying "Bartilson Funeral Home" covered by weeds and brush at the end of the driveway and one room in the basement is piled full with all their records and expense accounts along with the stuff from when it was a church. How do you miss an entire room?"
On November 18, 1974, during their stay there, an intruder broke in through a basement window. He ransacked the downstairs collecting the silver, grabbing up the watches and jewelry in the bedroom and pulled clothing out of drawers looking for valuables. Somehow, he got trapped in an attic closet with a chair propped up against the door keeping him from getting out of it. The police report fails to mention how he got locked in, but several locals believe he was attacked by something in the house.
The last known private owner of the house was Wallace Duncan and his girlfriend and life-partner of twelve years, Alicia Malone. They were partners in a local restaurant, and Alicia held cooking classes in the house, which for some reason annoyed the ghosts, because they had electrical problems from the start. Lights flickered, electrical appliances came on and they found the stove on in the middle of the night. A woman's laughter could be heard from upstairs, sounds of marching went up and down the stairs, shadows could be seen under the cracks of doors from the empty hall. Wallace saw a young blonde girl in the second floor windows looking out when Alicia wasn't home. One night, he woke up to the phone ringing, and when he answered it, a distant child's voice asked, "Daddy, when are you coming home?"
For the time they lived in the house,
they never got any of their phone messages. The answering machine never worked,
and friends and colleagues always got weird messages when they tried to call.
One female voice always said that Wallace had moved away, a gravelly voice with
a strong accent implied Alicia was "stuck in the wall" and someone
with a hoarse voice always told the caller to call back after midnight. Others
said they got no messages at all, just a cacophony of voices groaning and
moaning in unison. Wallace and Alicia finally moved out in October 1985 after a child's voice
announced that "Alicia dropped her head down the stairs."
History: Bartilson Manor has a long and tangled history. There are
several variations of its history and oral histories often conflict with the
known history. Once all the versions are sorted out and matched with confirmed
dates, it runs something like this:
Bartilson Manor was built sometime in the 1870s, "after the Civil War but before the rest of the neighborhood which came later." Her architect's identity is unknown, but the owner sold it without ever living there. Nothing is known about the house in the gap between 1890 to 1926 when the neighborhood was built. A family reportedly lived here, but no one knows who they were because the known history actually begins in 1926 when it was the Bartilson Funeral Home for seventeen years. During those years, something must have happened to part of the houses in the area because local records insist the neighborhood homes were built "during the housing boom in the Forties." Logic suggests a storm devastated the smaller homes which had to be rebuilt, but Bartilson Manor escaped unscathed. After the funeral home closed in 1943, the name stuck, and erroneously stuck to the architect and the original owners. It was a clubhouse for National Socialists at some point in the Thirties, but this must be while the funeral home was still in business. It became a home again to the wealthy Granger family, for which it is sometimes known as the Old Granger House, but their stay seems brief and cursory because after three months they went on an overseas trip and never returned. Legend claims they vanished in the house, but it just seems the place's reputation as a former funeral home soured them on living there.
Afterward, for twenty years, the house stood empty and unused although several locals claimed they knew of people who lived here during the Sixties, but no one knows who these people were. Ownership records officially start in October 1963 when it was Dark Harbor Methodist Church, reportedly encouraged by the son of a former owner who had lived here in the Fifties during the time "the house was the most haunted house in the United States." Pastor James Fitzpatrick acquired the house in 1963 spurred on by local businessman Daniel Carradine who said his father had owned the house in the Forties, but this is yet to be verified. (Whether Carradine is referring to the Grangers or the original owners is unknown.) Nevertheless, the church closed in 1970 when Fitzpatrick died, but afterward, several families lived in the house for varying lengths of time, although occupation is sometimes said to have started in 1991 when the hauntings became public. (Several of the names of those families have been slid back to identify families living here in the Fifties.) Since 1994, Bartilson Manor has been the meeting hall for the Loyal Sons of Abraham, a religious philanthropic group with ties to the community with attributes of the Freemasons.
The TV series, "Sinister
Sites," filmed an episode here in 2008. Their episode caught shadows,
footsteps, disembodied footsteps and EVPs of anomalous voices saying "Back
again?," "Watch out!" and "I'm coming down."
Identity Of Ghosts: No one knows just who or what is haunting the
house. In the Seventies, a friend of the Burkhart family described the ghost of
a small boy and a young blonde she believed were members of the Grangers;
however, a psychic invited to stay with the Pickett family said the house was
haunted by individuals left behind from when it was a funeral home, even going
as far as accusing the staff that worked there of some sort of impropriety. No reports of anything
improper was ever attached to the place. Psychic Dawn Rochner of the CGS,
however, sensed several spirits including Fitzpatrick, brief owner Michael
Cunningham, the Grangers and eight other members of a family named Hennessey.
Reportedly, the families knew each other, but there are no census records for
anyone with that name in the area. They can be dark and ominous, disruptive and
distracting, but completely harmless to the right owners.
Source/Ghosts: Dark Harbor (1961) - Activity loosely based on the
Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, Franklin Castle in Cleveland, Ridge
House in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Old Vogel House in Fort Madison, Iowa and
Snedeker House in Southington, Connecticut
Sinister Sites from "House of Bones" (2005)