BECKETT HOUSE

Location: The Beckett House is located at 820 Bernard Street (Route 11) in the Old Town Village area of Saratoga Springs, New York, fifteen miles north of Albany, New York on Interstate 87 in Saratoga County. Once a small community outside of town, the area is now a suburb of historic homes that used to include a small church, post office and market which in recent years has been replaced with modern homes and new subdivisions surrounded by woodland and open fields.

Description Of Place: Described as "the last of the Beckett family fortune," the Old Beckett House is a three-story Victorian edifice on a small lot surrounded by a neighborhood of period homes. It is a three-story edifice including six bedrooms, a front hall, dining room and a complete basement including a wine cellar and countless antiques dating back to the Nineteenth Century. 

Ghostly Manifestations: "If it wasn't haunted, it would be a shame." Bernard Corvin commented after escorting William Collins and Steve Barnette of the CGS through the antique home. "With the level of antiques here, you'd think it would be a museum, but just because it may be haunted doesn't qualify it as a historical structure."

Dr. Bernard Corvin is the lead professor of the Delano Institute in nearby Ballston, New York, and he's been studying the circumstances behind haunting activity for over twenty years. He is not with the guys doing field work and catching voices and photos of orbs; he is the guy recording the clairaudient activity and stimuli which people think is evidence of paranormal activity. However, when interest of a more traditional field study comes up, he's always open to have that line of research open to him as well.

"The last full time tenant of the Beckett House was Marlene Deaver, who was related by marriage to the Becketts." Dr. Corvin continues. "She lived in this house from 1974 to her death in 2009, outliving her husband. In that time, she reported sounds of footsteps, chairs getting moved by themselves, the staircase creaking as if someone was going down the steps and even visages of a woman in a long skirt passing through the house. After over twenty years of living with her invisible guest, she contacted me in 1989."

Beginning in March 1989, Dr. Corvin was contacted no more than thirty-two times to help Marlene deal with the problems of her invisible house guest. Although she has rarely seen her directly, she has described the same tall brunette figure of a woman in a long dress several times in the house sitting in the parlor area or casually passing by her bedroom door on occasion. He has documented many of these accounts in her own words through his study of the location.

"On March 26, 1989," Marlene told Dr. Corvin. "I was returning home from a trip to the store with Mavis Neff, a friend of mine who lived down the street. We often did our shopping together then spent the day together visiting, but on this day, when I hesitated to get my keys to the back door, Mavis asked me who was my boarder in the house. Well, I looked at her quite perplexed. "What makes you think I have a boarder?" I asked, and she responds, "Well, I just saw her pulling the curtains back then hurriedly gliding out of the dining room, down the front hall and up the stairs." I had never told her about the spirit, and I was surprised that she could see the (figure) as well so I just made up an excuse to get together with her another day and let myself in without her."

A few months later on a date Dr. Corvin records as June 13, 1989, Marlene called him back telling him that she was cleaning the house for company she was expecting that weekend and had left the vacuum cleaner turned off in the parlor area as she went to attend a roast she was cooking in the oven. After basting and putting more spice on it, she heard the vacuum cleaner turn itself back on, and when she returned to the parlor, she found it a few feet from where she had left it and lying down on the floor under the window. 

"I wonder of the spirit was trying to help me, or if it had been surprised by a device it was trying to study for itself." Marlene responds.

On September 12, 1989, Marlene tells the story: "It was a cloudy overcast day, and I was struggling to find something to do in the house so I decided to catch up on my reading and made myself comfortable in the parlor with a plate of small sandwiches and a pot of tea. However, after a while, I noticed it had started sprinkling outside, and I looked out to the wind blowing the raindrops into the windows so I thought I better close the upstairs windows. As I was doing that, I started getting this... feeling that someone else was in the house. I don't know how to explain it. Rationally, you know you're alone, but then you have this unavoidable sensation that someone was there. Anyway, it made me very reluctant to go upstairs to the third floor. I felt as if I turned the corner for the stairs that there would be someone standing up there."

Although Marlene had been on the top floor of her house several times, she learned to respect the spirit living with her, but she confessed several times to Dr. Corvin that she was terrified of actually seeing who or what was haunting her house. She also took to sleeping with a Bible and cross by her bed for mental support, but this never affected the strength or intensity of the haunting activity. However, it did make it easier for her to live with it.

The following Spring, Marlene was performing her usual Spring Cleaning of the house. Since she lived alone, she was once again joined by Mavis Neff and Georgia Bernard, a local widow she had befriended on her walks through the neighborhood. . Because of all the bric-a-brac in the house, Marlene always welcomed the help and repaid it with home-baked pastries, pies and errands. On this occasion, as Mavis was cleaning and replacing the objects in the dining room, she noticed an extra visage in a brass fixture that looked like a strange woman standing and watching from over her shoulder. Spinning around, she found no one there. The extra face definitely surprised her, but Mavis just strolled into the kitchen and politely asked Marlene, "Sweetie, does your house have a spirit by any chance?"

"Why? Did you see her too?"

Where most stories of haunted houses might have swelled to the status of rumor and urban legend, Marlene's spirit instead remained the subject of polite conversation and neighborhood tea parties. If either Mavis Neff and Georgia Bernard passed the story on to anyone else isn't known, but where Marlene kept the ghost relegated to personal experience, the spirit in her house instead made it a habit of making itself known to guests in the house. In the Summer of 1990, she was keeping time with Oliver Cochran, a retired banker she had befriended from nearby Schuylerville, ten miles away. The two of them had a non-romantic friendship with each other and loved spending time with each other, but Marlene didn't drive and when the hours got late, she invited Oliver to stay the night several times in the third floor bedroom.

"That bedroom had a closet that had been locked shut since Marlene had lived there." Dr. Corvin explains. "As per Mrs. Deaver's wishes, I never tried to unseal that door or go in there, but she believed that closet was somehow linked to the activity in the house."

On August 18, 1990, Marlene and Oliver had spent the day with each other in Saratoga Springs and didn't get back to her home on Bernard Street until after 9PM. To keep him from driving the long way home in the dark, she enticed him to stay in her upstairs bedroom for the night with the promise of blueberry pancakes and homemade jam in the morning for breakfast. Unwilling to let go of such as offer, Cochran gave in to her offer and made himself to home on the third floor, but as Marlene revealed second-hand to Dr. Corvin: "He didn't have a good night. He struggled to sleep all night long, seemed to drift off in thirty to forty minute tangents and he couldn't stop focusing on the closet. He couldn't seem to get over the feeling that someone was in it, and when he slept, he said he felt as if someone was hovering over his bed all night long. I, however, had no problems whatsoever. I awoke the next morning around 8AM or so and began making the pancakes, but then he came racing into the kitchen looking for me. He thought I had fallen down the stairs."

From 1989 to around 2008, Marlene had intermittently tried keeping boarders in her house, mostly students from the nearby colleges, and many of them experienced the same manifestation of someone falling and tumbling down the stairs, but when they rushed to help, there was no one on the staircase. 

"Brian is a pretty straight-laced guy." His partner, Roy "Sully" Sullivan, reveals. "He doesn't believe in ghosts and haunted houses, but he was really pretty upset when he heard Aunt Marlene had left the place to those scientists. Needless to say, I think he must have seen something in that house because, well, it doesn't annoy him any more."

History: Built in 1873 on what was thirty acres off Route 11, the house was created as a labor of love by Joseph Beckett for his wife, Christine Hackett-Beckett. Their descendants lived in the house until Joseph's great-grandson, James Beckett, sold the house to his brother-in-law, Roy Deaver, in 1969. By then, much of the land had been subdivided and sold off as housing developments. Roy later passed away in 1974, and his widow, Marlene Deaver, lived in the house until her death in 2009 while sharing the house with boarders in the interim. She in turn left the house to Dr. Bernard Corvin, the lead professor of the Delano Institute in nearby Ballston, a revelation that perturbed Brian Beckett, James's son.

Identity Of Ghosts: According to Dr. Corvin, Marlene Deaver believed she was being haunted by the ghost of Helena Beckett, James's wife, who died of a fall down the front staircase on March 13, 1968. Coincidentally, Brian Beckett also reported several passing visages of her in the house although he didn't recognized her.

"Between 1987 and 2009, Mrs. Deaver reported more than fifty-seven auditory, physical and psychokinetic forms of activity in the Beckett House, and I've been able to debunk almost all of it, but it's that last several cases that I can't answer that fascinate me and make wonder what exactly is happening in the house."

Source/Comments: The Skeptic (2009) - Architecture and activity based on the Batcheller Mansion in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Carter Mansion in Franklin, Tennessee, the Old Smith Mansion in Bardstown, Kentucky, Robin Hill Mansion in Mount Vernon, Indiana, the Old Moseby Mansion in Norfolk, Connecticut and the Rocky Hill Mansion in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, 

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