THE
BLUE HOUSE
Location:
Better known locally as the Blue House, the Old Loughlin House is located at the
point of three separate parcels of farmland off the sharp turn of Loughlin Road
(Route 11) in Jackson County, West Virginia, two miles southeast of Murraysville
on Little Pond Creek.
Description
Of Place: Surrounded by around 750 acres of cornfield, the Blue House is
located on private property at the crossroads of two separate cornfields and two
acres from a third. The two-story two bedroom farmhouse is fairly neglected and
abandoned without any furnishings. The first floor windows have been boarded up,
and the back wall of a ground floor room has been demolished, turning the house
into a barn for storing farm equipment. There are no interior stairs to the
second floor.
Ghostly
Manifestations:
No haunted house has proved to be so challenging to solve as the Old Loughlin
House. Unlike the traditional haunted house, the site does not have a long
history of witness testimonies, but this can be blamed on the remoteness of the
site. However, the grounds have had a long history of legends and folktales
dating back to the 1790s.
The
area was first settled in the 1770s. George Washington with his friends, Dr.
James Crake and Colonel William Crawford surveyed future Jackson County and
patented land claims to that area in 1793. Much of the area was deeded to area
businessmen arriving to develop the area. Murraysville acquired the second
school in the area in 1818 after nearby Cottageville.. In 1831, the county was
further formed from sections of Kanawha, Wood, and Mason Counties, and named for
Andrew Jackson, the Seventh President of the United States.
Its
paranormal history begins sometime before the Civil War. While cornfields and
potato farmers were popping up all along Little Pond Creek, this patch of land
remained unsettled and unclaimed. The area used to persistently flood after
every hard rain, but historical records also show a high turn-over land-owners
acquired the grounds, lived here a while and then passed on the land to new
owners. This disinterest in the area began in 1838 and lasted until the 1890s,
and it certainly inspired a number of tall tales and urban legends. Locals
claimed they saw strange things here such as strange animals that appeared and
disappeared, shadows of mangled and disfigured people hobbling through the
trails and strange voices that called each other by name. Colonel Crawford who
had once surveyed the area mentioned in his private papers that he heard that
that particular area attracted “necromancers and spell-casters” who held
unknown rituals there, “sacrificing animals and wearing skins of the creatures
they killed.” H. K. Coleman, a historian in nearby Ripley, adds the area was a
hotbed for black magic and demonic worship as well as attempts to call up
ancient spirits. A few locals mysteriously disappeared if the crossed the area.
Crows frequented the trees here. Through the 1860s and 1880s, there were even a
few of the very first Bigfoot sightings.
This
focus on the supernatural seemed to come to an end after the Civil War. Although
the area was split in half, it tilted to the Union, and Union forces were
cleaning out backwoods witches, vagabonds, heretics, freaks and deviates along
with Confederate smugglers and bushwhackers from the campsites along the creek.
With the first roads in the area, the land was acquired by an unknown family,
who attempted to plant corn here for a few years. At first, the land wouldn’t
yield results, and to add to the predicament, they were harassed by unknown
persons who tacked up dead animals on the land and blocked the road to the area
so they couldn’t reach it. Coleman speculates that these people were the
“necromancers” returning to reclaim their campsites.
The
Blue House on the site was built in or around 1900 on the cusp of a boom that
started after the Civil War. Several families faithful to the Union traveling
eastward from Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky migrated into the Murraysville-Ripley-Cottageville
area and began buying property or starting new businesses. There are no records
on the identity of the owners, but they definitely set up the original borders
of the farm at 310 acres, which was set to increase over the years.
While
it can’t be sure or verified, there is some speculation that 1930s writer
Keith Reinhart of Portland, Ohio likely based his 1932 short story, “The
Cornfield Curse” on the location. He was born and raised in Cottageville and
would have known the stories of the area. Several items of note of the area
about the farm, creek, layout and surrounding towns are strangely similar to the
Loughlin House environs and the name of his characters, Hammond, pops up in
Census records of the area. Even the fate of the family dying from a fire in the
house matches the limited history of the Blue House. The book tells the story
about a family haunted and besieged by strange animals and persons on the
property and later escalating to a full haunting with apparitions, distortions
in reality and poltergeist activity. The book uses a lot of lupine symbolism in
the activity, but as yet, the story is considered purely fiction without any
basis in history.
Sitting
abandoned for years, the ruins and farm rested untouched for several years.
Vagrants and homeless people camped on the border of the grounds along the creek
until the Sixties, and neighboring farmers frequently criss-crossed through the
cornfields growing wild and hunted for rabbits and anything else eating there. It
is in these years that the history of activity actually starts. In the late
summer of 1917, local farmers Lamar
Bible and Andrew Freeman were shooting at rabbits when they saw what they
thought was a strange dog prancing and moving through the corn stalks. Bible
took a shot at the creature with a shotgun and seemed to hit it, but when they
ran over to get a better look at whatever he had killed, he could not find a
single trace of whatever he had hit.
A
second sighting occurred shortly after this incident. Neighbor Randall Barber
and two of his other sons were hunting here when they noticed an odd bird larger
than any other bird they knew or were familiar with perched at the top of an old
oak tree standing up and spreading its wings. Same as before, Barber took a shot
at the strange creature and also seemed to hit it. The strange bird was seen to
fall to the ground and even hit the bottom of the tree. However, as Barber and
his boys searched and circled round the tree, there was nothing remotely alive
or even dead to be located at all. Perhaps, they must have wondered, the shot
had grazed it, and the strange bird had glided off just short of hitting the
earth. However, years after his father’s death, James Barber was given a book
of wild birds to identify it. He identified it as a combination of a vulture and
a condor.
In
March 1921, store clerk Kimberly Leggett was asked to meet her boyfriend, David
Messer, at the house. His family had just acquired the property to store old
cars on the grounds and take over the corn fields. She was driving toward the
ruins of the main house when she looked over and noticed a strange girl about
her own age dressed in blue and sitting in a swing attached to an old oak tree
by the house. As she headed to the tree to meet her, the girl vanished. She was
just there one minute and gone the next.
Dan
Short, the Messer’s hired man, had a story to tell his employer. He described
seeing a large black dog frequenting the property that he knew didn’t belong
to the family. Described as large and black but with the head and temperament of
a wolf, the vicious animal was snarling and threatening him, but when Short
raised his rifle to shoot it, the strange hybrid disappeared from right in front
of him.
Despite
this mild beginning, neither the Messer family nor any of their friends were
aware of the specter that would enter their lives of the torment yet to come.
They sold off parts of their farm to William Loughlin and his family in 1945,
and the Loughlins rebuilt the original house on the grounds and moved in with
their children, William and Emma, shortly thereafter. Shortly after moving in,
Carolyn Loughlin, William’s wife, said she started hearing voices in the
house. She would hear William’s voice when he was not around and saw strange
intruders moving through the house. Shadows flitted through the corn stalks at
night, and while they were trying to sleep, something pulled their bed covers
off. William and then his wife and kids suffered virulent sicknesses that took
forever to get over completely. Carolyn thought the well water might be
poisoned.
Short
suggested that the family was prone to wild very active imaginations, but some
people actually took the incredible stories to heart and believed them for what
they seemed to suggest. Eventually, the exploits of the supposed Loughlin ghosts
were the subject of whispers and secret tales amidst their neighbors and being
retold across the county.
In
the Loughlin House, the family started experiencing new activity that defied
explanation with increased intensity and even frustrating frequency before both
family and friends. The sound of someone frantically and determinedly knocking
at the front door in the middle of the night would drive everyone to the door,
but no one was ever there. On windless nights, someone broke the still night air
by rattling at the windows trying to get inside the house. As weeks went by, the
disturbances became even more unnerving, and the lack of sleep made everyone
short and bad tempered to each other. No rational explanations could cover all
these problems. There were sounds of an unseen rat nibbling at bedposts, and of
an invisible dog clawing at the floor somewhere inside with them. The sound of
fighting dogs chained together or voices chanting together would sometimes fill
the entire house. Noises spread from room to room just far enough to keep from
being discovered. They only stopped when the lights came on and the family
members searched for the source of the sounds.
New
sounds eventually filled the house. The sound of someone choking and gurgling or
dragging chains from room to room replaced the reverberations of unseen animals.
The Loughlin children felt their bed sheets ripped from off of them as they
slept. If they tried to fight against their invisible intruder, they would feel
the sting of an unseen hand striking their faces, leaving it red and sore. In
the summer of 1957, nine-year old William and even Emma felt someone yanking at
their hair. At times, the activity focused on Emma, and she would run screaming
from her bedroom in the middle of the night. When they stayed with friends and
neighbors, the volley of voices, rattling chains and poltergeist activity
followed them.
Emma’s
long hair was being yanked until she would be in tears, and the side of her face
would be struck hard, leaving a red imprint on the side of her face in the shape
of a human hand. Young William began experiencing fainting spells as if the
breath was being sucked from right out of his body. At times, he felt she was
being smothered.
William
Loughlin soon formed an informal committee of close friends, neighbors and
allies in order to delve to the source of the haunting that infested his home
and family and to hopefully eradicate it. From all over Jackson County came the
idly curious, ministers, dewitchers and assorted expellers of evil, all with
attempts to expel the malicious spirit. None of the supposed exterminators were
successful. Ben Short, Dan’s son, started the rumor that Carolyn Loughlin was
delving into the dark arts on the basis she was seen prowling around the farm
late at night. It was also reported she was burying things on the property. She
preferred to keep the house dark, and her parenting skills bordered on abuse. By
this point, William was sleeping in the loft in the barn, and in 1958, he was
reportedly keeping time with Carolyn Nixon, a waitress from the nearby truck
stop. Carolyn Loughlin began disappearing periods of inactivity in the house,
usually for just a few days, but during one of her more prolonged absences,
William moved Carolyn Nixon into the house to help take care of the house and
kids.
Robert
Baskin, another close friend of Loughlin, once stayed a night in the house and
woke to discover a presence that looked like Carolyn Loughlin pulling at his
shirt. Jumping up to confront her, he noticed that his bed covers had been
rolled up and placed in a bundle on one side of the bed. Carolyn meanwhile
turned into smoke clinging to the bundle, and when he attempted to hurl the
entire bundle into the fireplace, it suddenly began getting very heavy for him,
even giving off an odor later described as “the most offensive stench (he) had
ever smelled.” Overcome by the pungent attack to his senses, Baskin dropped
the bundle and dashed out of the house for fresh air and returned later to
locate the bundle where he had dropped it. Shaking it out completely, he found
it empty and odorless.
Whenever
there was a sign of Carolyn Loughlin returning from her trips to Willoughby or
helping to take care of neighbors (or whatever the reason might be), Carolyn
Nixon quickly and efficiently fled the house and stayed with her parents. During
her last disappearing act, Carolyn Nixon moved right back in and took over where
she had left off in the pretend marriage. However, Baskin also traveled to
Richmond to visit family he had there, and in his absence, he heard there had
been an incident at the Loughlin farm.
As
the Ripley Gazette reported:
“Last
Thursday night, it was a chilling scene as authorities arrived at a large
farmhouse in Jackson County.near the humble town of Murraysville. The entire
Loughlin family appeared to have been murdered. The sheriff’s office is being
tight-lipped about their findings, but a neighbor who accompanied police to the
home noted that William (38) and his wife Carol (32) were found in their bedroom
while their children Emma (10) and William Jr. (9) were found dead in their room
on the second floor of the house. All of the bodies had been found in their beds
suggesting they were attacked while they were asleep the night before. Nothing
was found missing (from) the home. Members who lived in the area and close
friends have reported the Loughlins w(h)ere known and loved by everyone who
loved them, and no one can think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt
them.”
The
general report and death certificates said the family had been mauled by wolves
but that was later redacted to wild dogs as there had not been wolves in Jackson
County in over a century.
In
addition to the Old Loughlin House, there are a few other sites in close
proximity to the Blue House that are said to be haunted. An old barn on the hill
south of the property is haunted by the events of a racial event in the 1880s
when members of the Ku Klux Klan captured, taunted and murdered a young black
man heading home from his job at an old paper mill. Strange lights, laughter,
screams and the figure of a man hanging from the collapsing roof has been
reported, but when anyone investigates, nothing is ever found. Closing down in
1912, the paper mill itself west of the farm is now obscured by heavy foliage.
The structure is in ruins and was burned down by unknown vandals in 1931, but
visitors say they have seen the apparitions of the employees in the ruins and
heard footsteps and distant voices. A strange white dog has been seen roaming
the grounds.
History:
Built in or around 1900, the house was rebuilt in 1953 and burned down in 1958.
The property sat untouched until 1973 when the Knott family added the grounds to
their property and converted the farm into a barn. Today, the site has been
known as ground zero for local teenage hazing rituals.
Identity
of Ghosts: No identity or source for the activity has ever been established.
Since the 1980s, several people have claimed to see the ghost of Carolyn
Loughlin wandering the grounds as an old woman or as a young girl. Not much is
known about her life prior to Ripley, but it is known her maiden name was Libao,
and that her family had been in the area since the 1860s. Other theories concern
the grounds being located on a Native American burial ground which is
unconfirmed while other theories credit the gypsies and old backwoods
necromancers doing rituals in the area. One of whom was identified by H. K.
Coleman as Deter Libao, a French Caribbean medicine man from New Orleans who
traveled the east coast with a retinue of wives and twenty-three children. It is
believed she may be a descendant of one of his children.
Source/Comments:
Mountain Monsters (Episodes: “The Waya Woman” and “The Secret of the Blue
House.”) - Activity based on the Bell Farm, Adams Tennessee, the Old Elm Ridge
Slaughter House in Delavan, Pennsylvania, Robinson Woods in Chicago, Illinois,
Lake Shawnee Amusement Park in Lake Shawnee, West Virginia, Old Sorg Paper
Factory in Sorg, Ohio and Mount Misery Road in Huntingdon, New York.
“Tragedy
Strikes Again - Entire Family Found Dead” by Heather Tallchief, Ripley
Gazette, September 14, 1957
“Questions
Still Unanswered in Family Deaths” by Kurt Sova, Ripley Gazette, October 3,
1957
“The
Legends, Lore and Haints of Jackson County” (pamphlet) by H. K. Coleman (1873)