THE CARMICHAEL HOUSE
Location: There are not many details as to where the Old Carmichael
House once stood. Known locally as the Old Cheesman House, due to its proximity
to to Cheesman Park, the area has since been sub-divided and developed into
several small suburban homes, but it is known the house once rested on the west
side of Cheesman Park Boulevard running alongside Lake Washington east of
Seattle, Washington on Puget Sound, 25 miles north of Tacoma on Interstate 5 in
Northwest Washington.
Description Of Place: Once one of the most historic mansions in
Seattle, the Carmichael House was an old three-story Victorian residence in a
semi-preserved state in the area of Cheesman Park, a large forest preserve in
the southeast area of Seattle near Puget Sound. Surrounded by several acres of
woodlands, it was connected to Cheesman Park Boulevard by a small court, gate
and short driveway. Obscured from view by the trees, the house had a
wood-paneled interior and a grand staircase that reached to the third floor.
Composer Jonathan Russell noted that only the first and second floors were
preserved, storing many fine antiques and pieces of period furniture (including
a Steinway piano from the 1950s), but the third floor attic rooms were neglected
and filled with cobwebs and thick layers of dust he could peel back with his
foot. The tower room obvious from the exterior of the mansion was accessed
through a small room in the north end of the third floor, adjacent by a short
stairway behind a door that had been covered up by shelves as if to hide
it.
Ghostly Manifestations: Haunted house aficionados won't find the
Carmichael House on any lists of haunted sites for Seattle. If one asks about
it, historians will tell you it never existed or it was never haunted. Most
paranormal explorers that search for it will find missing newspapers in the
microfiche at Seattle University and no mention of it at the Seattle Historic
Society. It seems to have been erased from history, but not from the minds of
those who recall it once existed.
"I am being haunted by the spirit of a young child in that house." Composer Jonathan Russell told Dr. Leonard Pemberton at the University of Seattle. Pemberton was an accredited psychologist interested in the full potential of the mind and after eight years of studying possible psychic activity, he had fully graduated to investigating the spirit claims of only a handful of locations. He knew Russell by reputation of alone and had no reason to discount his claims, later visiting the house to record a night-time séance assisted by medium Joanna Russell. (This name seems suspect. Since it is the female version of Russell's name, it seems Pemberton is using an alias to conceal the woman's identity.)
Before his arrival, Russell and other people had witnessed things in the house. Lionel Tuttle, the man who worked as caretaker for the house since 1967 knew the place had an atmosphere. He described the house often creaked and groaned in a matter unlike any other houses he looked over in the area. He would walk through the upstairs looking for water leaks and feel as if he was being watched, but he'd just shrug it off in his head. He'd hear the sound of distant pounding and blame it on water in the pipes. He'd also hear the sound of creaking from the empty hallways, a sound that seemed as if it didn't belong to the house, but he'd again pass on it and blame it on a house that was not getting the full attention it deserved.
Even Merriam Rossian, the housekeeper who worked for Russell felt something off about the structure. She described the sensations of being watched, the sounds of someone in rooms she knew was empty, the tinkling of piano keys from the piano when her back was to it and even the same creaking sound that Mr. Tuttle described, but she compared it more to the sound of a wheelchair, a sound she knew well in her status as a former healthcare worker.
Ironically, as Russell discovered while living in the Carmichael House, there was an old rusty abandoned wheelchair on the third floor, but no one could figure out why the sounds of it came from the first and second floors.
Russell had moved into the Carmichael House on March 28, 1980; his housing status was arranged by Seattle University after hiring him as their new music director for the school. According to Claire Norman, an associate of Russell, he liked the house and thought it was a good fit. Although it was going to be temporary lodging until something else came along, he was looking forward to staying in the grand old home and putter through it as he wrote new music. He was most definitely not the kind of person to believe in ghosts, but one week after moving into the house, he woke to the sound of pounding in the house. Thinking it was an emergency, he hastened to the front door in his robe to answer it, but on his way to the door, he became aware the pounding had stopped. Looking out the front door, he found no sign anyone had been there.
The day after, he was working at his piano when the sound returned. He described it to Claire as the sound of someone pounding on the wall from somewhere in the house. When he asked Mr. Tuttle about them, he was told the sound was air in the old pipes of the house causing them to pound on the old supports, but when Russell noted he wasn't running water at the time, Tuttle just surmised it was delayed.
The water faucets in the house also had a weird quirk of their own. Russell heard the water running in the kitchen at least a few times while he lived there and at least once in an unused second floor bathroom he didn't know even existed. According to the written testimony Dr. Pemberton took from Russell, as Russell was turning off the water, he was taken aback by the presence of a young boy floating in the water in the bathtub. Jumping back briefly and taking a renewed look, the image had receded away, but by now, the Carmichael House had given Russell enough to wonder about. Was it possible he was being haunted?
Following his initial counseling with Dr. Pemberton, Russell was strolling around the property and getting acquainted with it when he became aware of the sound of cracking glass. Looking around the courtyard, he then became aware he was being pelted by small pieces of colored glass. Unaware of where it was coming from, he looked around. All of the Carmichael's front windows had clear glass, but as he scanned the windows, he suddenly noticed the garret window of the attic tower room had a differently colored glass. By this point, he had become aware of a great mystery about the old structure and thought this strange incident might give him a clue to the answer, but as he sought the way to that attic room, he was barred by a closet with shelves next to a room off the second floor corridor. Realizing this room had been sealed off, he took the shelves down and found a hidden door leading up to the tower. Up beyond those dingy shadowy steps hidden from the world, he found a small boy's room with period toys from the turn of the century, a music box, a large copper bathtub and a child's wheelchair.
"The odd thing about that music box..." Claire Norman, an area historian who had known Russell, adds. "Russell was working on a new symphony during his first weeks in the house, but the music box played the same tune he was developing almost note for note. He had never heard it before, and he knows he had never been in this room before, but somehow, some way, that tune had been in his head before discovering that room."
Knowing Russell through his research on the house, Norman recalls that after unsealing that room that activity seemed to pick up around him. The pounding sounds return, doors slammed shut and the sounds of a phantom wheelchair was heard rolling through the top floors. He started to hear the sound of a child crying from empty rooms in the house, seemingly placated by the music box coming on and playing by itself. One night, according to Norman, Russell heard the sound of a ball rolling down the staircase in the main hall. Feeling he was being terrorized, he took it and tossed off the Seattle Narrows Bridge. For a few days, he had peace in the house, but the following Saturday, the sound returned and the ball inexplicitly came back to the house, rolling down the stairs and stopping at his feet.
Having exhausted every logical explanation by this point, Russell next contacted Dr. Pemberton once again to investigate the house. His rational belief was that the house was being haunted by the ghost of Cora Barnard, whose family had lived in the structure at the turn of the century. Barnard had died while quite young, and he believed her ghost was trapped in the house. To ascertain if this was the case, Pemberton enlisted the help of Joanna Russell as a medium to conduct a séance in the house with Norman in attendance. With Pemberton recording the session, Miss Russell utilized automatic writing to relay messages from the other side, getting the name Joseph. Pemberton also used a brass horn to provoke a poltergeist reaction. According to the witness testimonies that night, the horn danced on the table for almost fifty seconds before flinging itself through the air. Pemberton's tape also caught brief EVPs of a boy crying out the name "Joseph" and asking for his medal. Although this tape is still is still in existence, many of the participants have since passed on. Pemberton passed away in 1991, Joanna Russell in 1995, and John Russell died in 1999. Only Claire Norman is still with us.
"After that night," She recalls. "The activity in the house seemed to become more sinister. While it was only a mere distraction before, the spirit if that's what it was seemed to get more excited, practically terrifying."
Returning to the house after the séance ended, both she and Jonathan Russell became aware of the wheelchair resting on the top threshold of the stairway, as if someone was in it and eavesdropping on their conversation. The doors continued to slam shut by themselves both during the day and night, and one day when Russell was out, Claire thought she heard him calling her upstairs, only to be surprised by the wheelchair chasing her back downstairs. She refused to come back to the house by that point.
A few days later, the Historical
Society cancelled Johnathan Russell's lease "for being a nuisance."
Claire Norman was fired from her position, and two days later, the house burned
to the ground. Although the composer would most certainly be a person of
interest if it was arson, there was no investigation.
History: Built during the 1899 housing boom in Seattle, the house
was the original home of Richard Carmichael, the father of Senator Joseph
Patrick Carmichael, but he moved out in 1909 when he took Joseph as a young boy to
Nordbach Sanatorium in Switzerland to be treated for atrophic arthritis. They
didn't return to Seattle until 1918, after World War Two, but in that time, the
house had been sold to the Barnard family, but they moved out after the owner's
daughter, Cora Barnard, was killed after being run down by a coal cart the
following year. Architect William Sarachino acquired the house next, living
there from 1965 to 1967 when it was acquired by the Seattle Historic Society
through the Carmichael Foundation and used for storage. It was rented to
composer Jonathan Russell in 1980 due to some objections from the historical
society since Claire Norman had skipped some channels to rent it out to him. The
structure burned down on April 13, 1980 from "faulty wiring."
Identity Of Ghosts: Much of the debate on whether the Carmichael
House was haunted or not seems to be riding on the identity of the child that
supposedly haunted the house. Based on the recordings from the séance and his
own deductive reasoning, Jonathan Russell believes the child that Richard
Carmichael took to Switzerland was not his true son but an imposter in order to
retain control of the child's inheritance. He further alleges
that the true Joseph
Patrick Carmichael who suffered from atrophic arthritis was murdered in the
house by Richard and that the crime was covered up by taking another boy to
Switzerland to serve as his surrogate, letting him seize the boy's inheritance
from his mother, Emily Spenser-Carmichael, the daughter of logging magnate H. T.
Spenser. Both Russell and Norman also discovered that Carmichael owned a ranch
on Puget Sound with a well where a body could be dumped. Now split up into a series of
homes between 20th and 30th Avenues,
the house built over the well has been the scene of hauntings of a young boy's
spirit since 1975 although they picked up after Russell moved into the
Carmichael House.
On April 11, 1980, during the height of
the experiences Russell was going through at Carmichael House, the partial bones
of a young boy were excavated from the well. They rested in storage untouched
until June 13, 2007 when DNA testing of the bones had advanced enough to compare
them with the DNA of Danielle Spenser, another descendant of H. T. Spenser. The
results were supposed to be published on January 10, 2008, revealing beyond a
shadow of a doubt the true fate and identity of Joseph
Patrick Carmichael, who was believed to have died on April 13, 1980, instead of
murdered by his father in a dusty boys room in 1909. However, the report has yet
to be released, instead buried along with the hauntings of the Carmichael
Mansion by lawyers and benefactors working for the Carmichael Foundation.
Source/Comments: The Changeling (1980) - Based loosely on the Henry Treat
Rogers Museum in Denver, Colorado and the events in the movie.