CRABBE HOUSE
Location: The Ebenezer Crabbe House formerly stood on the site of the Fawcett Building at 1111 16th Avenue near the town square of Coeursville, Massachusetts, five miles north of Boston on Highway One. It was moved to new property on Broad Street north of town close to the Suffolk-Essex County line.
Description: The Ebenezer Crabbe House is a two hundred year old Dutch Colonial with six bedrooms, full moon and bay windows, a front porch and garret windows. It shows some stress from being moved from its foundation and relocated across town. The new property is a small plot of land surrounded by woodland and other isolated residences. A few family graves on the original plot were moved to the city cemetery.
Ghostly Manifestations:
According to a forgotten legend now passed on to legend, Ebenezer Crabbe, once a
prominent Boston area businessman, dabbled in the occult and held strange
rituals for opportunistic means. He was very successful in life and seemed to
have an in with the Coeursville Town Hall in the 1790s. Everything he ever
wanted came to him with ease. He married a young woman almost twenty-five years
his junior and when he died, he was one of the wealthiest men in the area. That
is, if he died. According to legend, for up to a hundred years after his death,
numerous witnesses saw him in the vicinity of his home and claimed he was still
alive. If he lived, he had grown to the ripe old age of 180 years old and just
as ripe and energetic as ever as he jumped out of the bushes and scared the
pedestrians who came near his house. As
late as 1907, witnesses heard his sadistic laughter resonating from near his
house. Oddly enough, his great great granddaughter, Nettie Crabbe, quite
eccentric, senile and infirmed before her death in 1926, insisted that Ebenezer
visited her often through the last years of her life.
By 1976, no one had seen Ebenezer’s ghost in
almost over seventy years. His old house had dilapidated from its full glory
into a forgotten and uninhabited home in the center of town surrounded by high
rise businesses, restraunts and apartment buildings. A haunted house by
reputation only, young men dared on by their peers took turns throwing rocks to
break out the last of the window glass in the place. Some of them claimed to
have heard raucous laughter scaring them away from the old house. Norville
“Shaggy” Rogers recalls crossing the street on his way home from school
rather than cross the sidewalk through the house.
When it came time to finally lose the old
house, it was moved and relocated to satisfy the whims of the local Coeursville
Historical Society petitioning its destruction. Edwin “Red” Sparks recalls the nervous apprehension he felt
being in the house as Doherty Construction as they prepared to lift the house
off its foundation and move it. Several years after the fact, he described the
implacable feeling of being watched in the dull light of the house’s basement
and the indefinable sense of dread that someone was hovering over him.
“Have you ever had a panic attack for no
decent reason at all?” He replies. “It was like you shouldn’t be there and
you’ve got the feeling someone is watching you.”
Jim Rivets, Red’s best friend and another
Doherty Construction employee knows that feeling very well. Just before the
house was lifted up and carried through town to its new property, it was his
responsible to walk through the house and secure it before it was moved. While
he was on the first floor, he heard a door upstairs open and close above him. He
raced up to catch who he expected was another dawdling employee and he noticed
an old hunched over lady in a shawl vanish up to the attic. He chased after her,
but there was no one in the house.
“Despite the absence of the house,”
Foreman Sam Doherty reflects on the haunts. “The haunting phenomenon didn’t
go away. If anything, it seemed to exacerbate things. Strange fires started
popping up on the site for no reason, we had equipment problems that went away
when repairmen came and walls collapsed the wrong way. Jim had a wall come down
despite being supported and Red started claiming he was being haunted. Almost
every man on my crew said they saw an old man in period dress lurking on the
site after dark and vanishing into no where. I saw a guy hide behind a support
beam and never come out the other side. I walked around to throw him off the
site, but he had vanished from site and I had never took my eyes off that
beam.”
All of Doherty’s regular crew walked off the
site at some point after another and the eight-month job stretched into three
years. City councilmen in a hurry to finish the job and get the area clean again
offered city finances to pay the crew extra to get back to work, but someone, or
something still hovered over both regular crew and new men. One man tumbled
inexplicably from twenty feet off the ground and survived while another man
attacked another for supposedly pushing him. Was it possible for a house to be haunted before it was
built?
Wilma Blake of the Coeursville Historical
Society meanwhile tried to see into the restoration of the Crabbe House far on
the outskirts of town, but someone was working against her. Spots she cleaned
off the walls returned and furniture moved around returned to where it had once
been. A carpenter overseeing repairs said he heard a man laughing upstairs when
he was supposed to be alone and another thought he was getting advances from a
manikin in a period dress that refused to stay in the corner of a bedroom. One
night after Blake left the house, Norville
Rogers, Velma Dinkley and their dog came by the house to get a look at its
new location and were invited inside by a strange old lady in a shawl and long
dress. Blake has no idea who this person might have been.
“She claimed she was Nettie Crabbe.” Velma told ghost hunter William Collins several years later. “But when she said she was waiting for Ebenezer, we decided we didn’t need to stay.”
History: Crabbe House was built in or around 1820 by Ebenezer Crabbe on what
was then a prominent piece of real estate. It stayed in the possession of his
family for all of its existence until 1926 when Eleanor “Nettie” Crabbe
died. She was the last direct descendant of Ebenezer to live in the house, and
during her lifetime, she had already started neglecting the house, and it faded
from the showcase it once was. Groceries were delivered to her and signed for by
her housekeeper who diligently and faithfully paid her bills for ten years.
After a vacation from her duties, the housekeeper returned to find Nettie had
passed away in her sleep without hiring a temporary housekeeper in her absence.
There was no report of neglect or malicious intent established.
In 1976, the house was sold and relocated outside the city limits. Having championed for its preservation, Wilma Blake oversaw its restoration and spent weekends living in the house as she refined the interior and exterior. Two tenants hired as caretakers and a family of four briefly rented it until 1983 when it was made a part of the Coeursville Historical Society collection of homes.
Identity of Ghosts: There are very few papers and photos left of Ebenezer Crabbe (1764 - 1854?), but part of the reason for his alleged longevity could be linked to his grandson Ebenezer (1878? - 1908) who greatly resembled him. His sinister and malicious specter has been blamed for scaring and unnerving many of the guests to his home. He seems very opposed to the people traipsing through his home. Reports of Nettie’s unnerving presence date back to her death.
Comments: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You (Episode “High Rise Specter”), Hauntings based on the Kelsey House in Fish Springs, Nevada; Old Metz Elementary in San Antonio, Texas; the Old Schnell House in Nashville, Tennessee; Halfway House in Hendersonville, Tennessee and the Whaley House in San Diego, California.