THE DOLL HOUSE

Location: The Doll House (or the Spears Road House or Spears Hill House as it has also been named) is at the end of a winding road at 1315 Spears Road in the former farming community of Hewitt, Illinois that was once part of the Chicago to Galena stage route. The route is now known as Highway 3 with Hewitt near Apple Canyon Lake 14 miles west of Warren and 10 miles east of Coloma.

Description Of Place: Hidden away from view on a property that has since grown wild with thick over-growth and years of neglect, the three-story Mediterranean-style structure has an elaborate maze-like interior of rooms, corridors and stairwells with nine bedrooms, ten bathrooms, a large front hall, library, dining hall, ballroom and kitchen with an elaborate basement whose lay-out is almost as confusing as the house itself. It has three staircases, five chimneys, seventeen fireplaces, antique 19th Century fixtures and "an antique store's worth of period furniture and decorations" including faded family portraits, old belongings, closets of clothing and dusty and worn curtains. The house takes its name from its most unusual feature in the form of a third floor bedroom dominated by a forgotten collection of dolls. Almost five hundred dolls from the Early Nineteenth Century ranging from porcelain dolls to modern plastic dolls interspersed with rag dolls, wood dolls and even assorted Barbies covering the entirety of an attic bedroom. 

Ghostly Manifestations: It is with no surprise to reveal that the United States and much of the world is dotted with abandoned and neglected houses and mansions and even the random restaurants, stores, schools and hospitals. Many of these locations are even reported as haunted, but without verbal testimony or witness accounts, it is hard to separate legend from reality without a living witness. Every once in a while, the researcher or investigator gets lucky and finds someone who once lived in the house or a history enthusiast who has had the location converted into a local landmark. In the case of Illinois's Doll House, Steve Barnette and Lizzie Spellman had the opportunity to speak to William Lohan, the contractor and occasional urban explorer, who owns the forgotten relic and has been restoring it by himself off and on since 2008.

"How bad was it when you found it?" Spellman asked.

"Took two months just to pull the wild vines growing off the sides of it..." Lohan responded. Single and devoted to architecture, he is married to his job. In between professional jobs, it took him just under a year for him to make the house livable for him to exist in it, but more than three-quarters of the structure are in different levels of restoration. The interior is a maze of corridors and rooms with stairwells connected to only certain parts of the house, rooms adjacent by their own staircases and even rooms with multiple entrances. It is easy to get lost and distracted by the layout, and even Lohan still finds things that surprise him. One day he was gutting a bedroom, and found another bedroom in a different section of the house.

"When I found it," He continues. "It was in a bad state with rotten floors, crumbling staircases, collapsing ceilings and wild animals running freely through it, but I knew it still had good bones and that it deserved to be restored."

"What was some of the first things you noticed here?"

"To tell the truth..." Lohan started. "In that first year and a half, I think I was more focused on the house than anything else, but over time, the strange noises I heard from the house turned from casual to more distracting. I thought I'd hear the sound of kids running through the halls and up the stairs. I probably ignored it the first couple of times, you know, rationalizing it as something normal, but by the eighth or tenth time, I really started thinking I had teenagers sneaking in and exploring the house, and I'd start running upstairs and exploring the closets trying to chase someone out. However, I soon realized the sounds didn't have the heaviness, the weight of teenagers but rather the patter of young kids scurrying through the downstairs rooms."

During the restoration process, Lohan has had several incidents beyond strange sounds and noises that have baffled him. The house has a huge front parlor room with a ten foot high ceiling with a large stone fireplace and the back of the room extends directly into the dining room in back of the house. It had a huge chandelier that was taken down and extensive wood furnishings that had to be covered up in the painting process. For the color, Lohan had chosen an eggshell white to compliment the furnishings and not blind anyone with the direct sunlight coming through the bay windows. Since the house didn't have electricity, he painted the entire two rooms with one coat by hand with rollers in a few hours and secured his paint and supplies before cleaning up and driving to Warren to meet up with some friends. When he returned the next day, he found his supplies strewn across the room, one empty paint can at the base of the front staircase, another in the grate of the fireplace and the other which was still half empty popped open with the paintbrush sticking upside down inside of it.

Tools also tend to disappear and turn up in weird places. A hammer turned up on the window seat of the old library he hadn't started working on, and a saw horse he was using one day was turned thirty degrees in the time it took for him to nail a wall support and return to cut another beam. Objects that work one time usually broke the next day. New pipes have burst, fixtures have inexplicably refused to fit in the locations they originated from and rooms measured for new floors turned out to be much larger than they were measured, requiring extra flooring to be ordered. When the chandelier was restored and brought back to be replaced to the dining room, it took just over an hour to hoist it up and reconnect it. Twenty minutes later while Lohan was talking outside, there was a huge crash, and he and his buddies came running in to see what had happened. The whole thing had come crashing down to the floor.

"I don't know how the heck that happened." He recalled. "It was almost as if the screws had reversed themselves loose from the attachment plate."

Over time, Lohan has called in favors from friends and colleagues to help on the structure. He has had the original first and second floor windows restored with new glass, and while the work was going on, the crew replacing the windows saw glimpses of young girls running up and down the halls playing beyond the rooms. The sounds of their voices and laughter could be heard echoing from stairwells and empty rooms in the old mansion. Lohan was outside at the time inspecting the work and going in and out working on the modifications the whole time and never saw or heard anything. As things were wrapping up, he was with Brian Swift, his glass guy, who was looking around curiously, suddenly remarked, "Where'd the kids go?'

"What kids?" Lohan answered. After a bit more exchange, Swift reported he and his two workers having seen the two phantom girls running loose and playing through the house. He described them as roughly eight to ten years old with dark dark brown hair wearing white and blue dresses with white ribbons and old period-style stockings and shoes. It wasn't until he recalled them that it seemed they had an ethereal presence about them. Doug Watson, a friend of Lohan's who is an architect in Galena, was invited to see the work on the house, and thought he had seen them in the house too. He and Lohan were strolling through the network of rooms on the second floor when he casually looked up the stairs to the third floor and saw the girls looking down on him. 

"Still reminds me of that scene from The Shining!" He comments.

The apparitions of these two girls have been connected to Doll House since the 1960s, and possibly goes back even further than that. Back then, local kids would invade the house trying to call up their ghosts, and some people even brought new dolls to add to an already exhaustive and abandoned collection to try and call the girls up. Several locals claim to have seen the spooky little girls staring down from the upstairs windows. According to local Davies County historian, Monica Gomez, back when it was known as the Millville House (Millville was the original name for the town of Hewitt; Spears Road was once known as the Millville Turnpike), teenagers would dare each other to visit the house and call up the ghosts:

"Dolls to the left. Dolls to the right. Can I play with these dolls tonight?" called out three times would reportedly force the spectral sisters to appear. After chanting the line three times, the girls would reportedly appear and start screaming, and several teens from the 50s and 60s reportedly saw the, but far more often, urban explorers and curiosity seekers have only heard the spectral sisters running loose through the house. However, since Lohan has taken custody, the location has been locked up, and all former access points, windows, the cellar access and even the coal chute, have been barred and secured. Yet, for some reason, something keeps getting getting inside the place.

"In 2012," Lohan reveals. "I had sanded and stained the entire wood floor through the dining room and parlor just short of the front hall. I had covered the floor with a polyurethane coating and had left and locked up the place while it was still tacky, leaving by way of the back door. When I came back a few days later to see how it had turned out, I was shocked to discover a series of small footsteps passing over it from the front hall through the rooms and into the kitchen. I thought I was going to completely redo it, but after I swept up the dust, it turned out whoever had walked on it had not left an impression in the staining on the floor. It was just a series of light dusty footsteps going through the house with very little weight to them at all."

Shortly thereafter, Lohan finally had electricity installed in the house, requiring three posts coming off the main line, up the driveway and into the house. With power now in the house, he started staying weekends in the house, moving up a few pieces of the period furniture stored in the basement along with a few other pieces. Only using the back end of the house, he started finding lights getting turned on he had turned off or burning in partially finished rooms he hadn't been in. A few times, he thought he'd hear his electric drill down stairs going off and on by itself, as if someone was playing with it. He started hearing the footsteps racing through the place a bit more often and he'd see dolls resting in corners and locations out the corner of his eye, but when he turned around, nothing was there. At times, he and laborers he brought to help him would see dolls lined up staring from upstairs windows, but when they came back later, nothing would be there. 

Despite all the strange activity, Lohan never had any funny feelings about sleeping in the house: "I never had a problem with sleeping here, but I did have this one weird incident that has kind of stayed with me. One weekend, I had stayed kind of long working on the downstairs bathroom and didn't feel like driving back to Galena so I just crashed in the back upstairs bedroom. It doesn't face the road so I don't get the traffic coming up and down, and I usually sleep pretty well, but this one morning, I woke up to the sensation of being poked in my chest. It was like I was being poked and prodded by someone trying to wake me up, and as I opened my eyes, I saw these two dark-haired little girls with big brown eyes huddled next to my bed looking at me. In the time it took me to focus and realize they could see me, they suddenly jumped up excitedly and went racing from the room in these long white dresses... maybe nightgowns like the Wendy dresses in the "Peter Pan" cartoons. Anyway, I was so tired and half asleep I didn't even race after them. Still not completely sure if it was real.... Haven't seen them since...."

In June 2012, thunderstorms hit the area that downed power lines, knocked over trees and created general havoc in the county. The storm blew away part of the roof, and Lohan put all of the inside work aside to install a new roof on the old mansion. To do the work, he hired Nate Stone, a professional roofer he had worked with often to do the work. In an interview with Stone, he remarks, "I was walking through the intact part of the structure looking for leaks, and I gotta say, I did not get a good feeling up there. I couldn't get over the feeling I was being watched. I mean, this is a twisty-turny lay-out for an attic with a lot of rooms and that one room with all the dolls is creepy as hell. I don't know why, but all those eyes staring at me creeps me out. There's a thousand of them up there, and I kept having the feeling they were following me from room to room.

Lohan agrees that workmen don't like working on that house, and plumbers and carpenters he has hired and worked with get nervous and look behind them while they're working in that house. Although he has worked with Stone several times since his company did the roof of the Doll House, he will not return to there.

"Yeah, it's a spooky old house..." He confesses. "But I don't think there's anything sinister here that's going to hurt me." Besides footsteps, electrical oddities, apparitions of girls and dolls and a cacophony of giggles and noises from empty parts of the old mansion, he's also had feelings of oppression and headaches, but things got better after he ripped out the old furnace and installed a modern AC unit.

"It still worked?" Barnette asked. 

"Oh, yeah..." Lohan confessed. "That thing was a carbon monoxide nightmare."

At that moment, Barnette and Spellman felt the house had been debunked as it is known that carbon monoxide causes the oppressive feeling many people have experienced in haunted houses as well as hallucinations. However, since activity had continued since Lohan had replaced the unit, they continued with their investigation.

Since 2012, Lohan hasn't noticed much activity or has learned not to notice. He still pulls favors from designers and carpenters to redo rooms, handle electrical work and replace the plumbing, but every so often, he catches them nervously looking around or things that shouldn't be moved in strange places. The previous contractor to start renovating the old mansion had moved all of the period furniture into the old servants rooms and corridors of the basement, but every once in a while, he sees a chair in the parlor he doesn't recognize or marches past bedrooms that seem full of furniture, only to find them empty when he returns. Dolls still sometimes appear propped up in empty corners, the sounds of playing children still echo from vacant parts of the house and strange faces can be seen intermittently from the windows on approach, but Lohan still plucks away at it trying to restore a structure a team of thirty could complete in five months.

"What's left to finish...." He looks around the partially restored place. "Part of the first floor, much of the second floor and all of the third floor. It has the potential to be a nice little bed and breakfast, but I don't know if I want to get tied down to running an inn. I hope whoever gets it never touches those dolls, because whatever is attached to them, they're not leaving the place."

History: Not much is known about the history of the Doll House, and what is known about it is conjectural. Traditionally, it was built by an industrialist named William Henry Barrett who built the structure in the Early 1850s in the style of the homes he had known in his native New Orleans, but in "Hewitt - A Town History," it was claimed it was built in the 1870s by a wealthy physician named Samuel Howard Tisdale from Chicago to be used as a hospital. However, which story is true is a matter of debate. Apparently, two different histories have been mixed up with the Doll House, but just which version (or neither) applies to this one is unrevealed. Where the two versions come together is in the story about just who is haunting the house. According to legend, either Barrett or Tisdale had two grand-daughters who once lived here, but once again, missing records, years of exaggeration and decades of local lore rears its ugly head as no two versions can agree on the fate of the daughters. In various versions, they drown in a well, died from tuberculosis or yellow fever or murdered by a sadistic nanny. Local census records lists no records of children dying on the property, again making a good case that someone at one time had merged the histories of two or more houses with the former residence.

"What complicates researching the house..." Historian Monica Gomez adds. "..Is that that particular residence has not had a stable location for over seventy-five years of its existence. It might actually date back to the 1850s, but that particular parcel of land has belonged to three different towns (including Millville which became part of Hewitt in the 1870s), who each gave it a different address and identified it using distances from five to seven different landmarks."

Reportedly left deserted for several years, the history on the structure stabilizes in the Late 1960s when a local contractor acquired the old mansion and tried restoring it, which explains much of the gutted first and second floors, but he eventually ran out of funds, and the local bank repossessed the house. It is during the time the house sat empty that the structure became known as a local haunted house. Spiritualists used to come here to hold séances in the Thirties when it was known as the Old Graham House. (Reportedly, a family named Graham lived in the house in the 1890s, but it is known this was actually a house on Highway 3 near Galena.) When William Lohan purchased the structure, the deed to the property had been lost since the Thirties (some people insist it had disappeared), and a new deed had to be created.

Identity Of Ghosts: Traditionally, the names of the girls living in the house are Sara and Elizabeth ("Lizzie"), but yet in other versions, they are named Jennifer and Jessica, Ashley and Amanda, Bertha and Clara and even Maureen and Marcia.

Source/Comments: Ghost Story/Circle of Fear (Episode: "The Doll House") - Activity based on the Tallman House in Horicon. Wisconsin, the Cohen House in Beacon, New York, the Heilbron House in Middleton, Pennsylvania, the Hotel Mokelumne in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Myrtles in St. Francisville, Louisiana, Weill House in Bakersfild, California, the Brookdale Lodge in Brookdale, California, the Gorman School in Le Bec, California, the Orpheum House in Memphis Tennessee, the Phelps Mansion in Stratford, Connecticut, the Rockwood Mansion in Wilmington, Delaware, the Whitney Mansion in Detroit, Michigan, the Early Hill Inn in Greensboro, Georgia and the St. Augustine Lighthouse in St. Augustine, Florida.

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