FAWCETT HOUSE

Location: The Fawcett House (sometimes referred to as the Faucet House) is located in Westbridge, Massachusetts, three miles south of Brockton on Highway 106 and twenty miles south of Boston. It is situated just past the second hairpin turn on Canopy Drive (formerly Hummingbird Lane) behind the high school off Main Street (Highway 106), eventually merging with Highway 28 near North Abington twelve miles away.

Description of Place: The Fawcett House is a remote dilapidated and condemned mansion surrounded by woodlands and marshland near Canopy Drive and across the street from the Hummingbird Cemetery spanning 155 acres. It is a Second Empire-style mansion, one of the last of the style, having been built somewhere between 1825 and 1835. It has a mansard roof, a four-sided gambrel roof with a shallow flat top pierced by dormer windows, turret windows and six chimneys along with an attached greenhouse. The twenty-five room structure includes twelve bedrooms, fifteen fireplaces, a library, a main dining room and secondary dining room, a game room, library/study, an upstairs ballroom and attic servants quarters, but the most notable feature of the former residence is the presence of family and personal items still on display. The dining room table is still laid out for a twelve piece dinner, the family room is occupied by an open book face down in a chair, forgotten mail still sits covered with dust by the front door and there is a line of books stacked against the wall going up the staircase. There are also old clothes hanging in the doorway to the laundry room, old vintage cans and packages of food in the kitchen and strewn children's toys in the old playroom, all of which adds a strange atmosphere to the dusty and cobwebbed interior. Abandoned sometime between 1945 and 1953 as accounts vary, the cellar of the house is a set of semi-flooded stone brick catacombs, some of which descend to a sub-basement level adjacent to a water house on the grounds..

Ghostly Manifestations: It is a story that has been told around a campfire and possibly shared in a high school girl’s slumber party. It has occurred in some form or another in several locations around the United States. A group of teenagers lost on a lonely rural road or bored by a town that has fallen behind the times enters an old house out of idle curiosity or an interest in the macabre. However, in the end, an incident or some string of occurrences happens that presses against rational logic and the limitations of imagination.

In the Fall of 1966, five high school students from nearby Easton named Melissa Hackett, Nick Richards, Lindsay Stewart, Ryan Russo and Michelle Bouchard ended up on purpose or by design at the Fawcett House near Westbridge, Massachusetts. Some accounts place their visit on Halloween or the week before but more credible publications set it on March 11, 1967. In Mike Enslin’s “Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Mansions,” he completely ignores the account by J.K. Finnerty (who published highly elaborate and implausible accounts under the name of Anton Scrimmshire) repeated by several other would-be paranormal writers, and starts with the historical account of the story of an abandoned car in Hummingbird Cemetery across the street from the house and a horrible fate in the house. According to the older urban legend, the five teenagers became trapped by the weather in the Old Fawcett House and experienced something in the house that “dragged them into the realm between life and death.” Other writers suggest that they encountered a cold-blooded killer in the house and were slaughtered in the basement.

Instead, Enslin tells the story like this:

“In 1966, Melissa Hackett and her gathering of friends were driving the back roads north of Westbridge lost and confused. Wondering how they could have taken the wrong exit from Highway 106, they had no idea they were only five or six miles from town, but when their vehicle chanced upon the blaze of lights coming from the Old Fawcett (Faucet) House speckled through their rain drenched windshield only slightly bombarded by their one working wiper, it was their only chance to escape the turmoil more responsible for misdirecting them than their own human error.

“Melissa was attractive and shapely, the kind that made the heads of teenage boys turn. She wasn’t a cheerleader nor a diva. She had a brain and was involved in school politics. Her boyfriend, Nick Richards, could possibly have been the atypical school jock, hoping to make it to medical school on a football scholarship. He was the one driving, likely with Melissa criticizing him in his right ear as Lindsay and Ryan tried to find time in the back seat to smooch and kiss in the presence of others. Melissa and Lindsay had had the kind of friendship forged by little kids and stretched into adulthood for no apparent reason. Michelle had tagged along because Melissa had invited her, and she had nothing better to do.

“Chancing on the house, Nick was hoping to get directions back to the highway, little knowing if he had just continued a few miles more, he would have found it on his own. Stopping here was just an act of chance. He could have been on his way and gone, but he was quite sure that he was lost much further east of Westbridge, maybe somewhere around Raynham or Taunton. When he knocked on the door, it sounded solid, locked against unwanted visitors, but when it swung open, and he poked his head in, Melissa thought he had been granted access, and the volley of passengers erupted from the vehicle desperate to be free from the claustrophobic interior of the car and in more humane luxury.

“The sight they encountered was actually a far cry from the serene suburban cookie-cutter homes from which they came. Instead of a warm blast of in-door air conditioning and well-coiffed conditions created by diligent house work, they instead met an interior tinged by dust and the subtle faint odor of wood rot. The structure seemed trapped in time, a time capsule of the 1900s with embroidered furniture, grandma furnishings, relics only seen in Silent Movies and faded striped wallpaper - all bathed in a weird grayish-blue light formed by the combination of rain clouds, darkness and reflected illumination.

“Although they knew they were intruders, Nick knew this was a better place to wait out the weather than within the five-ton sardine can on wheels currently parked roadside at the front gate. Pushing the ill-defined bounds of burglary and trespassing, Ryan immediately wanted to go exploring. He had seen what was to be seen on the first floor, but now, he was tempted by curiosity and boredom to investigate what seemed to be an abandoned house. Melissa and Lindsay were a bit more rational, calling out for a homeowner, but only silence and a dripping roof welcomed them. The air was chilly and cold, the furniture out of date and foreign to them, but they felt more secure in here than out on an unfamiliar road. However, as Melissa strolled through the layer of dust on the extensively prepared dining table, she felt an urgency she couldn’t explain. Twelve settings had been made with baroque China plates. The silverware was silver. The tea cups gracefully upside down in their saucers. Four candles interspersed by dead flowers lined the center of the table. When she reached out to admire the exquisite yet forgotten heirlooms, her finger sank into the still warm wax.

“Upstairs, Nick looked at the old children’s playroom. It was strewn with the toys of another age. Wooden blocks, a cast iron train, cloth dolls, a wooden hobby horse…. The kind of things from his grandfather’s attic. The door to the side entered their bedroom. There were two disturbed beds on the right side facing the windows, a third on the far wall stripped and laid bare by a rolled up mattress tightly wrapped in a huge bundle. A side wall was still littered by children’s drawings pinned into the plaster, an edge of the rug was upturned, the closet door was still askew… a small jacket hanging in mute witness from the doorknob. It looked as if whoever lived here had just departed.

“Downstairs, there was little chatter as Nick and Melissa lightly tread the creaking wood floor. Behind them, Michelle noticed the forgotten stitch work in the chair by the front windows. There was still an overturned book in the rocking chair by the mantle, and as they pushed on, the eyes of a stuffed owl seemed to follow them as they moved into the parlor behind the sitting area. The highlight of the room was a large black grand piano pushed near the bay windows. Still propped open, the cover to the keys was pushed up and sheet music to “Fur Elise” still propped up ready to be played. There was a stack of newspapers on the sofa. Old eyeglasses on the table with an errant coffee cup; its dried contents having left a stain in it. The fireplace was still mired with partially burnt firewood and ashes. Old sepia prints of forgotten relatives lined the walls, and at the liquor cabinet, accompanied by assorted dusty bottles of wine, spirits and brandy, was still an unfinished snifter of Scotch.

“With this atmosphere, Melissa felt as if they weren’t alone. Even Michelle had the sensation of being watched. Upstairs, Lindsay gently protested when Ryan suggested they have sex in the ramparts of the four poster bed in the master bedroom. For some reason, she could not stop looking back at the old bathroom where a man’s rusting razor still scarred the surface of the sink. The thunder cracked and lightning flashed, and Melissa began screaming. She felt as if she had been touched, but Nick was a few feet before her, staring up the backstairs to the second floor, and Lindsay was admiring a small brass music box from the mantel. Calming her down, Nick suggested starting a fire to keep them warm. After all, that’s what a fireplace was for. From upstairs, Ryan and Lindsay came running down the stairs looking for answers. Melissa had calmed down by now, but she wanted to go, and so did Michelle. They had been pushing it. They could be arrested for trespassing, but Nick felt it was acceptable to stay. They weren’t stealing anything, they hadn’t broken anything, and he was sure he could get their bearings in the morning. He just wanted to wait for the storm to let up.

“Still wet and chilled from the weather and gray skies, Nick started a fire in the fireplace belonging to the parlor, and the warm red light from it gradually pervaded the room and turned it from strange and shadowy to eerie and bizarre. Melissa started looking around hearing voices, and Lindsay thought she had seen fleeting shadows in other places of the house. Meanwhile, the storm continued outside. It sounded like it was right over the house. They could hear the rain pelting the roof and sides of the structure, the sound of dripping hitting the floor of the entryway. The wind was howling and whistling through all the minor cracks and crevices of the aging edifice. The windows were being pelted by the long unkempt branches of overgrown bushes, sounding like fingers scratching from the interior of a grave. Even the structure itself seemed to groan and sway from the weather, and from upstairs, Ryan could hear the thunder echoing through a window left ajar. Staring into the dancing flames on the scarce firewood in the fireplace mantle, Melissa was getting tired and sleepy. Snuggling closer to Nick by her on the dingy sheet-covered sofa, she was slowly dropping off into unconsciousness.

“At some point, Melissa stirred and looked up and around the room. She felt as if she had been asleep for hours, but it had actually just been a few minutes. She had wrapped herself in a sheet that had covered the sofa, but she was still cold. Looking around for a better cover, Lindsay mentioned that there were thick comforters left on the beds upstairs. Preferring one of those to a thin sheet, she excused herself and ran upstairs to obtain one. Nick and Ryan were talking about the football game they had seen between Westbridge and Broxton, but the talk then turned to the weather and then to recent cars on the market. When Lindsay noticed Melissa hadn’t returned, she called out to her to bring her down one of the quits as well. Not sure if she heard her, she went off to tell her in person.

“That left Nick, Ryan and Michelle down stairs by themselves. By now, the guys were talking about local high school gossip, and Michelle was stuck listening to their masculine blather. After rolling her eyes, Ryan asked out loud the question of how long it took to get a few quilted covers off a bed. Wondering what they were doing, he got up to check on the missing members of the party, leaving Nick and Michelle alone. 

“And then there was Nick. He wasn’t sure when he had drifted off, but when he woke, Michelle was missing and the storm had abated to a light sprinkle. There were even a few rays of sunlight peeking through the clouds. Realizing now was the time to finish the drive home, he went up the grand staircase to the second floor and its bedrooms to locate his wayward travelers. However, with the windows drawn and closed, the top landing was almost pitch black. There was a skylight peering down through the center of the stairway emitting a light purple pallor over everything, but beyond that, it was pitch black. There was a vague light coming from the east side of the property into one of the bedrooms, but the others were much darker. The top landing was part of a long corridor from one side of the house to the other with the master bedroom in the center overlooking the front porch, but as Nick looked into it, it was pitch black. The windows were seemingly covered by several layers of curtains to create the darkness, and before it, he felt a freezing cold draft flowing out of it. He called out to Melissa….

“Mel, it's time to go.” But no response came. When he dared to enter the room, he thought he saw a tall dark female figure by the side of the room near the bathroom door and then the feeling of hands wrapping around his arms. It was then that Nick realized…. He was never leaving this house.”

It's a very popular story, and it still gets repeated to this day, even for other locations like New Jersey’s Clinton Castle. Unfortunately, it's not true. If such a thing had happened, there would have been at least some documentation of it in some form in newspapers between 1967 or 1970 or even a mention in some documentary on the disappearances without the paranormal ingredients. However, no such evidence of this disappearing act has ever been recorded as happening. Melissa Hackett and Michelle Bouchard were real characters though, It turns out Melissa vanished on a drive from Boston to her parent's house in Brockton on November 18, 1957, and Michelle drowned in a ferry accident off Cape Cod on March 13, 1958. To this day, Melissa has yet to be found, but she was never in Westbridge, and it is likely she has never visited the Fawcett House.

Back in the Forties, the controversial psychic researcher Plato Zorba appeared at the house on Canopy Road accompanied by his psychic and medium, Elaine Zacharides, and a psychic photographer to investigate what was suspected to be a routine haunting. Elaine didn’t have the slightest notion where she was or why Zorba had brought her there, but she was described by Zorba as “walking in like an angry school marm before a rowdy classroom.” Upon entering, she claimed she felt almost completely overwhelmed, describing the dilapidated residence as a “jumping off place for spirits passing through from the other side.” She guessed that numerous people had once held séances in the house and even used Ouija boards to contact the ghosts. The numerous rituals left spirits trapped in the house and frustrated the local earthbound spirits. Zorba’s diary of his visit has her reading:

Zorba: “What else do you feel?”

Zachariades: “Personalities…”

Zorba: “How many?”

Zacharides: “I feel like I’m trying to move underwater.”

Zorba: “What else?”

Zacharides: “Voices…. I hear a woman saying, “This is your fault.” “

Zorba: “Whose fault?”

Zacharides: “The man’s….”

Zorba: “Can you get a name?”

Zacharides: “They’re arguing.”

Zorba: “Can you get their names?”

Zacharides: “She’s ordering him out of her house.”

Zorba: “Can you get any names from them?”

Zacharides: “Cass…. Maybe Castle….”

In 2009, William Collins and Steve Barnette met with Bill Dreyer, a local contractor who oversaw the property for the bank that owned the property. In addition to having seen and heard a few things, he has also given tours to prospective buyers and a few ghost hunting groups. At one time, the structure was simply known as the Canopy Road Mansion with the Fawcett name alternating as the “Faucet House” through the Fifties and Sixties. In his visit, Barnette called it “the Addams Family House” due to the exterior similarity with the location on the iconic TV series.

“I hear you’ve heard of a few things that happened in the house?” Collins asked Dreyer. A short stocky and balding figure with a round smiling face and salt-and-pepper hair and beard, he generously met CGS one Saturday to give a tour of the house and explore the legends.”

“Oh, I’ve heard a lot.” Dreyer confesses. “This town loves its ghost stories. We live in the area of the Salem Witch Trials and the Lizzie Borden murders, and we have a few other haunted sites too. The Old Westbridge Seminary has been shut down for years, and its stories are a bit more popular here than the Old Fawcett Place, probably because of the recurring renovations there. There’s also Westbridge High School and a house down on Collins Road where people have seen strange things.”

“What about here at the Fawcett?”

“The Fawcett is its own beast all together.” Dreyer mentions as he opens the house up for a walk-through. “Old Bill Danvers, a former town councilman with the chamber of commerce…. He kept a detailed list of the reports people had here and from the graveyard across the street. Not sure if the things are related, but there have been legends for years of the two sites being connected.”

“What things?”

“For one, back in the 1900s there were rumors of a ghostly black hearse drawn by horses storming from the woods on the far end of the cemetery, heading down the drive on the far side and coming down the road to disappear down the driveway by the house. There aren’t any accounts of anyone actually seeing it, but the story goes back to the Civil War.

“Another thing….. You know, Hummingbird Cemetery is still an active cemetery, and we still have burials there to this day. Back in 1983, we had the funeral of Lionel Ness, he was ninety-three when he passed, and he was buried near his parents. At the funeral, there were five extra mourners present no one could identify, they were all women wearing mourning robes, and when it broke up, they completely vanished, but someone said they saw them wandering off to the Fawcett.”

“In 1991, we had a funeral for George and Emma Keller, an elderly couple…. They had died from a gas leak in their house…. And their kids could only afford a simple funeral in the back of the cemetery. During the funeral, several mourners noted a dark figure in the third floor garret window watching from the house, and they knew no one was living there at the time.”

William and Steve together glanced up to the window.

“Male or female?”

“Don’t know…. They just called it a dark figure.” 

The house opened up to a wide hallway leading to a front room. Just as the stories claimed, the old residence was still occupied by the possessions of the last family to live there. There were old umbrellas in a stand by the door along with a tarnished gold frame for a mirror on the wall. The flower pot on the other side was occupied by a dead plant and decomposing leaves. An old period child’s stroller was partially obscured by a chair covered by a while sheet. The structure was almost pristine, its degradation hampered to just worn floors, cracked ceilings and peeling wallpaper. The old grandeur of the place was still evident, but the old brass lamp fixtures were tarnished, light was streaming through dirty windows over the staircase and the odor was a combination of stale air, old wood and the distant taste of rotting wood. In the kitchen, items and bowls were set out as if someone was getting ready to make a meal. The numerous pieces of sheet-covered artifacts looked like a multitude of short fat ghosts. Steve noticed Dreyer glancing nervously up the staircase to the second floor.

“Any stories?”

“A few….” Dreyer confessed. “A couple of years ago, we had a reality appraiser coming here to evaluate the house for prospective buyers. She had a contractor here and two others taken along to make sure the historical aspects of the house were kept intact. Anyway, I was here too, but I was making my usual inspection to check on repairs that had to be made…. I never even went upstairs when I heard a scream or something, like a short shriek, and everyone started running out scared of something on the stairs. When I came out from the kitchen and passed through the dining room, they were suddenly all outside mulling off the front porch and staring up at the house. From what I understand, they were ascending the staircase when a woman they didn't know suddenly appeared and dashed down the stairs right next to them…. Surprising all of them.”

“What did she look like?”

“Dark hair, light gray dress… She’s been seen several times.”

“How many other times?”

“Not sure of the number.” Dreyer led the way up the stairs to the bedrooms. “One time, I was coming up the stairs with an assistant getting ready to go up onto the roof to do some patch work, leaks, you know…. I was coming up the stairs just like we are now, talking, not really paying attention, when he suddenly stepped back and tumbled down the stairs. I thought he had stumbled, so I went down, lifted him up, and he’s pointing and going, “Who was that? What was that?” I’m looking around, “What? What?” And he says, “There was a woman moving through the house!” If I had lifted my head a bit more, I guess I might have seen her, but I hadn’t.”

“What makes him think it wasn’t a prowler?”

“He said she didn’t walk like a real person. He described her as just sort of floating from one side to the other like a dress on those overhead hangers at the Laundromat rolling by. That’s why the story sticks in my head so much. That and he said she didn’t have legs. Just a colored area of air below the waste. If I had seen something like that, I'd have run straight over him and not stopped till I reached Boston…”

“But you’ve never seen anything yourself, is that correct?”

“Well, I’m not really sure.” Dreyer stood before the two doors to the master bedroom on the front of the house. “You know, you guys calling me, and thinking of all these strange stories makes me recall something that happened just a few weeks ago. We had just had a series of recurring storms here, nothing major, no girls sucked into Oz or anything like that, and I was coming by as usual to check the roof and ceiling for leaks, and just as I turned into the drive by the house, I thought I saw a figure on the balcony over that side entrance…. Just standing there in dark clothes, wringing her hands like this.” He nervously rubbed his hands over and over across each other. “It was just a blip on my radar, boop, and it was gone. I’m thinking it might have looked like a person, but it could also have just been a suggestion.”

“Isn’t this the room where those kids reportedly vanished?” William asked about the master bedroom. It was a huge room, the largest bedroom in the house, with dark green baroque wallpaper with patterns on the light fixtures, a huge crystal chandelier and dark mahogany furnishings. The canopy bed was meticulously made with an extensively styled comforter, and the cabinets and bureaus had everything a man and wife might own poking up through the white sheets over them. Those “blacked-out windows” from the story weren’t boarded up. They were five-pane windows with dark blue curtains and dusty white second curtains under them. The carpet behind the door had a compass-like pattern lined up with the patterns across the room. The bathroom was on the right over the first floor parlor, it’s door just partially closed. There was a door on the other side to the nursery along with a large closet with French doors.  

“Yeah, that’s it….” Bill answered while looking around. “This room gives me the creeps. Whenever I have to work here, I hear strange noises from all over the house. No other room here does that. I’ll hear sounds like someone came in downstairs, and I’ll call up, “I’m up here. Be right down.” but no one is ever there. I’ve heard voices from parts of the place, footsteps on the balcony and from the attic, sounds like someone dragging chairs from room to room…. But I keep coming back. I only got scared once and left in the middle of my work. It was the sound of kids from over there.”  He points to the nursery. “It was a sound like several giggling little kids. I wanted to look inside, but something told me, “What are you? Crazy?” “

As William was doing the interview, Steve was moving around taking photos, hoping something might appear in his shots later to merit an investigation that night. Beyond the nursery was a second smaller bedroom with another canopy bed, but it wasn’t as tidy or pristine. The bed was unmade, the floor was covered in clothes and trash trailing into the hall, there were magazines stacked by the bed and fast food wrappers mixed into the detritus.

“Has someone been living here?”

“Let me tell you that story…” Dreyer continued. “Like I said, I started watching this place in 1989, hired by the bank through another contractor. Before that, it had been empty since at least the 1950s. Anyway, I was being escorted by Brad Penobscot from the State Historical Society through the place, you know, evaluating the place and determining if it could be saved, and as we got here, we found the place exactly like this. The magazines are from 1986 and 1987, the fast food wrappers are recent, there are clothes for a young girl in the closet, there’s a modern make-up case under the vanity…. Looks like someone had been squatting here to stake a claim for a while, but something must have scared them away, and Penobscot told me to leave the entire house preserved just as we found it…. So, I left it just as we found it.”

“So, except for this, it’s been trapped in time for over sixty years?” William remarked. “You haven't changed anything.”

“Not exactly…” Dreyer confessed. “You know that balcony I mentioned on the side of the house? Well, it’s connected to two bedrooms with an exterior stairway to the attic rooms. One of the rooms had been converted into a sitting room, and when we reached that, we discovered a table stenciled with all of these Ouija board symbols on it with letters and numbers. There have been several rumors of séances being held and people trying to contact ghosts here in the Twenties, but this just dang it to hell just confirmed it. Penobscot and I were just shocked, and he looked at me and went, “Get that mother-effing thing out of this house! I’ll take the blame for it, but get rid of it.” So, I rolled it out and off the balcony, shattering it as if it was plywood, then I tossed the pieces in my truck and trucked it off.”

“What the hell were they once doing here?” Steve wondered.

“I don’t know…” Dreyer went on. “But the next time I saw Penobscot, he was here with a bunch of kids from the high school on a Saturday and carrying off several boxes from the attic, out of the old green house and even the cottage in back, He had kids scraping up tiles from the greenhouse floor that had been laid in a pattern, and I have no idea what he found that terrified him so much.”

Checking out the damage, Collins and Barnette measured the missing patch of tiles as thirty feet wide with an estimated circumference of around 90 to 95 feet. The underlying pattern underneath suggested a four-pointed star within a four pointed star. To this day, they have no idea what to make of it, but Penobscot later got a job at the state museum and retired in 1995 to Fort Walton, Florida.

Later that weekend, Collins and Barnette were joined by Larry Wedekind, Tom Pittman and Dawn Rochner, the CGS team’s resident psychic. On October 13, 1996 (the alleged thirty year anniversary of the missing teenagers), Dreyer allowed the team access to the Fawcett for an overnight investigation. They centered the investigation on the master bedroom, the alleged séance room and the dining room where sounds of a phantom dinner party has been heard. Two cameras were set running to capture activity that might occur along with seven others through the house. When Dawn arrived, it was dark and overcast with a chance of rain.

“Are you ready to start?’ William asked her.

“I’ve got a headache.”

“Allergies?”

“No, the house…” She admitted. “I was feeling fine on the way here, but the second we made the turn, I started feeling this pressure above my eyes, and as I entered, it just took over my entire head. I mean, the air just feels so thick here. It’s as if I was trying to move underwater.”

“What could be causing that?”

“Have there been seances in this house? People calling up spirits?”

“It’s been claimed.”

“I think that’s why I think the house was built. Because of the proximity to the graveyard. I think the house was built in order to exploit the area. I think there’s been several seances here over several years…. There’s a lot of upset spirits here.”

“Can you identify any of them?”

“I’ll try, but it’s like trying to force myself through Grand Central Station.” Dawn paused in the dining room. “There are several ghosts here connected to the land, connected to the house, connected to the area homes and this house….”

“The missing teenagers?’

“There’s a girl here….” She paused in the butler’s pantry on the way to the kitchen. “I think from the Fifties…. She died near here, but not in this house. She just keeps saying, “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.” She may be buried close by.”

“Did she tell you her name?”

“Missy…. Melissa.”

William, Larry and Steve exchanged weird glances.

“There’s two small girls here….” Dawn continued. “They keep wanting me to come upstairs.” She went directly up the stairs, passing the master bedroom and heading straight to the nursery. Entering the room and stepping over the antique toys and books, she turned around once and gazed disinterestedly into the master bedroom.

“They want to play.” She looked amused. “They said there was a girl in the next bedroom, but she left in the middle of the night when they jumped into bed with her.”

“Did they mention their names?”

“Samantha, I think…. Emily?” Dawn answered. “Howard’s daughters… They once lived here, but they got sick…. Yellow fever…”

“Anything from the other room?”

“No…” Dawn crossed through it. “What happened to the table?”

“What table?”

“There’s a man here….” Dawn felt another presence. “He’s a big burly figure with a thick mustache and a bowler hat… 1890s, perhaps. He’s saying, “I hated that table. I moved it to the guest room, but my wife wouldn’t let me get rid of it. She wants it back.”

“Who is he?’

“He won’t tell me, but there’s a woman coming in around him as he departs. She wants her table back. Someone used it to bring the invaders in here…”

“Invaders? Like us?”

“No…” Dawn points to the cemetery across the street. “Those people…. She says her table was defiled to let all of them in here. This headache is killing me.” She paced back and forth a few seconds. “She’s Victoria Price, and she wants all of them out of here.”

“From the seances?”

“Yes…” Dawn explained. “She says the people who came after her let all of them in here and now, they’re using it like a hotel, and she hates it. She’s angry, but not unreasonable. She wants her house back. She also says her ashes are still located in the house. She wants them found and buried on hallowed grounds. She is very adamant about this.”

“Is she also the Lady in Gray?”

“Yes, I think she’s like a mother to the Fawcett girls, but she stays away from her husband. They’re not on good terms, and it’s this bad blood and the crowded situation of all this energy causing the oppressive feeling. The only ghosts that belong here are the Prices and the Fawcett children, but there’s also an old black caretaker named Boaz who keeps trying to communicate with the current caretaker, letting him know what needs fixing. If you hear a deep throaty laughter here, it’s him. He gets amused by the living traipsing through here. There’s also some Civil War soldiers wandering around the garden from when this was a hospital ....”

“What about Melissa?”

“She's not from around here.” Dawn responded. “She says she picked up a hitch-hiker that raped and killed her. She’s buried under what was a caretaker’s shed beyond the cemetery, but she keeps coming here because she keeps following the other spirits.”

“Are they saying anything about the cellar?”

“Not much….” Dawn revealed. “But I get the feeling someone did a lot of work down there to hide a lot of valuable stuff still down there.”

Following up on the location, Barnette and Wedekind pulled the property and census records from the Bristol City Archives. Since Zorba never followed up on checking if anyone named Cass or Castle ever lived in the house, they started looking for the Castle name and learned it did suddenly become very popular out of nowhere in the 40s and 50s. It is believed it is because of a Boston businessman named James A. Castle, who came down from Boston in 1947 with his wife, family and siblings, and acquired the local hotel, two restaurants and the property around Westbridge High School nearby including the Fawcett House, but he never lived there either. Reportedly, he had been chased out of Boston for selling illegal liquor smuggled down from Canada. On April 11, 1961, he was walking to the church when a car pulled up alongside him and several gunshots rang out, leaving him dead on the sidewalk. The murder has never been solved.

History: Culling a history for the Fawcett House has been a bit of a challenge. The Westbridge Historical Society only has a few Halloween articles for it going back to 1975, and the Plymouth County Historical Society in Plymouth has no research on it at all. However, as it turns out, the house predates the current county line when the area was still part of Bristol County. Buried deep in the census records at the Bristol County Historical Preservation Society, Andrea Welch of CGS actually found some long missing research on it.

According to their files, the Fawcett House was originally the Pryce Mansion, which was built in or around 1835 on the Westbridge-to-Brockton Road (now Hummingbird Lane/Canopy Road). It was built by Alexander Pryce, an English-German industrialist, for his wife, Victoria, but they moved away around 1853 after losing their five children during a tuberculosis epidemic in town. Many of the Pryce family members were buried in Hummingbird Cemetery across the street; the grounds increasing in size through the 1920s to the 1940s. Distraught by the deaths, they left the house and moved to somewhere in Michigan. The house was then part of the property owned by the Fawcett-Laurel family, who were famous apple tree farmers in the 19th Century. To this day, apple trees still grow wild around the house and are now collected by local families. Howard and Joanna Fawcett left the house to their eldest daughter, Samantha, who married William Torrance, a wealthy rifle maker, but they never lived here. Instead leaving it to her sister, Emily, who had married Max Laurel, a local furniture maker, but they didn't stay long either.

It is known the house was used as a field hospital by the Union Army during the Civil War, so the Laurels may have been required to abandon it during the war. Empty through the 1880s and through the rest of the 19th century up to the 1940s, the local police have been reported often chasing out squatters, vagrants and homeless people to leave the house. There is some indication the house was occupied at some point in the 1920s-1930s period, but no one knows who these occupants were.

In 1989, the mansion was protected by the preservation society to keep the house intact. The Westbridge Commons Bank in custody of the property and surrounding parcels still has the Laurels as the last legal owners, lending credence to the idea that someone was renting it in the early 20th Century or at least during Prohibition. Several investors and potential owners have mulled over the structure as a subject of a potential renovation project or “flip,” but as yet, none of those projects have come to fruition.

According to legend, there was a tunnel from a fake mausoleum in the cemetery across the street into the house used to smuggle bootleg liquor during Prohibition, but the source for this legend is unrevealed as no one has found evidence to support it. There are a few mausoleums across the street in a direct line with the house, but no one has examined them for possible evidence.

In 2014, the VH1 network filmed promos on the location with actors Hal Sparks and Lynsey Bartilson, implying the location was going to be in the Ninth Season of the TV series, “Celebrity Paranormal Project.” However, the series was later canceled and the episode was never taped. 

In September 2016, a historian named Dwight Potter with a number of archaeology students from the University of Boston attempted pumping out the water in the basement to look for tunnels. Their effort showed the water had made the foundation unstable with a risk of a collapse of the house so they ceased work until the foundation could be reinforced, but when they returned the following month, the basement was once more flooded. Plans to continue the excavation were scheduled, but as of 2020, no further progress has been attempted. 

Investigations: There have been only a few serious investigations of the house besides urban explorers and would-be historians. Plato Zorba’s records on his investigations have yet to be released publically, but J.K. Finnerty had contact with his assistant, Elaine Zacharides, and she reveals she believed the house was teeming with ghosts coming from the cemetery. She describes hearing from no more than eighteen entities in the house, and that Zorba had almost a hundred photos of figures in the house. Many of the images turned up in books on New England architecture, but a select few he kept for himself showed orbs, wispy shapes and strange shadows. Elaine said she recalled seeing a photo of a woman in shadow atop the stairs obscured by the bannister, but Zorba often erroneously identified this photo as from the Shivers Mansion near Langford, Illinois. She has no idea what happened to the original photo.

Before the October 2019 CGS investigation, Dr. Harold Clove from New York had his own lesser known paranormal investigation in January 1971. Accompanied by psychic Elinor Ungar, writer Andrew Madison, occultist Bernard Grassley and Finnerty, they had a seance in the upstairs bedroom, but nothing was reported from it except for a brief blurb in Clove’s 1987 biography.

To date, the CGS investigation has had the only truly in depth examination of the place. Twenty-three photographs revealed orbs, strange shadows, misty ectoplasmic formations and unexplained camera problems, like sudden blurry images in rolls of film. A few EVPs were collected during the process saying, “Are you listening?” “I’m coming up there.” and “I didn’t know.” In a response to being asked, “Are you one of the ghosts from the cemetery?” their digital recorder heard a voice say, “We come from down there.” followed by a gruff voice saying, “Get out!”

Identity of Ghosts: A truly exhaustive list of the ghosts in the house would be impossible. The only likely persons to be identified are the girls, the original owners Alexander and Victoria Price, the old black caretaker Boaz and two other persons named by Rochner, namely two Union soldiers named Baker and Stubbs, who think the location is the White House in Washington D.C. which they are on duty to protect.

And just perhaps Melissa Hackett…. William Collins let his suspicions known to the Westbridge Police she might be buried in an unmarked grade near the cemetery, but as of yet, no effort has been made to find her. Apparently, the police don’t accept psychic impressions as valuable information.

Source/Comments: Thriller (Episode: The House) - Activity based on the Halfway House in Hendersonville, Tennessee, the Loretta Lynn Plantation in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, Rock Castle in Hendersonville, Tennessee and the Whaley House in San Diego, California.

MAIN PAGE

Other Hauntings