FONTANA HOUSE
Location
: The Fontana House is located at 1545 Mendler Drive in a residential neighborhood in the Bellbrook section of Boulder, Colorado, twenty miles northwest of Denver Colorado on Highway 36.Description of Place: Two stories tall with high ceilings, an extended back porch and garage on a tree-lined street, the 110-year old white Dutch Colonial has black shutters and a white picket fence. Hardly the image of a haunted house, the eight-bedroom house was once part of a larger estate that was reduced in size through the 1950s.
Ghostly Manifestations: The hardest thing for a paranormal researcher to become a part of is to investigate a house that has no paranormal history. Numerous abandoned houses through the South have had reputations of being haunted long after their last tenants lived there whereas the North has had locations that have had interim periods of occupancy and lack of occupancy. Very few houses like the Fontana House have had long histories of occupancy by a single family who has retained the long-term stories of its haunted history. Gregory Fontana was five-years old when his grandfather told him about the spirits in the house, and he was eleven-years when his uncle started repeating to him the stories he had never heard. Now, a married man of three at forty-two, he's now ready to share the stories he grew up with in his youth.
"This isn't the typical blood-dripping-from-the walls, screams-in-the-night, slobbering-monster-in-the-basement Hollywood type haunted house you think you know." He starts off. "It's more like the just-because-your-relatives-have-died-doesn't-mean-they're-gone sort of thing. I'm not always threatening to move out because they've pushed me too far nor am I screaming at the dark for something to face me. It's more like, "Wow, I wonder what they're going to do next.""
Greg's great-grandfather, William Louis Fontana, designed and built the house in 1888, and it's been passed down more or less through the oldest child ever since it was finished in 1891. Greg received it from his father in 1995.
"When I first moved in," Greg recalls. "It took a little while to get used to the house. I knew it was my Uncle William's house, so I was never scared of it, but my wife, Heather, thought straight from the thought that there was something peculiar about the whole house. She always seemed to have experiences. I worked the day shift, and she had the night shift as a police officer. Things always seemed to happen more often during the day when I wasn't home."
Five months after they moved in, Heather began to experience a series of incidents that would ultimately test her resolve to live in the Mendler Street House. One morning, she couldn't sleep, and as she struggled to fall asleep, she sensed a strange presence in the hall outside her bedroom. When she got up to investigate, she caught a glimpse of a man walking past her open door. Grabbing her gun, she checked the house over.
"It was definitely a man, and he was swinging his arms lightly." As a police officer, she was trained to be observant. "His head was slightly bent, and he walked briskly past me in the room. At first, I thought it was my husband having come home early so I checked the house, but no one was home, so I began to suspect it was a burglar. However, there was no evidence of any entry, or of anyone having been in the house and I began to wonder if it had just been an overactive imagination."
Shortly after the incident, Heather soon began to suspect that it may have not been an actual living person at all. Two months passed without further incident, then, one night in March, Greg was working upstairs on the house, replacing light fixtures on the second floor. He stopped when Heather called him down to dinner, and, as usual, made sure to unplug his drill. As the evening wore on, Greg and Heather decided to watch a movie, while their eldest daughter, Kristen went upstairs to read. One hour later, Kristen heard the sound of the drill outside her room. She assumed her brother, Teddy, was teasing her about the house possibly being haunted, but before long, she felt the joke had gone on long enough. When she got to the hallway, it was empty, and the drill was unplugged.
"I was very confused, too. I knew very well that something was happening because I'm usually very level-headed." Kristen adds. "I touched the drill and it was cold, and it usually gets really hot after its been used."
Other strange events continued. One night, Greg heard the sound of coins falling in a bowl, but he was alone in the room. Another time, while cooking, Heather felt two sharp tugs on her blouse:
"After that incident, I decided we had a problem in this house. There was something going on. It wasn't something that we could understand or explain, but there was something definitely going on."
Most of the time, the occurrences all seemed to center around Heather. She has felt tugged in the kitchen as if a child was trying to get her attention, but when she turned around, no one was there. Her youngest daughter, Suzy, suddenly had invisible playmates with her in the house. Heather never thought about it, but a few times when she was alone, she had heard the sounds of kids running loose across the top floor. Eight year-old Jake Fontana reported seeing a strange little girl peeking around his bedroom door then vanishing. Greg has heard distant voices through the baby monitor in his youngest daughter room.
"I can't tell what they're saying, but it sounds like there's a TV going in the room - which there isn't." He says.
It wasn't long before Charlotte Fontana soon had her first strange experience. Greg and Heather's then twelve-year-old daughter, nick-named "Charlie," was alone in the house and working on her homework in the kitchen and she heard someone coming up from the basement. At the time, she thought she was the only one home, but she got so scared that she hid under the table until she could see who was coming. The ascending footsteps stopped abruptly on the top step. She stayed under the table for what she claimed was over an hour until her mother came home with groceries, but there was nobody there. As it turns out, Greg's uncle, William, used to live in that downstairs bedroom, and Greg believed he was still looking after the house.
Greg's first indication of his Uncle William in the house came during a thunderstorm. The family was in the living room, and footsteps suddenly pounded across the upstairs living room. The sounds of windows getting closed all over the house soon followed, and sure enough, when Greg checked later, all the upstairs rooms were shut against the brewing storm.
"He's got to be the only ghost in the world with OCD." Greg jokes. "He also seemed to grow obsessed with a bell we had on the mantle. We used to have this bell in the house, it belonged to my mother and I really wanted to keep it around, but we kept hearing it ringing through the house - in the kitchen, upstairs, in the garage, in the basement, at night, during the day. Heather once started screaming at it to stop, and you could hear it suddenly hit the floor as if we had surprised him. We went and checked it out, and, yep, it's five feet from the mantel and under the coffee table. We packed it away in a box after that, and we haven't heard it since."
William Fontana hardly ever appeared to anyone, but on two of those occasions, the witness was Heather's older sister, Bridget. She stayed in that downstairs basement bedroom one Christmas when one night, a loud noise woke her up and and she looked up to see a figure sitting with his back to her near the bathroom door. Hoping the apparition would disappear, she pulled the blankets over her head. A few minutes later, she peeked out and he was gone.
His second appearance was a bit shorter but again at night. This time, he was standing on the back porch next to a potted plant and staring out into the woods. Not recognizing him, Bridget asked Heather who their male guest was, but when they looked out, he was gone. Greg later revealed the spot where he was staring used to be the site of a huge oak tree with a tree house in it. William and Daniel Fontana played in it as kids, but it was sawed down in 1995 to keep it from falling on to the house in a storm
"That was the same Christmas I got my first video camera." Greg confesses. "I was pretty excited to get it, but I had a hard time understanding how to work it, and I unwittingly left it running when I went to bed. That night, it taped a few hours of my wife and I asleep as it rested on the dresser. Now, for some reason instead of just erasing it, I decided to peruse the footage and I think I captured Uncle Will in the footage because there's this dark shape that enters the room, hovers over my side of the bed as if its checking on me and then gradually fades away as it departs. Now, I know it sounds weird, but could he have stopped me from erasing the video so he could show me he's watching over the family?"
Eventually, Greg and Heather began to suspect that Uncle William could not be the only relative still in the house. Not all of the activity remained consistent. Local pest exterminator Bob Duncan was spraying the basement when he turned to warn a little girl about getting too close to his chemicals, but when he looked again, she wasn't there. Greg started wondering who this figure was, and where she was located on the family tree. No children have ever died in the house, but his three-year-old daughter, Suzy, often speaks about an imaginary playmate named Selene. There has never been a Selene Fontana in the family.
Greg recalls hearing from his grandfather that his ancestor likes to prowl around the partially-finished attic: "Heather heard someone up there one afternoon and thought some squirrels had broken in, but I went up there and couldn't find anything. Family legend says my great-grandfather hid some stocks up there worth a couple million dollars, but it's been searched to death, and no one has found a thing. Worse part, Bob the Exterminator once went up there to treat the attic against rats and said he saw an angry male figure staring at him from the north wall. Poor Bob, the family spirits tend to give him a hard time."
One recent incident involved a friend of Heather from high school named Isabel Kramer. She had come to stay with Greg and Heather and was very eager to experience some spirits, but late her first night after retiring, she heard the drawers opening and closing in the attic over her room, footsteps moving across the floorboards and the sounds of furniture moving. She thought Greg was upstairs trying to give her a show and she even tried to applaud him for his effort the next day. However, as Greg pointed out, "There's no furniture up there. Just several boxes, lamps, old TVs, Christmas decorations and closets with clothes, nothing like what she described."
There have been stories going on in the house for five generations. Greg's father, Daniel, reported seeing someone waving at him from the front porch then turning and entering through the closed front door. His sister, Nancy, was once in the bathtub and heard a presence in the house going down the hallway; when she peeked out to see who it was, the bathroom door slammed shut and locked behind her. When Greg came to unlock it, it swung open by itself without anyone in the bathroom. Neighbors have seen through the windows figures passing in front of lights when the house was empty.
Most recently, Heather was home bringing groceries through the kitchen door. When she went out to the car, the door slammed shut and locked on her. Racing around the house to the front door, she then heard as the lock clicked and the latch switched into place. Greg doesn't think the ghosts are malicious, just mischievous and playing games with her, because as she tried the patio door, it too suddenly locked as as she looked inside the house to the front door, it slowly began to open up for her.
"Like I said," Greg adds. "The ghosts here aren't scary, but they can be a bit chilling from time to time. Last Spring, we were replacing the upstairs carpet and renovating the master bathroom, and while working on it, we found what looked like a trap door in the ceiling of the bathroom that looked like it was once direct access to the attic. Wondering if I could find out where it came up, I went up into the attic and on the top landing up there, there's a room on the end next to the attic door, a small room with a garret window directly across from the stairs and then there's the large attic room with two rooms at opposite corners at of the house on the other end. As I went up, just out the corner of my eyes, I thought I saw a woman in a rocking chair just to my left in the room by the door. It was the most fleeting image, but I had noticed it enough that I tried to look directly at her, but at that moment, she had vanished, and there isn't even a rocking chair in the room."
History: William Fontana was an investment broker in the 1880s. He developed a large fortune through a large stock portfolio through the early Nineteenth Century, but the 1922 Stock Market Crash hit him hard, and he held on to what was left of his fortune by shrewdly selling off portions of his portfolio and holding on to more potentially lucrative stocks. Though he never retrieved the berth of his fortune, he passed away in 1938, leaving the house to his son, Joseph Fontana, a medical doctor, but he and his wife died childless, and Joseph's brother, Daniel, acquired it next. Rachel Stewart-Fontana, Joseph's wife, had used the house as an orphanage until she passed away in 1952. Daniel left the house to his son, William, in 1980 to move to Florida, but after William's death in 1987, it passed to his nephew, Gregory Fontana. Greg's oldest daughter, Kristen Fontana, is already plotting to do a complete remodel when she gets the house.
Identity of Ghosts: William Fontana I, the builder of the house, has been identified as the primary ghost haunting the house by the family, but Greg's father, Daniel Fontana II, claims he saw his Aunt Madelyne Fontana's spirit through the Late Thirties. She was five-years-old when she was fatally injured in fall down the stairs and died of complications on the way to the doctor. William himself has been reported haunting the attic.
Greg believes the most active spirit is his Uncle William Fontana II, who spent almost his entire life living in the basement bedroom from his teenage years to the day he died. A local newspaper columnist, he walked into a robbery at the convenience store on the corner in 1987 and was knifed by the assailant on the way into the store. Not realizing how bad his injuries were, he wandered home afterward, treated his wound and then went to bed where he died the following morning. His nonsensical death ripped the family apart for months after it happened. Several of the children spirits are linked to when Rachel Fontana used the house as an orphanage and a day care. Childless, she raised eight children in the house removed from broken homes named David, Max, Selene, Ashley, Matthew, Debby, Ryan and Grady, as per her personal albums, but the number of children she might have raised could be much higher. Although their last names are unrevealed, they were all teenagers when they moved on with their lives. It is believed Rachel's ghost is also in the house, and that they all return because of the happy memories they had there.
Greg believes this is not all the ghosts in the house. He believes there could be as many as twenty ghosts in the house. His Aunt Marcia thinks the number could be as high as fifty.
Source/Comments: Good Luck Charlie (Episode: "Girl Bites Dog") - Activity based on the Reynolds House in Evansville, Indiana; the Tatum House in Atlanta, Georgia, the Old Andrew Mansion in La Porte, Indiana, the Fuller House in Skaneateles, New York and the Piotrowski House in Cripple Creek, Colorado among other cases.