GARDNER HOUSE
Location: The private residence is located on Gardner Street in Grandview, Pennsylvania, the county seat of Driscoll County, between Bucks County and the New Jersey state line, twenty-eight miles east of Philadelphia where Interstate 13 and Interstate 1 meet. The current owners are not interested in being harassed by visitors.
Description of Place: The house is a Mediterranean-style house much like most of the houses in the tree-filled neighborhood with a round swimming pool and garden on a small parcel of property.
Ghostly Manifestations: Grandview, Pennsylvania is a haunted little town, but then there is a local psychic here who believes all towns have their population of the living and the deceased. Vehemently holding on to her privacy, the young beauty has shared stories from her second sight with few people privy to her secrets, and among them are story of the ghost that once haunted the house on Gardner Street. Because she is friends of the couple now living there, she is not willing to reveal their names or much of the facts in order to keep the house from going public.
To begin with, the couple who acquired the house did not originally believe in ghosts, but the inexplicable things they saw and witnessed soon actually made them believers. Things started subtle at first, like a lot of cases. A water faucet in the kitchen turned on by itself. Such a thing is possible when the water pressure builds up, but this was a modern newly installed faucet and none of the other faucets in the house were malfunctioning. Rapping sounds and creaking floorboards occurred at night as the cold night air stretched and reacted on the house. These were annoying trivialities in any new house, but it was hardly proof the house was haunted. The creaks and groans of the fifty year old house did sound like the patterns of a spirit making itself known, but then the female owner saw the image of a little girl playing around the pool and went out to confront her. Upon entering the patio area, she realized the back yard was empty. The girl must have run back home.
Her husband saw and heard things too. He'd hear the sound of something moving through the house and think his wife was home. Getting up from the kitchen table to help her, he'd move through the hall to the foyer and find no one to welcome home. He'd head upstairs expecting to find his wife up there, and then he'd hear the sound of someone in the kitchen. Wondering how his wife slipped past him, he'd rush to catch up with her, and find the refrigerator standing open, a loaf of bread on the counter top and a jug of milk on the linoleum floor as if left by a child.
Both the owners experiencing things together as well. A loud thump upstairs would pull them up to the spare bedroom to find the ceramic statue of a cat sitting on the floor seven feet from where it rested on a shelf. It could have fallen and skidded across the floor, but it had been found sitting up, and there was not a single chip on it where it had hit the floor. Later that day, the light in the staircase to the basement flickered on and off. They could see it flickering through the space under the door. What's odd, it stopped as soon as they opened the door to investigate it.
The wife once heard the sound of a young girl breathing heavily next to her as she sat in the kitchen doing the household bills. It was as if a young girl had just run in to join her and was watching over her shoulder. Looking around, she could not find an explanation for the noise and continued working, but then she heard a girl's voice: "Is my mommy home yet?" The experience rattled her so much that she dropped what she was doing and fled to find her husband. Neighbors later commented on the young lady that swam and played in the back yard alone. A young man watching by telescope from three houses away became disconcerted when the seemingly harmless young girl somehow became conscious she was being watched and turned round to stare at him from over two hundred feet away!
Eventually, Grandview's local psychic promised to see the house in private and give her observations on what she saw and felt. The visit must have been prosperous, because the spirit seemed to have moved on. Afterward, there was a feeling of maternal longing for the child's spirit. The wife felt she had been hasty in being instrumental in exorcising the young girl's ghost and felt guilty in sending her away, but her conscience was swayed by realizing she had done the right thing for her.
History: The house is part of a housing division created atop a divided parcel of land in 1957. The house has had several owners over several years.
Identity of Ghosts: There has been only one death recorded at the house. The young girl of a previous family accidentally drowned in the pool while left unattended. No criminal charges were ever filed in the case.
Source/Comments: Ghost Whisperer (Episode: "Drowned Lives"). Manifestations loosely based on the Gardner House in Topeka, Kansas.