Description: The dilapidated Gothic-Victorian two-story manor house sits on a forgotten and unused back road on the outskirts of town. The structure has rounded windows, ornate wood doors and bay windows and sits on a large shaded property. The location has eight bedrooms, a large two-floor library study and Eighteenth century fixtures. Parts of the grounds are still overgrown with thick brush and vines growing over the property.

Ghostly Manifestations: The Grimes House is just barely within the city limits of Springfield. If it weren’t for the rumors of ghosts, no one would know it was even there. Indeed, several long-term residents have forgotten the house is still out there; yet, every year around Halloween the town is deluged with Blair Witch-obsessed teenagers with camcorders looking to explore it. The house is not easy to find. Several would-be film makers and news reporters looking for a Halloween story have unknowingly driven past it half a million times while they look for it. The truth of the matter is, they are coming on the wrong day to explore the private property.

“Christmas Eve, 1917,” Former government agent Fox Mulder has a deep personal interest in the house and in ghosts and UFOs in general. “Maurice and Lyda Grimes, living alone in the house, made a murder-suicide pact to never leave each other in death. Their bodies supposedly lay on the floor where they took their last dying breaths for almost a year until a meter reader looked in through a window and noticed the bodies on the floor. She was shot in the stomach at close range; he was dead by the same rifle after shooting himself in the head. Since then, three more couples have died in the house and always on Christmas Eve.” Fox told ghost hunter William Collins in 2003.

The first couple was Robert and Laura Grant in 1926. Convinced that he was cheating on her, she poisoned him and then drank the rest of it herself. In 1943, five years after living in the house, Edward and Lily Richards found a rifle in the house and went crazy blowing out the walls and doors and then themselves. Their children found them just a month after the incident. (Mulder says the rifle belonged to the Grimes.) Finally, on Christmas Eve 1956, Martin and Jane Moore were found dead after spending their life savings into restoring the house. Jane had died of heart failure, (although strangulation was once considered) and Martin hung himself in the library by jumping off the balcony in the study.

“In 1962, David and Gillian Carter hurriedly moved out after realizing the place was haunted.” Mulder repeats David Carter’s story first hand. “He said that both he and his wife were terrified by voices, footsteps, apparitions and the frightening visage of a man hanging from the ceiling in the foyer.”

Carter had also mentioned to Mulder about the building inspector who hastily condemned the house, a witness that he is still trying to locate. “While, investigating the house, something scared the man so badly that he quit his job and became a high school teacher in New York City. I mean, New York City? What in the world could scare a man that much that he would go that far?”

Through the years, drivers often reported hearing and describing other things from the obscured house. They reported seeing the place ablaze with lights and the sounds and scenes of a party going on. Women laughing, men calling and music playing, but then they turn the corner and look back and the place is completely dark again. In 2001, local and state police in the Springfield area were searching all the old structures in the area for a supposed meth lab in the area. Officer Dayle Hinman of the Springfield Police Force drove past the house on his rounds and felt it might be an ideal location for undesirables to conceal illegal activities.

In the cellar of the house, he found a storehouse of chemicals used to make meth in addition to fifty crates of ammunition, eight-loaded fully cocked high-powered assault riles, seventeen small handguns and stacks of anti-government literature and pornography. They staked out the house secretly for five months, but no one ever appeared in the house. When the discovery finally broke, it was believed the discovery of the propaganda had forced the drug-pushers to move location elsewhere.

Of course, one reporter theorized: “Maybe they were scared away by forces more terrifying than a police stand-off.”

In 2005, newlyweds from Baltimore named Adam and Kari Hyneman were driving around looking for property to invest in and convert into a bed and breakfast. The local realtor gave them the addresses of eleven locations, ("None of which was the Grimes House." Mulder adds.) and the couple spent a week driving around checking them all out.

"We had gotten lost a little bit looking for one of the houses and had turned down Larkspurr to turn around when we saw the house." Adam told Steve Barnette of the CGS. "We knew it wasn't the house we were looking for, but it did have a few of the traits we were looking for ourselves, such as the old-style kitchen and large grounds. When we asked Mrs. Rowe at the agency if it was available, she very quickly tried to get our attention to another location, but it was too late. For some reason, my wife just wanted to save the place."

A former Harvard law professor, Hyneman is now a member of the board of admissions at nearby North Virginia State College. He is a rational man with a fascination for architecture and more than capable of doing a few house repairs, but even he insists that there are some things that baffle him.

"One day, a door slammed upstairs." He comments. "You can blame that on a breeze. Another day, the doors to the study jammed shut. Wood can swell, but hearing voices in a room and sounds of someone moving around inside? Some things you can't blame on the house."

They purchased the Grimes House in 2005 and converted the house over five months into a bed and breakfast. Adam says, "Since guests have started staying, many have report that they're awakened in the night between 2:00 AM and 2:30 AM by something that enters the room and pats them on the cheek, but when they come to full wakefulness, there's no one there."

"We also hear a woman's laughter sometimes around 4:00 AM upstairs," Kari adds. "On a number of occasions we've had guests who have heard something or were frightened by something and have gotten up and left. "

"Not crazy about the attic..." She continues. "It's a series of rooms at the top of the staircase. I think it might have been servant's quarters at one time, but it's full and crowded with furniture, lamps, boxes and all sorts of stuff. and very dark up there. I was poking through the stuff up there for antiques to decorate the downstairs when something passed by me out the corner of my eye and blocked what little light I had coming through the window up there and made me drop a stack of books. Scared the crap out of me. Haven't been up there since..."

History: Records and deeds for the old Grimes house are missing, but it is at least two hundred years old. Sitting empty since 1962, it was supposed to be demolished in 1998, but then in 2005, a new building inspector revised the house's status and approved plans to restore the structure. Much of the damage was to the roof, the west end of the foundation and part of the floor in the dining hall, not to mention damage by animals getting inside the location. However, despite the renewed restoration into the location, parts of the house have not been altered to retain its original condition.

Mulder on the other hand comes by often to check on their status - concerned that once again, history might repeat itself.

Identity of Ghosts: “The house is haunted by Maurice and Lyda Grimes and quite possibly by the Grants, Richards and the Moores by the looks if it.” Mulder replies.

Source/Comments: The X-Files (Episode “The Ghosts Who Stole Christmas”) - Loosely compared with the episode and with the Stone Lion Inn in Guthrie, Oklahoma..