OLD GRUBER HOUSE
Location: Peekskill is a historic city on the east bank of the Hudson River forty miles north of New York City on Interstate 9. Burned by British troops in 1777, the town is the home of the Peekskill Military Academy, Binney and Smith Company and Bear Mountain State Park and the Eastland School for Girls (since closed). Once located at 620 Main Street in the midst of the historic section of town, the former Gruber house has since been leveled to make room for a strip mall.
Description of Place: A two-story Dutch-style frame house with three bedrooms, the Gruber House was original a private residence subsequently modeled into a restaurant, a bakery, a deli (Ira's Deli), a bakery again (Edna's Edibles) and after a fire in 1985 into a collectibles store (Over Our Heads) which eventually closed in 1992. During the length of its existence, the back of the structure served for off-campus housing for Eastland and Langley College students doubling as employees in the store.
Ghostly Manifestations: In 1984, when aspiring film-maker Natalie Green was searching for a topic to film for her college film project, she settled on the obscure Peekskill legend of the Gruber sisters, told to her by Charles Lazaroni, a local old-timer. The actual story was long forgotten, but it was quite notorious in its time with shades of the Lizzie Borden trial from 1892. Predating the Blair Witch Story by about twelve years, Natalie dropped seeds of suspicion among her sorority sisters living with her in the upstairs apartment of the former Gruber House, and then pulled back and filmed the chaos in one of the very first "reality films."
At the time, Natalie was fortunate to live above the store that had been the Gruber House, but it had been remodeled and renovated several times. In paranormal research, it's believed that renovations can stir up ghosts, but ironically, Green doesn't recall anything resembling hauntings during the nearly five years she lived there. In 2005, when she was working on a documentary on ghosts in Upstate New York, she started gradually having memories that sounded like the stories being told to her by other people. One girl named Joanne Polniaczek heard thumping noises like a bowling ball being bounced in the house, but at the time, it was blamed on a dysfunctional AC unit. Natalie's best friend, Dorothy Ramsey, at times described voices coming from the shop, but back then, they could have just come from out on the street. Another girl named Pippa McKenna had a frightening phone call while she slept downstairs. As Natalie recalls the story, a woman's voice over the phone asked Pippa to speak German to her. (Pippa was Australian by birth, but as she learned years later, her relatives were German and Scottish in origin.) Heiress Blair Warner even lived for a time in the house while she attended Langley College, and she had bad dreams in the house on occasion and had an experience she described years later "as being possessed." However, after the girls moved on in their lives and things settled down, Beverly Anne Stickel and her adopted son, Andy Moffet, started feeling more and more of the house's haunted nature without day-to-day distractions.
"I was living in the house at the same time as those college girls..." Andy beams a grin remembering childhood crushes on those girls. Now an editor for the Peekskill Press, he takes Dawn Rochner of the CGS on a tour of the property where the house once stood. "And during that whole time, nothing ever happened... well, nothing that we noticed. But after the girls moved on and it was just me and Beverly Anne, we both started noticing just how spooky the place was without people around all the time, and with it, we started noticing other things...."
Other things included sensations of not being alone in the apartment in back. Once used to constantly being around young girls from the school and college, Beverly Anne had a hard time getting used to not living with as many people. She'd hear conversations from the living room when she was in the shop and even once heard sounds of multiple individuals in the upstairs bedroom. At the time, she'd think she was just imagining the noises she was once so familiar with, but over time, she was not so sure. She'd get the feeling she was not alone in the house while Andy was at school.
While sitting on the floor doing his homework before the television, Andy recalled seeing a smoke coming from the kitchen. As he describes: "It wasn't like a real smoke. I remember it having a body and wavering shape to him as it came around the doorframe ad then dissipate. I ran to check if something was burning, but I didn't even smell it. There was nothing on, but yet I recall seeing it coming out of the room. I've thought about it for years trying to figure out what it was, but I've never been able to think of anything that made sense."
One of the local guys in the neighborhood, George Burnett, used to hang around the place as a handyman getting and sending admirations to the girls. He's a tall good-looking guy now on the city council, but in those days, he was a jack-of-trades doing repair work, restorations and grounds keeping. After the 1985 fire, he restored the shop almost single-handedly and returned often to do repairs and fix the plumbing, but even he adds today that he believes in ghosts because there was not a time in the store he felt he wasn't being watched, even when he was alone in the cellar and replacing the heating system.
"You can't tell me that place wasn't haunted." He says today. "I know otherwise."
While odd activity living in the back of the store was few and far between, Andy wraps with one memory. He's still friends with George today; they're like brothers who still laugh, tell jokes and reflect on unrequited infatuations with the girls from Eastland. In a conversation for this article, George recalls an incident that Andy had all but nearly forgotten.
"Thanksgiving 1990..." George tells the story as if it happened yesterday. "The two of us were watching football, and Beverly Anne was preparing a small dinner for all of us. Tootie was on the way, Natalie was covering the shop and Blair was somewhere over.... Iceland... and I had gone back to get Andy and I drinks. I recall this because I had picked up two beers and he still wasn't old enough to drink, so I had to turn back and replace one beer with a generic soda. As I'm coming back and crossing the bottom of the stairs, I see this woman I didn't know. For a second, I thought she was Blair already arrived, I turned to say something and she heads up the stairs and vanishes.... nothing... nothing on the top step. No one's there!"
"It's as if she was just erased..." Andy adds. "She was there one minute, and gone the next..."
It should be noted, ironically, that the employees of the Chinese Restaurant now on the site of the Gruber House sometimes experience things. Employees sometimes hear voices, and a candle on one table sometimes refuses to go out. After closing, its still burning while all the others are snuffed.
"I was talking to one of the girls who worked there." George adds. "She had learned I had restored the old house and knew the girls who had lived there. I guess she wanted to hit me up on a history and maybe confirmation of the stories there. Anyway, the back living area is now a dining area and they've got this one table under the window where after they put the chairs up at night, there's always this one chair that is found back down as if someone had still been sitting it. They can't explain it, and sometimes they catch a flash of a attractive young girl sitting there."
"It's odd that you mention that..." Andy reacts piqued by this story. "Because I've heard a few people ask me about the phantom at the table and who she is. While I lived there, I never saw any ghosts. Noises, strange sounds... yes, but I never saw any ghosts. Those who have seen her describe her as blonde, thin and attractive..."
"That does not describe any of the Gruber sisters." George adds. "But it does describe Blair, and she's still very much alive!"
History: Chartered in 1640, Peekskill was named for Dutch navigator Jaan Peeck who operated a trading post here from 1667 to 1677. A largely Dutch and German community, the town prospered under donations from the affluent Warner Family from Manhattan whose relatives were on the board of directors at Eastland and connected to the town council. Arriving from Germany in the 1920s, Wilhelm Gruber made his wealth as a shop-keeper and landlord, later acquiring the house on Main Street, then the center of the high-class neighborhood. After his death, though, his eldest daughter, Gertrude, allegedly decided she did not want to share the family future with her sisters and hacked up them up with a butcher knife. She then departed the house for a weekend and returned to "discover" the bodies. Though indicted for the crime, there was not a lot of evidence to prove she was guilty and even as she was imprisoned, many of her supporters believed she would subsequently be exonerated for her crimes. Unfortunately, German sentiment was not particularly high in the United States during World War Two, and her lawyers barely tried to get her out of prison. (During the trial, evidence of similar butcher knife murders in Waterford, New York, Haddonfield, New Jersey and one in Seaford, Delaware the month after the murders that same year weren't even bothered to be connected.) Gertrude died in prison of tuberculosis at the age of 54 in 1943, vehemently claiming her innocence to the very end.
After the sell of the house, the structure had several owners with the last being noted culinary hostess Edna Garrett of the long-time running cable series, "Cooking with Edna." Her sister, Beverly Anne, started living there in 1986 and departed in 1995.
Identity of Ghosts: Gertrude had three sisters named Heidi, Helga and Fritzie; none of them were exceptionally attractive, but they all had potential male callers with Gertrude the only one in a serious relationship. As far as the unidentified blonde figure, it's been rationalized that she could be a much younger spirit or maybe existing energies left over in the structure.
Source/Comments: The Facts of Life (episodes: "Halloween" and "Seven Little Indians") - Loosely based on the Sherman House Restaurant in Plover, Wisconsin, Pandora's Box in Hialeah, Florida, the Schnell House in Nashville, Tennessee, Old Duff's Smorgasbord in Madison, Tennessee and the Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts.