McMANN HOUSE BED AND BREAKFAST
Location: Mayfield is a Cleveland suburb on Highway 91 near the Cuyahoga County line. Other than Main Street, the town is crisscrossed east to west by Grant Avenue crossing Main Street at the town square where the city courthouse and town museum rests in the former tow hall structure. A picturesque Midwestern town as close to perfect Americana as one can get, Mayfield is dotted by historic homes, among them, the McMann House at 1313 Grant Street rests at the end of Pine street close to Mayfield Grammar School (formerly Grant Avenue School).
Description of Place: A two-story Gothic Victorian surrounded by Federal and Dutch-style residences, the five bedroom mansion has two bathrooms, bay windows, an enclosed porch, stone fireplace and a pitched roof with a corner bay window extending to a tower balcony, completing the image of the stereotypical haunted house. At least a hundred years old, it has been restored as a bed-and-breakfast decorated with Old English furniture incorporating modern conveniences with European-style decor.
Ghostly Manifestations: When Jim and Cheryl Mathers acquired the McMann House in 1969, they had a massive renovation project ahead of them. Neighborhood kids over several years had shattered every window, itinerants had burned objects in small bonfires for heat and vandals had marked their territory. However, the structure still had its original wood-burning stove and the foundation had weathered the test of time. Jim was an experienced contractor and Cheryl was a promising interior decorator. Long rumored as a haunted house, it seems they may have shaken a few rumors into the realm of possibility.
"I never believed in ghosts until this place." Jim told the local Fox affiliate broadcasting ghost stories for Halloween. "You know, that idiot Haskell guy would say, 'Oh, did they tell you about the ghosts there.' and I'd be like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah... I hope they can work a broom.' but I'd be here alone repatching walls or tearing up floorboards, and I'd get this weird feeling I was being watched. I'd look up, wander around from the parlor to the kitchen to the dining room, study and back to the foyer reaffirming I was alone. You think, maybe some homeless person is returning thinking the house is still empty, but there's never another stinking person here."
"We moved in Spring of '69..." Jim continues expressing his opinion that he is not hallucinating. "Restoration took about three months to practically rebuild the house from the inside out casting new pipes and replacing wiring. I had a team of three guys on assisting me, and one of them, Feldman, who's lived here since the Fifties, said, 'I could move a lot faster painting if your wife wasn't constantly watching me from the kitchen. She's giving me the creeps.' The thing is, at that time, Cheryl was living in Bayport with her sister and the kids and had not been to the house since two weeks prior. Another thing, she has blonde hair, and the guys were talking about the young sexy brunette I was supposedly married to!"
Everyday Jim left to drive home to Bayport, he departed and left through the front door which was sealed by a combination lock. The back door had been barred and nailed shut because it kept popping open. Local police were also making routine checks at the Mathers' insistence; yet, someone was moving tools, opening an upstairs bedroom window, had moved aside a saw horse blocking the staircase and pulling down tape cutting off access to rooms.
"The night I stained the dining room floor," Jim recalls. "I had pulled shut the study doors and locked them by twisting a wire through the broken lock and twisting it tight, effectively sealing it off. I then taped off the archway into the back hall to the kitchen with a sign to keep the guys out. I left early that day to get dinner before the drive to Bayport, and that Saturday when I brought Cheryl to inspect the work going on, the tape had fallen, which I suspect is possible, but there was a series of dusty footsteps through the dining room and into the study, which was still wired shut as I had left it. now, the dust could be swept up, but whatever left it was not heavy enough to leave a mark in the stained floor. Whatever it was, left a path going in, but not out, and definitely not through the sliding doors."
Restoration and work was originally going to take two months, but missing tools and strange goings on stretched into three. Laborers did not want to left alone and insisted on company while some guys brought music players to drown out whispering sounds or the echoes of footsteps from the top landing. Once, as the guys were outside eating in the backyard having a barbeque, they left a radio going at top volume from the kitchen which had been completed. However, somewhere between the bawdy stories and appreciation for barbequed food, the radio suddenly cut off. Heads turned to see who was in the kitchen, and then Jim went to see what had happened.
"Yep, you guessed it." He muses. "Someone or something had physically switched off the radio."
It was then Cheryl's turn to experience the ghosts. Jim had done such a good job restoring the old McMann house that he was getting requesting work through Mayfield. Unlike Jim, she believed in ghosts, but she wasn't exactly believing the stories he had been telling. She supervised in moving her grandparent's antique furniture from Youngstown and insisted on much of the locations for the decor and furnishings, hitting ever yard sale and crafts shop in the area for inspiration. In the upstairs back bedroom, she had a huge wrought iron bed with a thick comforter and minutes after setting up, she had the bric-a-brac chosen for the room and return to the room, she found the outline of a body on the bed.
"First thing I thought," Cheryl rolls her eyes confused. "Had I left something in the bed and forget to smooth it out? Had my sister been up here and down the back stairs? I just smoothed it out and went to her saying something like: 'Trying to scare me, huh?' but she had no idea what I was talking about."
Jim meanwhile was coming home late into the evening. Arriving home by nine or ten o'clock, he'd catch glimpses of figures at windows or a white presence moving through the house. His daughters, whose names he seeks to not disclose, suddenly had an invisible playmate they were playing with. Unable to comprehend their new friend was not real, they were having whole conversations about how the house used to look and were sometimes getting snacks that were hidden away high in the kitchen. They would insist they did not need a babysitter as long as "Nattie" was around, but where they heard that name is anyone's guess.
Rumors of the ghost soon became good for business, but to an extent. One local from the other side of town quickly rushed to be one of the first guests and used the opportunity to have his house fumigated, but one night of hearing someone trying to get into his room and not getting a response was enough and he checked in with friends. A married couple in the upstairs back bedroom felt their comforter torn off the bed in the middle of the night. The apparition of the young girl was briefly seen sitting in the parlor a year afterward and Cheryl's sister, Nicole, sat on the back porch drinking coffee and watching a young girl her own size drift out the back door and back behind the garage, vanishing in the proximity of the old cemetery back in the woods.
In 1974, Jim and Cheryl came home to find their children and their babysitter missing from the house. The young lady watching the Mathers' girls took the kids to her house because she had been unnerved by the ghost coming up behind her on the sofa and laying a hand on her shoulder.
Despite activity, not every guest has an experience. Some people stay three to five days without an experience and then the next people in the same room a week later wake to being watched by a fifteen-year-old girl with dark hair and a long white dress. Apparitions are rare occasions, but noises happen often, especially from the upstairs back bedroom. Bric-a-brac has been moved, the sound of a bell has been heard and the noise of someone puttering through the kitchen has attracted attention. The kitchen table is always kept set with the candles out and the chairs pushed under, but every so often, Andee Paisley, the Mathers' housekeeper, finds the chairs pulled out and the candle burning.
Today, in addition to the house as a bed and breakfast, Cheryl is part of the local PTA and a loyal member of the Mayfield Library Reading Program. Her girls are grown now with few memories of the ghost, and she opens the house as a Halloween attraction taking kids through her haunted basement and into a haunted cemetery mock-up in the backyard, but once or twice a year, someone reports a brunette female phantom around fifteen years of age blending into the tours.
History: Believed built before the turn of the century, maybe conceivably as early as 1850, the structure was the home for several generations of the McNabb family until being used as a summer residence and then finally forgotten. Sitting around deserted for almost thirty years, it was owned by the city until finally attracting the attention of the Mathers.
Identity of Ghosts: Popular belief is that the ghost is of Natalie McMann, who died of tuberculosis in the house in 1933. In that year, she was jilted by a philandering boyfriend at a high school dance and had walked home alone in the rain rather than stay at school and feel ignored. She fell sick that week and died a few weeks afterward, her body interred in a small cemetery less than a hundred yards from the house where an old church once stood.
"After much research," Cheryl replies. "I eventually tracked down Georgia McMann living in Detroit; her father had been one of the last of the McManns to have lived here. I went to her on the pretext of doing history on the house and she asked me if we had seen the ghost yet. When I said yes, she showed me a picture of a young girl named Natalie who had died here, and she looks exactly like the apparition we have experienced. She later goes on to say she was buried in the same white party dress she had been wearing the night she became sick."
Source/Comments: Leave it to Beaver TV-Series (Episode "Mistaken Identity"), Hauntings based on the Southern Night Bed and Breakfast in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Battery Carriage House Inn in Charleston, South Carolina and the Sherman House Restraunt in Plover, Wisconsin.
The exterior house used on "Leave it to Beaver" is the same exact exterior used as the home on "The Munsters." Today, it is part of the houses on Wisteria Lane on "Desperate Housewives."