OLD NEBBERCRACKER HOUSE
Location: The May Valley sub-division is a housing community northwest of Columbus, Ohio near Interstate 270 comprising of a hundred and twenty-seven homes near the small Columbus suburb of Mayville, Ohio. The former Nebbercracker House was located at 1386 Elm Circle off Maple Drive, not far from Mayville Luxury Towers.
Description of Place: The Old Nebbercracker House was a non-descript gray-shingled two-story three-bedroom residence in a forested plot of land in a rural area of Columbus, Ohio. Over the years, much of the property was sold and subdivided into homes. Today, all that exists of the house is an empty foundation filled with debris.
Ghostly Manifestations: It's a well-known fact that Hollywood has it's own idea of the supernatural. Movie ghosts tend to fit into a narrow range of categories: the invisible person, the psychopath spirit or demonic energy force. During the Forties and Fifties, the range of spirits were limited to comedic beings who were embellished for laughs or unseen presences who were depicted chillingly but still confined to the background. In 2004, when producer Robert Zemeckis began production on the animated children's comedy, "Monster House," writer Dan Harmon pulled together inspiration from a number of haunted houses he knew about about, one of which was the Old Nebbercracker House of Columbus, Ohio.
Today, no one in Columbus has any memories of the house ever existing, but during the late Fifties and most of the Sixties, the Nebbercracker House was "the" haunted house, particularly to the kids who attended nearby Mayville Grammar School and Westbrook Prep. If they had to pass the house on the way home, they crossed the street for the other side and cross back once they got past the house. According to them, they could hear the house creaking and groaning as if it were alive. They could see strange lights drifting from window to window. Dogs barked at the house for no apparent reason. The local teenagers claimed that all the missing kids in the neighborhood had vanished into the house, but if one questions the fact that police have no reports of anyone ever vanishing in the house, the illogical conclusion is that there must be a cover-up.
The truth of the matter is that despite the house's image and reputation, it was not empty. It was the residence of former military demolitionist Sergeant Horace Nebbercracker, a widower whose wife died during the construction of the house. Extremely protective of his privacy, Nebbercracker seemed to have a distrust of the neighborhood kids and was known for taking anything that landed on his property, be it Frisbee, football or plywood glider. He had a local reputation for ordering kids off his property. He did not make friends and he did not socialize. No one had ever known his wife, Constance, and in his grief, Nebbercracker never associated with another person. It's believed in October 1958 when he was rushed to the hospital after suffering a mild heart attack on his front yard that the gas left on in his house resulted in an explosion that decimated the structure. No one was harmed, but for months afterward, residents were reeling from the effects of the blast and the shards scattered over ten blocks. A sink was found lodged in a tree over on Evergreen Drive, and a flaming bath tub extinguished itself in a swimming pool three streets over.
Since then, the trees on the Nebbercracker property have grown to create a leafy canopy over the empty and open basement that was once a home. Never completely lighted, the area has sort of become home to the ghost that once haunted the house there. Passersby claim they have seen a dark shadow flitting between the trees. In 1972, a group of kids claimed they heard a voice yelling at them from the open basement to get off the property. Some people think it's Nebbercracker haunting the former house.
"No, it's not me..." Now in his Eighties, Horace "Sarge" Nebbercracker has been quietly living with his sister in Garden City, New Jersey. "As Mark Twain once said, 'The rumors of my death have been very much exaggerated.' " Not quite the coarse-tempered man he once was, he's now a soft-spoken retiree who once or twice a month drives to Atlantic City with his military pension to try his luck at the poker and roulette tables. After Constance, he never remarried, but many ladies still tend to bring a blush to his cheeks.
"I loved Connie very much..."He grins with a sparkle to his eyes. "And I know she's waiting for me to join her in the afterlife. I lived alone with her spirit in the house for over twenty years listening to her footsteps on the stairs, hearing the water taps going on and off, doors closing behind me... It was as if she had never left me. If I left anything laying out, I'd come back later to find it neatly put away for me."
When he returns to Columbus, he's never surprised to hear about what's been going on his old property. In 1973, he was interviewed by the local community newspaper about the haunted reputation the site of his old house had acquired and confessed that he had felt Constance around him constantly since she had died. Since then, she's been more of a local legend in the neighborhood with appearances of her ghost recurring mostly around October. She's been seen wandering up the former walk and vanishing, several people rushing to find her and discovering the ten foot drop where the house used to be. On one occasion, the house briefly returned for a local peddler who wasn't aware the house was missing and was later found screaming for help in the branch and leaf-filled foundation. In the hospital, he later said he'd been invited in doors by a tall obese woman and fell through the nonexistent floor, looking up later to notice there wasn't a house over him.
Today, the property is fenced in to keep more people from wandering into it, but that doesn't stop the vandals and teenage miscreants who slip through the fence to defame and challenge Constance's ghost to show herself. It's believed some of them have been seen racing out through their hole in the fence and over it after getting more than they expected. Nebbercracker willed the lot to DJ Walters, a local youth he knew from the neighborhood, now grown and living overseas in the US Marines, but whether Walters rebuilds the house or sells it remains to be seen.
History: The house was built in 1947 by Horace Nebbercracker on what was twenty-five acres of open field with a solitary dirt carriage path to the closest road. Most of the land was sold over the years to realtors who built homes around his plot, reducing what was once farmland into the recent modern housing development.
Identity of Ghosts: Constance's maiden name is unrevealed, but it's known she escaped Germany in 1938 as a circus performer who emigrated to the United States and never returned home. She married Horace in 1946 in his native Cleveland, but died a year later of a stroke before the house was even finished. Later rumors erroneously claim she was sealed up into the house's foundation, but her body actually rests in nearby Woodpine Cemetery.
Source/Comments: Monster House ( 2006 ) - Activity and phenomenon based on the Morris-Jumel House of Manhattan, New York, Old Brinkley College of Memphis, Tennessee, the Old Schnell House in Nashville, Tennessee, the McClean House of Rutland, Vermont, the LeBlanc House in Leominster, Massachusetts, the Ray-Smith House in Millbridge, Maine and the Parody House in Thousand Island, New York.
"Columbus House Lost In Explosion" by Robert Mitchell, The Columbus Tribune, November 1, 1968
"What Haunts the Wooded Lot on Elm Street?" by Jennifer Bennett, Mayville Gazette, October 29, 1973