ROSE RED
Location: Rose Red is located in a nature reserve at the end of Spring
Street in Seattle, Washington on ground overlooking Washington Sound. It is
surrounded by a long wall that surrounds the property. It is considered
private property closed off to the public; trespassers have been arrested when
caught on the grounds.
Description:
Affectionately known as Rose Red, the Rimbauer Estate is a Tudor Gothic mansion
painstakingly constructed between 1906 and 1909 on forty acres of land covered
in cedar, spruce, elm and pine. Because of its eclectic style, it has an
indiscernible number of rooms placed somewhere between a number of seventy to
seventy five bedrooms. Secret doors link rooms to hallways stretching over the
elegance and royal opulence of the whole edifice. The house has a sixty-foot long
entry hall, a banquet hall, Grand Ball
Room, on-site gymnasium, and in-door swimming pool. Other prominent locations in
the mansion have been created with a flair for creativity and artistic license
such as the Perspective Corridor, the Mirror Library and the Upside Down Hall.
One floor at the bottom of the back stairs was designed so that anyone looking
at it from above would sense the illusion of being a hundred stories up instead
of just two or three. The Health Room is actually a green house attached to the
kitchen. The library boasts 6,000 volumes and the study includes a suit of
armor, a brown bear shot and killed in the Swiss Alps, a Bavarian pipe organ,
Eastern carpets and a display of antique German mark smith pistols. Probably
greater in size even to the Belasco
House in Maine, the stone and brick facade is behind a wrought iron fence
and a set of stone pillars holding up the Rimbauer crest. There is an island fountain
in the round driveway and statues from Italy decorate the estate. There are
numerous windows and half a dozen chimneys.
Ghostly Manifestations:
In a period of forty-one years between 1919 and 1960, twenty-six people have
been described as having vanished in the confusing labyrinthine halls known as
Rose Red. Numerous searches have been started for these people, but to no avail
and every venue has been explored. To those who believe the extraordinary, Rose
Red has swallowed them all up. The truth of the matter is that logical reasons,
however unproven, have been found made for most of these disappearances, but
then it is the last thirty two percent that have made Rose Red so much to be
feared.
Following the disappearance of Ellen Rimbauer
herself, the few servants still working in the house started reporting random
sounds and strange occurrences such as the sound of Ellen crying from empty
rooms or laughing from vacant halls. Many of them started leaving their jobs
behind or trying to follow the sounds while many tried to stay close to their
duties, but with Ellen missing and reportedly vanishing from the house, even the
most loyal did not want to stay in the imposing edifice. By time Adam Rimbauer
was old enough to come home, there was not a servant left and without the family
fortune, he did not even want the house, haunted or not.
In his short time there, Adam reported several
things about the house. Rooms he measured seemed to change in dimension when he
measured them later. He started getting lost as he searched and explored the
house as if new walls were popping up and new rooms were appearing. His wife
reported seeing a figure that vanished just out of eyesight.
Photos he took of rooms did not match when he compared them later. He once
stepped out of a third floor bedroom and found himself a few steps from the
first floor foyer. It was almost as if Rose Red was some huge organism
constantly restructuring itself.
After his death, his widow started entering
the house looking for antiques to sell for money. Her son, Stephen, became lost
while exploring the place, and in a story he told several years later, he said he
had encountered the ghost of his grandmother standing on the steps to the attic.
There have been only two documented
investigations of the house and the two of them cite similar and practically
identical phenomenon. The parapsychologists staying in the bedrooms of Rose Red
with the permission of Steven Rimbauer have described a majority of phenomenon
bordering between typical and the unusual. The ghosts have been described as
resembling decomposed and desiccated corpses wandering the estate and peeking
around corners as well as in traditional spectral anamorphous shapes. Ellen
Rimbauer’s ghost has been glimpsed flitting around the halls and corridors or
standing in thought just out of eyeshot. However, her personality and behavior
remains bipolar. To the people she considers as guests, she can be kind and
endearing to the point of leaving gifts. To all others, she can be frightening
and merciless. Members of Max Burnsteim’s investigative team felt they were in
critical danger as things fell close to them, just short of causing major harm
and presences seemed to chase them through the house. One observer remarked that
Ellen seems determined to control everything in the house, and by all terms and
purposes, that seems to be what is occurring. Another source practically
describes her as possessed.
Other members of Max Burnstheim’s team
remarked they thought they saw a ghostly little girl wandering the upstairs with
a deformed left arm pulled up close to her chest. Sometimes accompanied by
temperatures of extreme cold, she is believed to be April Rimbauer, but she is
much more distant than her mother’s spirit and refuses to be acknowledged or
confronted. Much more active is the presence of Sukeena, Ellen’s best friend
and companion. During the short times tours were conducted through the place, a
woman of slender build and African descent believed to be the housekeeper has
met a few people at the front entrance. Often conducting informal tours beyond
the knowledge of the Seattle Historical Society, Sukeena has described to
visitors the most intimate details of Rose Red that only a person who lived
there would know. Often appearing as a normal living person to those who have
seen her, Sukeena has surprised and received scoffs from visitors refusing to
believe she is one of the ghosts. Others who have encountered her, mostly men,
are quite the opposite by reporting they have been put off by an indefinable
aura of danger as she tries to lure them into parts of the house and grounds.
One of Burnstheim’s researchers noted the
odd moving around of a female statue seen on the grounds while observing from an
upstairs bedroom window. Over the course of a few nights, he reported that it
seemed to be closer to the house on some occasions and nearly obscured by a tree
on others. Noting its placements by time, day and circumstance, he made note
that it seemed to circle the pool it overlooked and even turned on occasion from
facing it. One night, it actually seemed to turn its head up to him in what was
most likely an optical illusion.
Visitors have detected the sound of hammering
from far away. Individuals within whole tour groups claimed they heard this
hammering despite the fact no one else heard anything. Others reported the scent
of fresh wood being cut or the vibration of activity from deserted parts of the
house. Despite the fact that all work had been ceased from some time before,
guides and witnesses would find tools in innocuous places or a fine layer of saw
dust over a surface of floor or furniture in locations lacking any physical
change. As the placement of furniture and the known layout of the mansion began
conflicting with the memories of the guides, it was rumored that the ghost of
Ellen Rimbauer had found a way to alter the physical shape and layout of Rose
Red from the afterlife.
In 2002, Dr. Joyce Rearden found the diary of
Ellen Rimbauer in a trunk, which she had bought in an estate auction. Reading
it, she became entranced by its accounts of early Twentieth Century life but
much more by Ellen’s documentation of the hauntings and disappearances. She
published it to fund a brand new investigation of the house under the eyes of
Steven Rimbauer, the last known member of the Rimbauer family. Her investigation
confirmed and paralleled many attributes of the investigation by her mentor, Dr.
Max Burnstheim. Experiencing the house first hand though, she remarked that even
when she was by herself and taking tactile readings that she never felt quite
alone in the place. In her mind, she felt that the house was teeming with
ghosts.
History: John P. Rimbauer, co-founder of Omicron Oil with Douglas
Posey, built Rose Red in 1906. The grand structure was reportedly built on cursed Indian
ground and according to records, numerous Native American bones and remains were
being hauled away by the cartload during the building and laying of the
foundation. So many were being found that Rimbauer stopped having them hauled
off and began burning them. Several Chinese workers became spooked as odd
occurrences started happening already. A teamster named Harry Corbin killed a co-worker
for no apparent reason and fled to the tavern where the police caught him. Three
more deaths eventually occurred. One man was decapitated by falling glass,
another person broke his neck in a fall and another choked on an apple. While
some people add this is proof of the house's reputation to come, it should be
noted that numerous accidents and incidents are common in the building of large
edifices.
John and Ellen Rimbauer decided to take their
honeymoon by traveling to get away from the “bad luck” and ended up
traveling the world collecting the curios that would illuminate and decorate the
place. Ellen, however, caught fever in Uganda where she met an African woman named
Sukeena who became her closest friend and confidant even before her own husband. She
and John returned with her to Rose Red on January 15, 1909. Nine months later, Adam
Rimbauer was born. His sister, April, was born in 1911; she was born with a genetic
defect in the form of a withered left arm.
1909 was also the year that Rose Red started
showing her sinister side. One of Ellen’s guests, Constance “Connie”
Fauxmanteur vanished from the West Hall. Servants and police searched the entire
house suspecting she had become lost or disoriented in a hallway or trapped in a
closet, but no trace of her was ever found.
Ellen soon began to suspect John was
entertaining young ladies behind her back. He also ended up buying Posey’s
share of Omicron Oil and bankrupting him, but Posey returned later to Rose Red
during one of John’s absences after a four-year period of seclusion. Dressed
as a cowboy, he started to hang himself in one of the rooms in full view of the
children in order to spite John or as others insist to add to the house's
reputation. Before taking his life, he tossed his hat to Adam and a rose to April and then kicked the
chair out from under him. It is believed this happened in the downstairs study.
Ellen began seeing a psychic named Cora Frye for advice on how to handle the bad
luck happening around her. Billing herself as Madame
Stravinski, Frye visited Rose Red once to never return again, but she did instruct
Ellen to constantly build and add to Rose Red. If she did, Frye claimed, Ellen would
live forever. John indulged her idiosyncrasy to placate her, but it was obvious
by even then that their marriage was in jeopardy.
In 1919, eight-year-old April Rimbauer vanished on the
estate to be never seen again. Her brother was away in school at the
time as fifty men searched for her and the police took Sukeena for questioning
in her involvement. In her interrogation, she was badly beaten and left the
police station with a broken nose, broken arm and three teeth knocked out. April
was never found, but months later, someone recalled the ice being broken on
nearby Lasky Pond. Though it was postulated she had wandered over the lake and
fell through, no one ever bothered to check the lake.
Sukeena’s treatment completely estranged
Ellen and John’s marriage, and he reportedly committed suicide from the tower
in 1921 although there was no indication to the contrary. Ellen mourned his loss
for a
while before she started throwing her lavish parties. The highest socialites
from Seattle’s High Elite were always invited. During a party in 1946, actress
Donna Petrie, a star of several musicals and comedies vanished while wearing her
favorite cocktail dress. She had been one of Ellen’s favorite guests. Her
disappearance made Rose Red’s reputation. No trace of her was ever found
except for her earrings. That was the last party Ellen ever had.
After John’s suicide, Ellen began the
majority of the building that is seen today. The carriage house ended up
partially razed and added to the house as it was converted to more rooms. They
style and layout of the house became creatively more eclectic as anything and
everything that Ellen or Sukeena could dream up was incorporated. Workmen and
contractors were often frustrated as Ellen changed plans or dropped ideas in
mid-status. Parts of the basement were inadvertently closed off, never to be
seen again, and plans were rarely consulted as hidden rooms, secret passageways
and more architectural curiosities were being created.
In February of 1928, Sukeena herself vanished
and Ellen Rimbauer was heart-struck. She describes in her diary how after her
vanishing the plants in the greenhouse started coming to life. She had them
ripped out, but as soon as she did so, they grew back in just as prosperous as
before. She also described in her diary the sound of the house laughing at her.
In 1950, Omicron Oil was sold, and Ellen
Rimbauer vanished shortly thereafter on January 15, 1951. The last person to see her
alive was a maid who later testified that she had seen Ellen seem to walk in a
trance-like state toward the Perspective Hallway. The servants carried on for a
while unaware of their mistress’s absence and gradually began to leave the
house. By now, Rose Red’s legend had now officially begun.
Investigations began in the Sixties as
scientists and geologists converged on the house trying to solve the riddle of
the house. Some of them thought the noises in the house were caused by sounds
amplified by old water pipes. In the Seventies, parapsychologist Max Burnstheim
vanished during a visit in the house, but this may be a hyperbole. He may have
vanished in Seattle after visiting the house, but he is not generally credited
as vanishing in Rose Red. His bio clarifies he may have been the victim of foul
play while walking home a few days later from the college. The Seattle Historical Society had been
leading tours in the house since Ellen Rimbauer’s disappearance, but they all
stopped in 1972 when a guest named Liz Albert broke away from the tour and
vanished somewhere in the house. The most recent investigation occurred in
Autumn 2001 by Dr. Joyce Reardon from nearby Beaumont College. Steven Rimbauer
oversaw it as the last exploration of Rose Red because he had
been offered a lot of money for the land. The demolition of the house and
grounds was been halted and postponed for three years because of the local historical
significance to the area. Scholars not so fascinated by the hauntings desire to
preserve the house in order to research the land for more Native American remains
believed buried under it. In 2005, the courts refused historical preservation of
the house, but since the new owners had no interest in the house being razed,
they sold sections of it along with the furniture, furnishings, statues and
relics to be regathered and reconstructed elsewhere on another location. That location
has yet to be revealed to the public, but rumors place the house rebuilt on a
smaller scale somewhere in Northern California.
Identity of Ghosts: While it is plainly obvious that the spirits of Ellen Rimbauer and Sukeena haunt the structure, there are unconfirmed suggestions of Native American spirits haunting the area before them. Before her disappearance, Ellen Rimbauer herself spoke of a curse that had followed her from Africa, but she just may have been speaking metaphorically than literally. Some critics of Ellen Rimbauer’s diary blame the sounds and experiences she had as signs of her dwindling health, but those who knew her swear she was just as strong and vibrant as she ever was until just before her death.
Comments: Rose Red (2002/2003). Loosely based on the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California and Summerwind in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin. The architecture of Rose Red itself was based on Thornewood Hall, which was used as the exterior in the movie.
Summerwind has been featured in the Discovery TV Series, “A Haunting.” The Winchester Mystery House has been overly exposed in several TV Series including “Sightings,” “Most Haunted,” “Ghost Hunters,” “Paranormal Borderline,” “Haunted Travels” and countless paranormal documentaries.