OLD STIGWOOD HOUSE
Location: The Huxtables briefly lived in 13 Stigwood for eight months while waiting for renovations to be finished at their future home. It seems renovations for their new home had been stalled by inept contractors. Located in Brooklyn Heights, New York, the residence is a few houses down from their current residence.
Description of Place: The structure is in a very formal up-scale suburb known as Stigwood Place within Brooklyn Heights. Lined with curbside trees, the neighborhood brownstones have identical layouts with varying styles. The two-story, four bedroom brownstone at 13 Stigwood has a full basement, paneled living room and modern kitchen.
Ghostly Manifestations: Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable is a Brooklyn obstetrician; his lovely wife, Claire Huxtable is a successful Manhattan lawyer. At the start of their careers, they lived in a small crowded Manhattan duplex then graduated to a beautiful Brooklyn brownstone in a picturesque neighborhood with front stoops, trees and close proximity to the schools. Before moving, Cliff wanted the basement renovated to be his offices so he could watch his kids for his wife "a slightly bit better than she ever did." However, when renovations dragged out, they were out of their duplex with no where to go. With payment already down on their future home, Herschel Tavares, their landlord allowed them to stay in another adjacent brownstone that had been repeatedly empty since 1961. The Huxtables soon learned why that brownstone was persistently empty.
"To this day, my parents will never confirm we had a ghost." Petite and attractive Vanessa Huxtable is a fashion reporter in Manhattan, but when she was starting out, she was doing freelance. One day, her editor wanted a Halloween article and she rose to the occasion by revealing the family secret.
"Several times when we lived there," She continues. "We lived with odd noises of someone racing through the upstairs, and my dad would call up the stairs asking my younger sister to slow down, but the thing is, she wouldn't be home at the time.
"In those days, my brother, Theo, was pushing me and my sister Rudy around a lot, and we annoyed him back by calling him Teddy. He hated that name, and we knew it. He was accusing Rudy of running into his room and waking him by jumping on the bed, but when he tried to confront her, she'd run out laughing and he'd race into our room and wake us up. Repeat, he'd wake us up. This would seem to suggest that someone other than Rudy was annoying him, but he get so upset and my parents would be so busy sending everyone back to bed that no one seemed to bother to ask the question: where did the extra kid come from?"
Vanessa specifically recalls her mother in a harried state as asking out loud, "Why do we have four kids?" The truth of the matter is, there were FIVE Huxtable kids. The last family had four kids, but if one asks Claire today why she forgot her eldest daughter away in college at the time she just answers: "I was upset. I wasn't taking inventory at the time." Even Cliff who muses on her state of mind at the time recalls teasing her on forgetting their first born child: Sondra "The Forgotten" Huxtable.
In moving his medical practice to the renovated basement, Cliff ran to another problem. His colleagues had had commissioned for him a brass plate with his name on it as a gift. It was going to go on the new house, but as the brazier called to confirm his first name, someone got it wrong. Although called Cliff, his first name was Heathcliff after his grandfather, but someone told the brazier that his name was Clifford. Whoever it was was answering the phone in the middle of the day when no one was there.
In his work, Cliff worked very odd hours delivering babies late into the night and consulting patients during daytime hours. Sleeping sometimes during the day, he later told a story that Vanessa recalled later on in her life. According to this story, her father was so tired one afternoon that he hallucinated a young girl about his smallest daughter's age just popping up at bedside and running out of the room. He never saw her run in, she just popped up then out. Looking back now, Vanessa wonders if he had seen the ghost and didn't realize it.
Eventually, the Huxtables moved into their house and things turned to normal. Vanessa lived her life and grew up wondering in the back of her mind about the ghost left behind. She learned that a family named Chiara moved into that house and Rudy became friends of their son, but young Peter didn't speak of ghosts in the house. Vanessa's sister, Denise, meanwhile married and had a step-daughter, Olivia Kendall, who later grew up to have a teenage singing career. As a young girl, Olivia recalls having a playmate who came from the other house, two years after the Chiara's had moved away and it was standing empty..
History: The neighborhood was built in the 1920s on top of what had been up until then one of the few last remaining farmlands in the vicinity of Manhattan. The creation of Brooklyn Bridge in the late Nineteenth Century brought in an influx of upscale residential areas such as Stigwood Place which was created what it is now: a high profile neighborhood for working families away from from the crime-ridden slums of New York. The Herold family were the last of the original families to move away from the neighborhood. Their house stood empty intermittently from 1961 to 1982 as the Huxtable family briefly lived there before moving into their current residence. A month later, the Chiara family acquired the house.
Identity of Ghosts: Vanessa speculates if the spirit of the young girl in her house was the Herold's youngest daughter, Lillian, who had died in 1943 of tuberculosis.
Source/Comments: The Cosby Show (1984-1992) (Episode, The Pilot) Loosely based on the El Centro Avenue House in Los Angeles, California.
NOTE: This "bio" was largely created to explain the differences between the pilot and the series rather than any Halloween episode.