Description Of Place: Situated on a tree-lined road lit by antique streetlights, Wolcott House, also known as Arethusa, is situated on an acre of land surrounded by a brick wall and entered by an iron-wrought gate. The two-story Craftsman style mansion is a four-gabled structure set back on the land to include a large front yard and a small backyard converted into a garden area and a small former family plot. The house includes six bedrooms, a large entry hall and ascending staircase with stain-glass windows, a study, parlor and dining room as well as a large basement comprising several rooms.

Ghostly Manifestations: Voices arguing from a deserted private library, sounds of steps running up and down the staircase, noises of furniture being moved in empty parts of the house, a feeling of being watched as one traverses a home one knows very much... they're all circumstances Janet Walker knows very much. A single woman, twice divorced, she knows very much her home is haunted, but the fact doesn't bother her nor perturb her. She's used to it, but every once in a while she confesses, the house still gives her a fright.

"Does it scare me?" She replies. "Yes. Is it going to send me running off into the night? No. I mean, why should it? I'm not in any danger of getting hurt here. If the house was going to hurt me, it would have by now, but as it is now, it's entertaining me. That's all there is to it."

Lovingly restored as per the memories of her deceased mother and numerous old faded pictures, Janet walks the grounds where high weeds grew wild through the grounds and where bushes once grew so thick that the driveway was almost inaccessible. She walks stone paths that were once hidden by foliage and sits on a two-seated yard swing surrounded by manicured round bushes and orchids watching her from stone-crafted flower beds. Every so often, she looks up to the house and a curtain drawn back falls back into place. It could be one or two of her three boarders, or it could just might be any of the four ghosts she knows wander the house. A petite slender woman with brown hair and round eyes like a German doll brought to life, Janet is a local area socialite who chooses to be very open and courteous to her guests.  

"I don't screen my boarders..." She confesses as she ascends the porch stairs and strolls through the front entrance into an immense hall. "I have an agency that handles that, but I do insist that I be the one to tell people coming here to stay that the place is haunted and that they might be waken up in the middle up in the night by someone standing over them."

"How often does that happen?"

After thinking on the answer for half a minute, Janet finally answers. "Last year to me..." She says. "I woke up and saw my Aunt Hattie sitting in the chair by the window." She goes on to describe that after being taken back for the moment, she looked again and tried to grin back to her, but by then, her figure had departed. Hattie had passed away at Garden Crest Convalescent Home in 1987.

During the time her Aunt Hattie and Uncle Johnathan lived here, Arethusa had been badly neglected and allowed to fill up with garbage and debris. Janet mentions that her aunt and uncle seemed to hide it as first, but after a few days, "it felt as if a veil was started to be lifted off her eyes." Rooms that seemed clean started feeling grimy and soiled. She walk down a hall and started seeing clouds of dust kicking up. Once by full candlelight, the guest room seemed abandoned and ruined and the next, almost completely restored. The place was a shifting illusion between past and future; Janet wondered if she was going mad. One night she heard sounds of an argument, and she wandered downstairs to witness a murder.

"It was..." She searches her memories. "...a few days after moving into the house. Aunt Hattie and Uncle Johnathan had put me in the guest room, and I was constantly disturbed by the scent of dust. I couldn't get it out of my head. Anyway, I was struggling to sleep or had woken up from a light doze when I woke up to the sound of voices. It didn't sound at all like them, and in searching for them, I came downstairs to the library doors and opened them to the sight of two men at the billiard table. I watched one of them killed the other and they seemed to suddenly wink out. I don't know what was more terrifying. Witnessing this murder or the fact that I had seen two people just vanish before my eyes.

Janet says voices still can be heard in the house quite often, maybe once or twice a week. At least once month, something moves from door to door through the upstairs in the elaborate mansion. During renovations, Janet recalls cleaning out an old upstairs closet and hearing a sound like something dropping and hitting the floor behind her. She turned around and found four coins, two pennies and two nickels, dated 1876, 1877, 1867 and 1869, on the carpet. Where they came from was a mystery. They seemed to come straight down, but there were no cracks or holes they could have come from. 

Janet also experienced something playing with the front doorbell once it was restored. It was an old-style crank that had to be twisted to ring the bell, and it was likely already an antique when the house was built. One summer night, Janet woke from a sound sleep as the bell rang five to seven times in succession rousing her from her sleep. 

"It took me five minutes to pull on a house frock and answer that door." She recalls. "The last twist occurred right as I unlocked the door and looked out, but no one was there. If someone had been there, I would have at least seen their tail end vanishing off the porch, but nothing was there. I think it occurred three times that week before I wised up and had the bell assembly removed which is a real shame because it was such a wonderful original piece, but I wasn't going to spend my life answering that bell."

Janet says she often found doors to unused rooms often standing open in the days before she invited boarders to stay with her. It started with Gloria Collins, the sister of housing inspector Harry Collins, who approved the restorations at Arethusa. What started as a one-time thing turned into a recurring rotation of house guests and short-term boarders, but some guests didn't stay very long. The upstairs corridor, which seemed a focal point for the mysterious happenings, often seemed busy with footsteps and sounds of doors opening and closing. Gloria remarked she would go to bed with her door locked and would wake with it standing open. Another guests described movements of air and a sound of heaving breathing as if someone had passed them. Janet has described this sensation as well. More coins fell from somewhere near the same closet as Gloria walked by it.

The presence in the house remained fascinated by the front door. Although the bell assembly had been dismantled by this time, the sound of it still returned in the late Summer to Early Fall months. Gloria always thought it came from the back door, once catching it from the front door as she passed by it. 

Besides Janet, the only other person who described seeing a ghost was Annette Sebring in 1981. As she was sitting in the garden reading, Sebring reported feeling a cold breeze pass by her and looked up to the second floor window to see a woman's spirit. At the time, the room was empty, and no one was in the house, and as Janet checked she realized it was her Aunt Hattie's old room, but it was quite obvious that no one had been in there for a long time. 

"You don't need to be crazy to live here." She remarks. "But it helps."

History: Built in the Early Forties, the house has been the property of the Wolcott family for several years. It was once the home of  James Dillion, an investment banker and businessman who made his fortune in real estate and various stock commodities. After his death, his widow, Harriet Wolcott and her brother, Johnathan, retained custody, but actual ownership passed to their cousin, Merriem Wolcott, who left it to her daughter, Janet Walker, in 1972. By time she inherited it, the house was on the verge of being condemned. Harriet and Johnathan Wolcott had neglected the house repairs for so long and had hoarded so much trash and debris in the house that the home, which had been been opulent in its time, had deteriorated. Since their committal, Janet has painfully worked to restore the house, and it is once again back to its original state.

Identity of Ghosts: It is believed the house is haunted by the ghosts of James Dillon and Bert Gray, Dillon's former manservant. For several years, Dillon's death was believed to be an accident until Janet learned he had been murdered in a plot by her aunt and uncle in collusion with Gray, the two of them poisoning Gray to keep him from blackmailing them over the murders and ultimately pin him solely for the crime. The bodies of Gray and Dillon were found behind a partial wall in the basement during restorations, despite the tombstones for them on the property. They were reburied at nearby Marymont Cemetery, but their original tombstone are still in the garden.

"Uncle Johnathan and Aunt Hattie were deemed too mentally incompetent to stand trial for the murders and were committed." Janet adds. "By time the trial came around, Aunt Hattie had passed away in 1987, and Uncle Jonathan was the only one left. He was found insane and committed to the hospital for the rest of his life. He passed away in 2002."

Janet has since come to the conclusion that the spirits in the house have been joined by her aunt and uncle. Hattie's spirit tends to make her presence known in her old bedroom, while Jonathan's gruff voice has been heard grumbling and grousing in the passage between the front hall and the kitchen.

Source/Comments: Ghost Story (Episode: "A Touch Of Madness") - Activity based on the Old Schnell House in Nashville, Tennessee, the Old Andrews Mansion in La Porte, Indiana and the Martin House in Camden, New Jersey.