Haunted Southern Tier by Elizabeth Tucker

Author:Elizabeth Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

HAUNTED HOMES

HISTORIC HOUSES (OWEGO AND VESTAL)

Not all haunted houses are huge, impressive mansions; some are modest homes, and others have served as commercial properties. No matter how old a home is and what architectural style its builder followed, there are certain factors that make haunting likely. One of those factors is sudden, untimely death; another is the living person’s sensitivity to unusual experiences. Early records help us understand how sites of sudden death became known as haunted houses. Let us begin with two old stories: one from Owego and the other from Vestal.

The Owego ghost story comes from a manuscript written by LeRoy Kingman, who was born in 1840. Kingman explains that Judge Thomas Duane moved to Owego in 1800 with his wife, a widow of an officer in the Continental army who had died in the massacre in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, in 1778. Judge Duane built a store on the bank of the Susquehanna River and painted it bright yellow. His stepdaughter, Polly Pierce, built a fine house on Hollenbeck’s Eddy. After her death in 1815, the house belonged to several owners and became a tavern in the early 1830s.

At this point the house developed ghost story potential because river raftsmen and boat captains stayed there overnight, leaving their rafts and boats tied up in Hollenbeck’s Eddy while resting and enjoying a few drinks. One of these overnight guests was a riverboat captain named Butler, who had a very strange dream. His story follows:

One night previous to the day on which he was about to leave Owego on one of his periodical trips he dreamed that he fell overboard from a canal boat and was drowned. The dream made such an impression upon him that in the morning he narrated it to his wife. She was considerably affected, and endeavored to dissuade him from going away. He laughed at her fears and went on his way. A few days afterward she received information of his death, which had happened in every respect exactly as it had been presented to him in his dream.39

After Captain Butler’s drowning, nobody lived in the house where he had been an overnight guest. Townspeople called the dwelling a haunted house, claiming that they had heard noises coming from the house at night and seen lights shining in the windows. Others disputed these claims, suggesting that the sounds and lights came from “people of not particularly reputable character, who consorted there at night.”40 This unsolved mystery stopped bothering people once the old house was torn down.

Another mid-nineteenth-century building, the Drovers’ Inn in Vestal, has gone from one identity to another. Two prominent Vestal citizens, John and Jacob Rounds, built and named the Drovers’ Inn. When it opened in 1844, the inn welcomed drovers of cattle, pigs and turkeys who were following the Jamestown Turnpike. Crane’s Ferry brought people across the Susquehanna River nearby, so the inn became a favored meeting place for travelers and local residents. Later, the building became a home for members of the Rounds family.

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