ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
The historic Cabanne House in Forest Park.
No one really thinks of a 1950s rambler or a neat Cape Cod as particularly scary. If a house is going to get you, it is probably going to be a Victorian.
With their bay-windowed towers, widow's walks and creaky floors, Victorian homes are the go-to image for being creepy and haunted ? the place where some bogeyman-type will give chase to neighborhood children.
The stick-style home in "The Amityville Horror" told the homeowners to "Get out." And all kinds of awful things happened to the couple who owned the Queen Anne in the film "Pacific Heights." It was a Second Empire that unnerved many of the Addams Family visitors, a house similar to the Cabanne House in Forest Park and the Park House in Lafayette Square.
"That's the quintessential haunted house image," Elsey Hamilton, a historian with St. Louis County Parks, says of homes with mansard roofs and iron cresting that always seem to be built among overgrown trees with crawling limbs. "It's (an image) historic district homeowners have been trying to dispel for years."
The opulent homes in a wide variety of styles built between 1840 and 1900 have been largely reclaimed and are often painted in frilly, ladylike colors. But despite preservationists' efforts, darker ideals of Victorians persist, especially in pop culture.
Back stairs, passageways
It isn't all Hollywood stereotype.
"The architecture could be very spooky," says Mary Werner DeNaida, a historic preservation fellow with the American Institute of Architects. "During the Victorian period, gargoyles and grotesques were very much in vogue. Heads of animals and people were tucked into the nooks and crannies, and a lot of those things could be pretty scary."
Some Victorian-era buildings featured dragons that could hiss steam, and some houses had stone renderings with eyes that seemed to follow people down the street.
"Some people thought these houses looked like castles," DeNaida says. Like European chateaux, McPike Mansion has spikey Gothic Revival turrets and an intriguing labyrinth of stone paths that lead to a vaulted wine cellar with heavy gilded metal doors.
"In the bigger houses there were hidden cupboards and secret passageways that people built just to hide their belongings." Other Victorian homes had lots of doors and back staircases and plenty of places to get lost. "All those things add to the mystique," DeNaida says.
Witch or widow?
Another macabre truth is that death reigned over Victorian life. Childbirth, cholera and random infections are just a few of the untimely ways people died at home. It wasn't unusual for a child to share a bed with a dying sibling, or for a relative to sit with a body until a mortician arrived, which could take several days. And before graveyard regulations, family members would lie in state on the dining room table, then were simply interred in the backyard.
"The Victorians became very good at grieving, says Edna Dieterle, a communications specialist for the Chatillon-DeMenil mansion. Dieterle says that many Halloween traditions come from Victorian mourning customs.
When there was a death in the family, bustling Victorian homes became somber residences. Wealthy widows dressed extravagantly in black hooped dresses, their sober faces hidden by veils and shoulders covered with capes. Decorations were replaced with black crepe fabric around doors, windows and stairs. Doors were left ajar so that friends could creep quietly into a home to pay their respects, which Dieterle says was less nerve-wracking than doorbells.
If she observed the customary three-year mourning period, maintaining a Victorian home could become especially difficult for some widows left with children but not much money. Sometimes caretakers sought better employment, leaving the home dusty and cobwebbed, the land unkempt.
Fast-forward several decades and these neglected, sometimes abandoned homes became curiosities for whispering children to trespass upon and the backdrop for ghost stories about the bodies that may have languished there.
Spirited stories
Victorian homeowners often believe spirits of former residents are lurking about.
"A lot of these houses do have ghosts," says Betsy Belanger who conducts the weekly haunted tours at Lemp Mansion, once called one of the most haunted houses in the United States. "Even if it is scary, a lot of old houses have stories to tell." According to local legend, the beer-brewing Lemps are still hanging around their 33-room Italianate, pacing the floor, screaming, and playing keep away with guests' belongings.
Dieterle does historic re-enactments at the Chatillon-DeMenil House and says she has felt Madame DeMenil checking out her old digs, traipsing down stairs or walking in the garden. "I like to tell her that things are looking good, and thank her for using the house."
Sharyn Luedke insists that the McPike Mansion she owns has earned its haunted reputation. "There have been too many unexplained things, slamming doors, cold chills. I know that one day I saw a man at the window. And one day, a guy felt something tug at his coat. I don't think they are bad spirits. I just think it was one of the little children who was curious."
Marie Davies, who owns a brick Romanesque Revival in Lafayette Square wanted her hauntings confirmed, so she went to a group called Missouri Ghosts. They recorded footsteps and a woman's voice. "It's all good ghost stuff," she says, "unexplained noises and flashes of light."
Historians such as Hamilton of St. Louis County Parks won't confirm or deny paranormal activity in Victorian homes. "I can't dispute what people hear in their houses."
Halloween house
Still, historic neighborhoods such as Historic Alton, Old Webster and Lafayette Square are major attractions for trick-or-treaters and shriek seekers.
"A lot of us in the Square go all out with the decorations because so many of the houses can be spooky," says Dane Drefke, the neighborhood association president.
Homeowners dress their lawns in tombstones, stretch cheesecloth over trees and eerily backlight skeletal silhouettes in their windows.
Ruth Williams, of St. Charles, says her sprawling Queen Anne with the wraparound porch is "the perfect house for Halloween." She and her grandson plan to line the porch with 50 pumpkins in hopes the neighbor kids will find it "fun, not scary."
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