?Turret house? more than walls
By Travina Coleman
Phoenix Staff Writer
Crying plants, mysterious blood, electronic voice phenomena or EVP recordings, and eerie music played in vacant rooms.
These things scream haunted.
And Susie Glidewell knows it all too well.
?I had no idea the house was haunted when I bought the place,? Glidewell said.
Glidewell purchased the house from the family that originally built it, although she can?t trace the actual year of completion.
?I wanted to have it put on a the historical register and one of the requirements is knowing the year it was built,? she said.
Glidewell said she sought an attorney?s help in locating the date in her paperwork.
?No one can seem to find the year,? she said. ?We have even gone as far as looking at the old fire maps, and still can?t trace it.?
The Queen Anne Victorian home called ?the turret house,? 550 N. Cherokee St., was built by a family with many properties in the area. The design of the home was popular during the 1880s and 1890s, the industrial era.
It passed through the hands of several different relatives and had fallen into disrepair when Glidewell bought it.
?This place was a mess, and it?s taken about 11 years to work on it,? Glidewell said. ?I still don?t have all the rooms the way I want them.?
The home is reportedly haunted. Eerie music can be heard in some of the rooms and when walking out in the hall, you can?t hear it at all.
In one recount, Glidewell said she had found drops of blood that began small and lead into a larger pool, across from the downstairs parlor.
?I called my sister-in-law, Vicky, and asked her what I should do,? she said. ?She asked me if I had done anything new, since the house was the most active while we were renovating.?
Glidewell said she had just brought in plants for the Turret room, and Vicky suggested she take one of them and place it in the room where she had found the blood and say a few words.
That is when she said the plant began to drip water as if it were crying. She said no matter where she moved the plant it continued to drip water and damage the house?s hardwood floors.
?I asked the florist at Bebb?s what I could do about the plant?s moisture, if it was a humidity issue or something in the house,? Glidewell said. ?She said she had never heard of that type of plant to drip.?
She said eventually her cat knocked the plant over and killed it.
Glidewell not only possesses the family home but she also has a few of the family?s possessions. She said one of the members of the family brought her the original owner?s wedding shoes and other personal items.
In the downstairs parlor, the diploma and class picture of a dentist who inhabited the home at the turn of the century is still displayed on its walls, along with a piano, purchased for a favorite niece.
?It?s sad that no children ever lived in the place. It seemed to get passed to older adults,? Glidewell said. ?I thought that was odd.?
The family was plagued with health issues that took the life of the favored niece.
Glidewell said when things began happening in the home, they called in her sister-in-law Vicky Glidewell, now of Tulsa Ghost Investigators, to do a reading in the home.
?We found a lot of activity in the downstairs area in the dining room and through the hall,? Vicky Glidewell said. ?The upstairs bedroom is where one of the home?s inhabitants died. The room was closed and was untouched left the way the deceased had left it.?
Rumors of a murder even get tagged to the house and there are whispers of unmarked graves on the property.
?People could be buried here, the old Texas Trail is right there,? Glidewell said pointing to the north end of the house. ?Often people died on the long journey and would be buried at some point along the way.?
Glidewell has decided to do a haunted tour to benefit Promoting Animal Welfare Society or PAWS for Halloween.
?Over 4 million dogs are put down every year, and it?s sad,? Glidewell said. ?PAWS does a great job at what they do. It is a good thing.?
She is opening her house to the public along with Tulsa Ghost Investigators.
http://www.muskogeephoenix.com/features ... art:int=15
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