Ghosts along the Texas Coast (20 page)

Along with the history, there seems to be a ghost story as well, quite an enchanting one. Mr. J. F. Cramer had been the custodian at the old Carnegie Library, and when the new building opened, he came right along. He was a quiet, soft-spoken gentleman, pretty much of a loner, who made his home in a basement apartment in the new building with his faithful shepherd dog, Pete. Cramer seldom went out, except to buy groceries. He was content to stay in the beautiful building with his collection of houseplants, his dog, and his music. Mr. Cramer was a violinist of some considerable talent. He took excellent care of his instrument, polishing the wood until it gleamed.

After his daily cleaning chores were done and the library had been closed to visitors, Mr. Cramer would often amuse himself and Pete by playing his violin, strolling around the empty building at night. His favorite spot for impromptu concerts was the corner of the third floor balcony in the rotunda, where the acoustics must have been wonderful!

There's probably no one around now who can recall the gifted janitor. After all, he died over sixty years ago! But his music, some say, still lingers, and on dreary, drizzly days, the sounds of strings have been heard reverberating through the old building. Coming first, faintly, from the basement, then gradually intensifying until they reach the balcony, where they reach full crescendo! Most often, the strains seem to be parts of Strauss waltzes.

Some people have attributed the sounds to the wind blowing through the drafty halls, but often the sounds have been heard when there is no wind blowing outside at all! Perhaps there was much energy and emotion attached to Mr. Cramers' private after-hours concerts. When conditions seem to be just right, the music, which was so much a part of his life and therefore a part of the building where he spent the last ten years of his life, comes back again and again to serenade the empty halls and reading rooms.

According to an article in the
Houston Post
on March 5, 1961, Mr. Cramer loved plants and grew them in his apartment. He once grew a seedling oak tree from an acorn in a pot, tending it until it was finally strong enough to transplant. Now, it is a huge oak tree that shades the McKinney Street entrance to the building. The library staff still calls it “Mr. Cramer's tree.”

Mr. Cramer died in a Houston hospital on November 22, 1936. He was sixty-three years old and left only one living relative, a sister.

The
Post
article also quoted a former librarian at the Ideson, Miss Hattie Johnson, who began working there in 1946, as saying although she had never heard the violin music, the building itself still managed to “spook” her. She always felt as if someone was watching her.

There was another employee, a custodian whose name is Scott Gould, who said he used to work the predawn shift, coming to work before daybreak to open up the building for the day. An October 28, 1984 edition of the
Houston Post
quoted Gould as saying he used to carry a broomstick with him “for protection.” The custodian once said, “It's just plain weird over there. I really don't know if I believe in ghosts, but it is just plain weird in that building.” Gould no longer works that shift, but he hasn't changed his mind about some unseen “something” occupying that building.

The aura of mystery is certainly there. The Gothic arches, carved wood, dark paneling, curving staircases all lend themselves to a setting that might make a spirit feel right at home.

There hasn't been any music around lately, according to present-day librarians. Maybe Mr. Cramer has settled down to peaceful dreams, or else he holds his concerts very, very late at night!

A final note: Apparently, one of the areas Mr. Cramer most liked to roam in the library building while he was alive is now called the “Texas and Local History Room.” His music, on occasion, has been heard coming from that place. How fascinating to this writer! I just checked the return address on the large manila envelope containing research material for this book, sent to me from Houston. You guessed it! The return address reads, “Texas Room, Houston Public Library, 500 McKinney, Houston, Texas.” Wow!

In an old section of the city of Houston known as Montrose, at 903 Welch Street, there's an old house that was built about eighty years ago. The big, two-story dwelling is constructed of wood, with a sweeping circular porch and a matching second-story verandah. They used to say it was haunted.

Back in the late 1960s, the era of the flower children, the house was rented to a “Reverend” Jim Palmer, a former postal worker and the organizer of what he called the “First Pagan Church of Houston.” Nobody knows much about the inner workings of the strange cult, but it is said that Palmer taught what he called the “mental, occult, and hypnotic arts.” His followers held nightly sessions in the “church.” Many classes were held while the members were completely in the nude, and they studied such subjects as psychic phenomena, sex, yoga, and karate. The cultists placed huge papier-mâché Greek figures on the front porch, and nude pictures were plastered all over both the interior and exterior of the house. A sign in the front yard read, much to the horror of the neighbors, “Stand up for sex. Lay down for love. The joys of heaven are not all above.”

George Brown, who has lived within three blocks of the old house for many years, recalls the sentiments of Palmer's neighbors. “Nobody liked it,” he said, “I even went by there as a kid and shot out some windows with a slingshot. They had these nudist colony magazine pages glued to the outside of the house. Back in those days, this neighborhood had more older-type people who really didn't appreciate that. People were kind of scared of them.” Brown was interviewed for an article that ran in the Sunday, October 25, 1981 issue of the
Houston Chronicle Magazine
.

It was said in the wee hours, the horrible screams of animals being sacrificed would be heard coming from back rooms as followers of the strange “religion” chanted. The Palmers' teenaged daughter was nicknamed the “Ghost” by the neighbors, because of her pasty-white complexion and glazed, spaced-out look.

In 1974 an attorney named Thomas L. Whitcomb evicted Palmer and his family from the property. Whitcomb was buying up a whole block on Welch Street for renovation and wanted to start work on the “church house.”

Shortly after the eviction, weird things began to happen at the house. A young man that Whitcomb had hired to clean up and work on the place related some really strange occurrences. He didn't want his name used, so we will call him “Jay,” just as the writer in the
Chronicle
article referred to him. He related how another young man, a friend of his who had come to help him with the monumental task of cleaning up, was hit on the arm while walking down the stairs. He called out to Jay that something had hit him. The two men just quit working and went home that day. Then, another time, a couple of Native Americans who were hired to help walked off the job, saying they were thoroughly spooked.

For about three weeks while the cleanup job was going on, Jay lived in the house, staying in a room on the second floor. He had strange nightmares while there, something he had never experienced before. He says the people in his dreams were so bizarre that he feels he was being persecuted in his sleep. He finally moved out, partly because of the weird dreams, and also because of the noises he heard. There was the constant creaking and groaning of the old house. There was also the continual scurrying of rats. It all combined to give him a general uneasy feeling.

One acquaintance of Jay's decided that he wanted to spend a night in the place. The man, whom Jay described as someone prone to emotional difficulties anyway, spent his first night trying to “invoke the devil,” Jay said. It's unclear as to what happened that night, but the man elected not to return. The very next night he stayed in another house in the neighborhood and set fire to that structure. “He was a little bit on the loose side, anyway,” Jay said. “By word of mouth, I heard he ended up in a mental institution.”

Since Jay had seen a popular movie of that era called
The Exorcist
, he suggested to Whitcomb it might be a good idea to have this place exorcised. Whitcomb went to see Reverend Francis E. Monaghan, vice-president of St. Thomas University. The Father agreed to come over and “bless” the old house. It wasn't a formal exorcism, as he just
sprinkled some holy water and said some prayers, but it must have done some good!

We are delighted to report the former pagan church has gone through a real transformation since the article appeared in the
Houston Chronicle
. A visit to the Montrose area revealed a cheerful, yellow-painted house, with white and turquoise trim. Its well-kept yard is surrounded by a sturdy wrought iron fence. Gone are the graffiti, the ugly door-side statues, the lewd slogans. It is just a charming old turn-of-the-century corner house on a quiet street. The neighbors must be relieved!

903 Welch Street, Houston, Texas

If you saw the film
Poltergeist
, you will recall that a family bought a lovely “dream home,” but ended up having to leave the house with all their belongings behind, fleeing as fast as they could, just to get away. . . .

The house, which had been built over an old unmarked cemetery, had become the dwelling place of satanic spirits and poltergeists. This film could have been based on a true story. The upper-class Newport subdivision on Lake Houston has been almost abandoned. Many former residents left after strange and eerie events began to take place in the area soon after they took possession of their lovely new homes. You see, these weren't ordinary garden variety ghosts! One couple, Ben and Jean Williams, wrote of the terrors they experienced in a book entitled
Black Hope Horror
(Morrow Publishing Company). One of their daughters went insane, and another died of a heart attack after warning her mother not to dig in the backyard. All told, four members of the ill-fated family died of cancer within six years of their moving into the house, which they finally abandoned.

There were eight families in the neighborhood that moved away, after reporting such strange occurrences as garage doors opening and closing by themselves, television sets turning on in the middle of the night, strong winds blowing through their houses, and huge, rectangular sinkholes suddenly appearing in their yards, while snakes were seen devouring birds!

These families learned that the Purcell Corporation had constructed the homes in the subdivision over an old Negro graveyard, once known as Black Hope Cemetery. The unmarked graves, long overgrown by a tangle of weeds, were not visible, and the builders apparently did not intentionally or knowingly build the custom-made homes over the cemetery.

One couple, Sam and Judy Haney, sued the Purcell Corporation for damages they claimed to have suffered in the form of “mental anguish,” but they did not succeed in winning their case. The Haneys discovered a grave containing the remains of two corpses in September of 1983 while excavating for a swimming pool. Oddly enough, a stranger who noticed they were building the pool warned them a cemetery might be at that location! According to an article in the August 27, 1987 edition of the
Houston Chronicle
, the disinterred remains were left at the Harris County medical examiner's office for about six weeks, when the Haneys asked for and received permission to rebury them in a small casket which they had built for that purpose. The bodies stayed buried in their backyard until 1986 when the Purcell Corporation received a court order to move them away from the area. Testimony showed that as many as sixty poor people had been buried in unmarked graves in the unconsecrated area, a sort of “potter's field,” many years ago. The Haneys believe that the bodies in their yard were those of former slaves who worked at the nearby old McKinney estate.

Although the Haneys did not win their court case against the Purcell Corporation (the jury determined that the Haneys should have known about the cemetery being there in 1981, and they didn't file the lawsuit until 1984, meaning the lawsuit would be barred by a two-year statute of limitation), they said they still felt like they had scored a moral victory. They said the major reason they brought suit was to gain recognition for the cemetery. Judy Haney said of her obligation to the dead, “These are people that were born slaves and that were lost for a long time. I think that's really sad.”

The Haneys went on to say that when they first disinterred the remains, many unexplainable occurrences took place in their home. Shoes mysteriously disappeared, and then reappeared, side by side, in the opened gravesite! Their television set came on at night at least twice, and although they never saw or talked to any “spirits,” they were sure that although unseen, they were definitely there!

The Black Hope Horror
, co-authored by Ben Williams, Jean Williams, and John Bruce Shoemaker, details the experiences endured by the Williams and Haney families. It is very interesting, spine-chilling, and thought-provoking. But be forewarned. It is not a good bedtime story.