Thread: Hello from The Mansion of Doom

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Hi Halloween Lovers,

For some years I have owned a spooky, abandoned, run down but still beautiful historical mansion in Pittsburgh. I have finally figure out what to do with it: turn it into what it really is: a haunted house.

I have only stayed one night in it. Never again! I am not sure if I even believe in ghosts, but I know what I saw and heard and that was enough to keep me from setting foot in the place again since then!

It is about 200 years old and is one of Pittsburgh's oldest buildings still standing. It was built by the first family to move into the area after the French and Indian War. It sits on top of a great river bluff above the Monongahela River about five miles upriver from The Point, Pittsburgh's ground zero -- where the three rivers join and the Ohio heads first north then west to join up with the Mississippi.

I don't know anything about the haunted house business but I am hoping to learn something here.

Anyone know anything about professional ghost busters? I would love to have someone who is an honest researcher look into its long history of ghostly events. I guess I should have known about this. But the real estate agent who sold me the place didn't mention any of this at the time. Later he told me about doors that slammed themselves shut when no wind was blowing.

It all started the first time I ever set eyes on the place. When I drove up and got out of the car, I looked up at the topmost window and saw a woman with gray hair looking down at me. Just then the real estate agent walked up and introduced himself. I figured she must be the owner and that I would meet her when we toured the mansion.

But he never mentioned her. It turns out that the place was empty. The last member of the family that had lived there for two hundred years had recently died. When I asked him who I had seen in the window, he just looked at me weird so I said it must have been a reflection. (But there was no way it could have been a reflection! After all, the window was about thirty feet above me and it was no reflection. It was a person standing in the window.

It was not for several months after I bought the place that the next strange thing happened. I was reading a scholarly article in a journal about the history of the Hays family, the family who had built the place and lived in it for many generations. I was reading about Sarah Hays, the Quaker lady who was the wife of one riverboat pilot and the son of another, both of whom took coal from the family coal mine down the Mississippi and brought back fugitive slaves. I turned the page and there was the one picture that is known to exist of her.

It was the woman in the window. I later learned that the window was an attic window and opened to a playroom where the children of the family loved to play and where Grandmother Sarah spent long hours with her beloved grandchildren.

I remember at the time thinking it was somewhat strange that the woman should be up behind a high little window just below the peak of the roof. I said something about it at the time to my intended partner, the man who was supposed to buy the mansion with me but who got cold feet and backed out of the deal at the last moment. I asked him if he saw her and he looked at me as if I were crazy.

This was in broad daylight, about ten in the morning -- just when the children would have been playing, I imagine -- and I always thought that ghosts showed up only in the dark and gloom.

I have no explanation for this. And it is certainly not the spookiest thing that ever happened at the haunted mansion, but it was the first time I ever set foot on the property. I never saw any manifestation of Sarah Hays again.

I might add that if this WERE a ghost -- and I have no other explanation for it -- it was not a frightening experience, except afterward. When we looked at each other, she did not seem weird or threatening or even unfriendly. She was just a grandmotherly figure looking at me. Neither was she pale or translucent. Just a woman with gray hair wearing a lace shawl. I don't remember her dress though I have the impression that it was a high necked dress.

I never had any similar experience before nor since other than the night I spent in the mansion, but I don't want to talk about that.

Welcome to HF!

Hello and Welcome.

hey & welcome.

Hi doctormark,

Welcome to HF.