WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) - Sixty-eight years later, the story sounds like something out of “Poltergeist.”
On May 11, 1950, a thousand people jammed traffic outside 14 Douglas St. to see the three-family house shake, its windows rattle, walls crack and ceiling plaster crumble.
Strange rumblings accompanied by a heavy pounding noise had rattled the house at intervals every spring for three years, the Worcester Telegram reported at the time.
No cause could be found for the mysterious phenomenon, which affected no other house on the street.
“Shaking House a Mystery and Headache to Tenants,” read the headline on the front-page story in the Worcester Telegram on May 13, 1950.
“SHOWS WINDOWS THAT RATTLE” was the caption on an accompanying photo of a neighborhood girl pointing to the first-floor apartment. “POINTS TO CRACK” read the description under a picture of a neighbor showing a damaged wall in a third-floor bathroom.
Even The Boston Globe took notice. “Police Assigned to Ghost-Hunt in Worcester” read the headline in an item in the Globe on May 12, 1950, which noted two officers had been posted to the scene that Thursday after teenagers threw rocks at the “haunted house.”
Were “poltergeists” to blame, as the Globe, tongue-in-cheek, wondered? Or did the vibrations that shook 14 Douglas St. have a more down-to-earth explanation?
The truth is shrouded in the mists of time. But of the possible explanations that present themselves, one involves the supernatural, and the other decidedly does not.
Prompted by a letter from a woman who once lived next door, and had grown up hearing ghost stories about the place, the Telegram & Gazette set out to investigate what the paper in 1950 called “Worcester’s mysterious house” at 14 Douglas St.
?(This) has long been a mystery to my family,” Lauren King of Greer, South Carolina, wrote. Ms. King explained that her great-uncle, a Worcester fireman named Michael Hallahan, lived with his wife, Nora, in the first-floor apartment at 14 Douglas St. when the unusual events took place.
Ms. King’s grandmother, Elizabeth Hallahan, a Worcester police officer’s widow, lived next door at 16 Douglas St., where Ms. King was raised in the late 1960s and ’70s.
“As you can well imagine, they are all deceased now and all that’s left is the speculation and ghost stories that have come along the way,” Ms. King, now 61 and a nurse in Greenville, South Carolina, wrote.
The Telegram on Saturday, May 13, 1950, described a remarkable scene on Douglas Street, where the three-family at No. 14 had “quivered” as if “shaken by a giant hand.” Two nights before a crowd estimated at 1,000 had come from across the city to view the house, the paper reported. The next day, perhaps 500 had watched “as experts conducted an exhaustive three-hour search for the cause - and went away still baffled.”
Each disturbance lasted about a minute. The quakes knocked pictures from the wall and dishes from the shelves. A third-floor resident, Mrs. Arthur Singleton, told the Telegram she had seen a bed on the first floor jump off the floor while a “spasm” was in progress. She said closed doors strained as if someone were trying to rip them from their hinges.
Residents said radios in the house emitted peculiar whistles during the poundings, which usually occurred between 9 p.m. and midnight, though sometimes between 5:30 and 10 a.m. The shaking incidents were reported over three years beginning in the spring after the frost had left the ground. The vibrations were plainly visible from the outside in daylight, the Telegram reported.
The city’s public works commissioner watched the shaking and couldn’t explain it, the paper reported. Gas, electric company, and water and sewer bureau crews likewise were at a loss to explain the mystery, as were engineers who checked the foundation of the house and found nothing amiss.
Ms. King said she grew up with stories about the house being targeted by an angry ghost - in the family’s telling, that of her great-grandmother, fireman Michael Hallahan’s mother, Mary Daly Hallihan, who died in 1928 unreconciled to her son’s choice of a wife.
“The story that I got from my grandmother and my aunt and uncle - they were all Irish, and full of whatever - (was) that Michael’s mother, who was from Ireland, didn’t like the woman he was going to marry,” Ms. King said in a phone conversation this past week.
“She told him straight out, ’If you marry this woman, I swear if there’s any way to come back, I’m gonna come back and haunt you.’ This was the story in our family, that Grandmother Hallihan came back and haunted them because he married the wrong woman.
“He was supposed to marry Lizzie Monahan, who lived across the street on Douglas Street. (Instead) he married this girl from Ireland, Nora Maroney. They didn’t like her and there was a lot of family fighting and all that. I heard this story so many times.”
Mary Daly Hallihan and her husband, Patrick, are buried in the family plot in St. John’s Cemetery in Worcester. (The stone notes the spelling of their name as Hallihan, changed to Hallahan by subsequent generations.) A black-and-white photo from the 1920s depicts the rough-hewn couple wearing stern expressions and looking, in this picture anyway, quite capable of haunting a house.
Was Grandmother Hallihan behind the unexplained banging and shaking?
The family of the house’s owner in 1950 offers a more mundane - but head-scratching, in its own way - explanation.
“It’s probably not as haunted as you think it is,” said Randy Chavoor, a retired Worcester Fire Department district chief, whose late grandmother, Victoria Chavoor, owned the three-family at 14 Douglas St. at the time of the disturbances. “From what I was told,” he said with a laugh, “it’s not as exciting as it sounds.”
Where university engineers were unable to find the cause of the shaking, Chavoor family members say, a plumber later did - behind the medicine cabinet in the wall of the first-floor apartment.
“According to my cousin, someone put a washing-machine motor inside the wall,” Chief Chavoor said. “She’s 99 percent sure, though she doesn’t want to get anyone in trouble, that it was the first-floor person, who wanted to buy the house from our grandmother. There was some type of motor, he evidently put power to it, and it was enough to shake the whole house.”
It was said among the Chavoor family that the man on the first floor wanted to buy the house, and that perhaps he was trying to make the place appear haunted to get the price down. “My cousin believes that’s what the whole thing was,” Chief Chavoor said. “She thought it was a washing-machine motor.”
Other family members confirmed this was their understanding of what happened. The cousin, who asked that her name not be printed, was 10 years old in 1950, and recalled walking up from the mom-and-pop store the family operated at the corner of Grand and Douglas streets to see the house shake. She said she had heard that certain residents of 14 Douglas donned sheets and stood in the windows when a crowd gathered outside, drawn by word of the latest shaking.
So was Worcester’s mystery house a hoax? “Mike and Nora moved over to Heard Street, and there was no more shaking, so I don’t know,” the Hallahans’ niece, Ms. King, acknowledges.
In the years since there have been no reported recurrences of the odd vibrations. The current owner of 14 Douglas, Juana Manzano, who lives on the second floor, this past week had no ghost stories to tell. Down the block at Guertin’s Cafe at 139 Grand St., a bartender who said she lived at 16 Douglas for a time could recall nothing unusual about the house next door.
Neither could Ms. King, who said as a teenager she sometimes baby-sat at 14 Douglas and could remember “no shaking or anything like that.”
But she’s not convinced by the story about a motor in the wall.
Ms. King cites accounts of beds jumping off the floor, water coming out of toilets and dishes breaking. “Would a washing-machine motor do that?” she said. “I don’t buy that at all.”
People tend to embellish, she said, but nonetheless, an old neighbor who lived at the end of the street and whose account she found reliable told her: “You could see the house rocking.”
She said: “I don’t know. I still think it’s the grandmother.”
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Online: https://bit.ly/2yEtf3t
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Information from: Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, Mass.), http://www.telegram.com
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