In 1939 the mansion was donated to the St. Paul Gallery and School of Art by the Roger B. Shephard family. A skylight was installed on the upper floor and painting classes were offered to the public. But teachers and students felt uneasy in the house. They sensed presences walking among them or stopping to peer over their shoulders as if to study the works on their easels.
Malcolm Lein, who directed the gallery from 1947 to 1964, told a newsman that he personally never saw or heard anything unusual in the mansion, but he could not discount the reports of others.
“These people were sound, educated, and well read,” Lein said. “Yet many had the feeling of some kind of supernatural or unknown thing in the building.”
In the early 1950s, Dr. Delmar Kolb, a military intelligence officer in World War II, joined the teaching staff. He was a lawyer as well as an artist. At first he lived in the quiet and comfortable carriage house behind the mansion. Sometime later he moved into a front basement apartment in the house. It was far from comfortable.
“One night I felt two fingers on my forehead,” Kolb said. “I was in a cold sweat. I reached for the light, but when I turned it on there was a blue flash and then the room was dark.”
Two nights later, Kolb opened a kitchen cupboard door to get a paper bag. The bag leaped off the shelf.
“It took three hops across the floor and stopped,” he said. “I thought there was a mouse inside.”
Kolb went on to bed but was awakened soon after by the presence of a thin man in a black suit and top hat standing at the foot of the bed. At first Kolb thought it was a costumed intruder until he watched spellbound as the figure disappeared into a solid brick wall.
Kolb left St. Paul in 1959 and two college students moved into his apartment. In the middle of the first night, one young man awoke. Usually a sound sleeper, he had no idea of what had roused him. He did not see or hear anything in the room until he looked up. The head of a child floated in the air above his bed.
Around the same time, another student had moved into an apartment in the rear of the building. He too was shaken out of a deep sleep one night. This time the head of a man floated back and forth across the ceiling of the room. He claimed that the apparition moved in a controlled fashion, staring down at him the entire time.
Was it Chauncey Griggs making another check of his old homestead? Charles Wade, the gardener, returned? Or was it pure imagination?
The St. Paul Gallery and School of Art occupied the mansion for twenty-five years. Then a new arts and sciences center was built and the mansion put up for sale. In 1964 a publisher of occult books bought the house to use as both his office and home.
Carl L. Weschke ordered painting and repair work done before he moved in, and often stopped by the house to check on progress. According to reports, one day he found a window open on an upper floor and closed it. The next day it was open. Again he closed it. After repeatedly finding the window open, Weschke had it nailed shut.
On a number of occasions after Weschke moved into the house, he heard footsteps padding through the hallways and up and down the staircases and doors slamming shut. He always sensed a restless presence, he told an interviewer, but was not afraid because he believed in some kind of world beyond the one in which we live.
One fall afternoon in 1967, he was working in his library. Needing a break, he pushed his chair away from his desk and got up. In the doorway stood a man he had never seen before. He wore a dark suit. His face was long and thin and his hair bushy white.
A lady once called Weschke to tell him she had worked in the house as a girl and had seen the ghost of a young woman in the fourth-floor hallway. The butler at the time had also seen the apparition, she said.
Two veteran reporters from the St. Paul Pioneer Press arranged to spend a night in the house to gather material for a series of articles they were producing on ghosts in 1969. The journalists considered the old mansion one of the most famous haunted places in the Twin Cities.
Weschke welcomed staff writers Don Giese and Bill Farmer and photographer Flynn Ell and briefed them on the official history of the house. As the visitors sat with their host in his study, they noticed one of the owner’s three cats, a Siamese, crouched on its master’s desk, staring up at the ceiling.
After a tour, the newsmen decided to stay in the large top-floor room with its vast skylight, just off the back landing where the maid is said to have committed suicide fiftyfour years earlier, and where some of the supernatural activity seemed to be centered.
Weschke retired to his second-floor bedroom with its private bath and said he would not be leaving his quarters.
Photographer Ell set up two cameras. One was loaded with regular film and fitted with a wide-angle lens; the other held infrared film that would record heat changes if anything invisible to the human eye appeared. Giese and Farmer turned on their tape recorder. Then the three men sat in a circle beneath the one shaded light in the room. Beyond the doorway a bright light illuminated the hallway and the top of the staircase.
Within a short time, all three men were overcome by feelings of what they termed distress.
Giese and Farmer later wrote:
As newsmen we have each been in hundreds of situations that held far greater risks of possible physical danger.
There was no sign of danger in that room. We had no reason to feel apprehensive. Yet each of us soon reported feelings of general uneasiness—a definite sense of discomfort we couldn’t define. Each was especially anxious about the hall—brightly illuminated—and the staircase leading to the floors below.
They never heard anything approach them, but suddenly one of Weschke’s cats appeared in the room and went directly to reporter Giese. He stroked her back. Then she walked to the doorway, twitched her tail, and looked back into the room. Giese walked toward her.
The cat moved on, toward the top of the stairs, and again looked back, as if urging Giese to follow. He did. But when the cat went on down to the first landing, Giese could not follow. Standing under the bright light of the hallway and peering over the railing at the top of the staircase, he was overcome by fear. He stepped back into the room.
Ell went out into the hallway. He returned.
Farmer went into the hallway. He returned.
All three men agreed that nothing could induce them at that point to go down the staircase.
At twenty minutes past one in the morning, all three men heard five distinct thumps just beyond the doorway, like heavy footsteps. The men sat listening, waiting, eyes fixed on the lighted hall. They did not hear or see anything more.
Shortly after 3:00 a.m., the stairs groaned under the weight of someone walking up them. But then whoever it was stopped. Giese went alone into the hallway and stared down over the railing to the landings below. He saw nothing, but when he returned to the room he told Farmer and Ell that he knew someone had been on those stairs.
Five minutes later the stairs creaked again. Then silence.
This time the intrepid reporters and their photographer decided enough was enough. They packed up their equipment and left by the back door.
Giese and Farmer wrote: “We all agreed on one thing. There is no prize on earth that could get us to spend a single night in that great stone house that seems to speak in sounds we cannot explain or understand.”
For well over a century people have reported those mysterious sounds and unreal presences in Chauncey Griggs’s old mansion on Summit Avenue—the maid who climbs to an invisible noose on the fourth-floor landing, the snoopy gardener who riffles the pages of books in the library, and the thin man in a black suit who quietly slips in and out of locked rooms.
All may have been legends and rumors, but for those who say they came face-to-face with one or more of them, it is a reality they would just as soon forget.
The Levitation of Archie Collins
Minneapolis
Most persons reported to police as missing are eventually located. Either they turn up on their own or are fou
nd by a search party, alive or dead. But sometimes a person simply disappears for no apparent reason. It is as if the person disappeared into thin air.
That is exactly what happened with a magician known as Herman the Hypnotist and one Archie Collins in old Minneapolis. In front of several hundred persons, they vanished from a theater stage never to be seen again. Or so it is claimed.
The year was 1872. Minneapolis was celebrating its incorporation as a city. Gas lampposts were decked with red, white, and blue bunting; the streets reverberated with the cadences of marching bands; and residents keen on revelry partied late into the night.
In a field south of the city, Copson’s Traveling Theater pitched its tent for a week-long schedule of performances. Actors roamed the city streets, delivering handbills and hawking the delights of the repertory tent show.
The ballyhoo was not needed. This type of frontier theater was extremely popular throughout the Midwest, and Copson’s well-known troupe had a loyal following. Ephraim T. Copson Jr., whose grandfather had brought the company from New York to the Upper Midwest in 1847, ran the outfit. From early spring until late fall, it played villages in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Lake Superior coast of Michigan.
On opening night, playgoers from all parts of Minneapolis began arriving early at the tent theater. Three one-act plays were to be presented, with specialty acts in between. During the second intermission, Herman the Hypnotist entertained. Herman, a German actor whose surname was Aikmann, was billed as a performer of amazing feats. He had only recently joined the troupe.
The crowd, eager and expectant, jostled one another in line at the ticket office. Inside the tent, the canvas chairs in front and the rows of benches toward the rear filled quickly. Children sucked indolently on sticks of candy while their parents munched peanuts and popcorn. Heat from the oil lamps intensified the oppressive and pungent odors of food and damp, trodden grass, but few people seemed uncomfortable. Minutes before curtain time, the show sold out and late arrivals were turned away.
On the raised platform at the front of the tent, the first play began. Spectators cheered their favorite performers and soon the unfolding drama absorbed everyone.
When the play was over, the first intermission entertainment began, a fat lady who did acrobatics on top of a donkey. It inspired gales of crude laughter.
The second play received even more enthusiastic response than the first; the thunderous applause perhaps based less on merit and execution than on the anticipation of seeing Herman the Hypnotist, whose amazing abilities were already being talked about on the show circuit.
However, earlier in the evening Herman had been taken ill and in the show-must-go-on style, another entertainer had agreed to repeat her act. She stood backstage, waiting to go on, when Herman suddenly appeared, rudely bumped her aside, and swept past. He neither spoke nor acknowledged her presence.
Meanwhile, on stage a giant firecracker exploded in a bang and cloud of acrid smoke. Out of it Herman appeared. Tall and slim, clad in funereal black, he resembled an animated exclamation mark. His dark eyes flashed in a powdered face the color of chalk.
Fingering his string tie, the hypnotist strode to one side of the platform and called for a volunteer. Men nudged one another in the audience, but no one stepped forward.
“I must have a volunteer,” repeated Herman, his words edged with contempt. “I cannot do my act until someone joins me. It is harmless. No one will get hurt.”
He surveyed the audience and finally a girl seated in the third row got up and climbed the steps to the makeshift stage.
The hypnotist bowed and directed the girl to a chair in the center of the stage. “You will relax and go to sleep. Then you will do exactly what I tell you.”
The girl had other things in mind. She leered up at the actor and made a coarse suggestion.
He glared at her.
Suddenly a huge ball of sticky taffy soared through the air and landed on the girl’s head. Herman spun on his heels.
“Who did that?” he screamed in rage.
People stared at their shoe tops. No one spoke.
When the hypnotist stopped trembling, he waved the girl off. Facing the audience again, he sneered, “Maybe the clown who threw the candy would care to assist me.”
Now many sets of eyes settled on Archie Collins, who sat in the center of the front row. Catching the cue, the hypnotist began taunting the young man.
Collins blushed and squirmed in his seat as his friends around him called out, “Archie! Archie!” The chanting grew louder and feet began stomping.
Finally he could stand it no longer. Archie leaped to the stage and sat in the chair vacated by the girl.
Murmurs of speculation rippled through the audience. Collins, while a likeable and well-meaning fellow, was a daredevil with a strong will. Surely a poor candidate to be hypnotized. Yet, in less than a minute, the young man’s eyes were closing and he was nodding as the hypnotist droned on: “You are now asleep. Sound asleep. You will do anything I say.” He leaned close to Collins.
“Remember that. Anything.”
Collins sat rigid in the chair.
“Now, rise, rise like a puppet on a string!”
Herman the Hypnotist’s voice trembled with excitement and he stood on tiptoe to emphasize his command.
The audience gasped as Archie Collins rose and seemed to hang in midair.
“Rise! Rise!!” shouted the hypnotist. “Rise!!!”
The audience gasped as Collins floated out over the front row of chairs.
“It’s a trick! Cut him down!” called a man in the rear of the tent. No one seconded the demand. Most of the playgoers sat numb, electrified, staring openmouthed as Collins floated higher and higher like a leaf carried by the wind.
Then someone shouted, “Hey! Look at the hypnotist!”
Herman now had the appearance of a skeleton—a crazy, crooked smile on his skull and long, white bones shining eerily. Was it a trick of the primitive gas lighting used in nineteenth-century theaters?
Slowly the skeleton levitated a foot or two above the stage floor, then disappeared completely.
A man stood up and screamed, “Look!” All faces turned upward.
Overhead, Archie Collins’s prone body smashed into the top of the tent. The impact spun him around, revealing his battered face. When he hit the roof a second time, the canvas split and Archie Collins vanished into the night sky.
The audience sat mute; parents hugged their children, wide-eyed with wonder. Finally shuffling feet broke the silence as the bewildered spectators streamed from the theater. The last play never went on.
One of the show’s officials went directly to Archie Collins’s home to report the young man’s disappearance.
The family was stunned, his mother nearly hysterical with grief. How could her son simply have been spirited away by some unseen force, in some unknown manner?
Police launched an investigation.
At the theater site, all was confusion. Actors and actresses, some still in costume, milled around or stood talking quietly in small groups. Knots of spectators lingered in the shadows at the outer edges of the field.
The theater’s owner, Ephraim Copson, visibly shaken by the events of the evening, told the police that whoever had walked on stage as Herman the Hypnotist was in fact not Aikmann. Earlier that evening, Copson said, Ulrich Aikmann, Herman’s son, reported that his father had been bothered by food poisoning and would be unable to perform. He had spent the evening in bed, cared for by his wife and Al Jones, Copson’s personal assistant.
Copson stated further that he himself had summoned a doctor for Aikmann and that he had then asked another entertainer to take Aikmann’s place.
Police officers questioned the entertainer at length about the man who bumped into her backstage. The poor woman felt somehow at fault. Choking back sobs, she mentioned the performer’s unexpected rudeness but said he had looked enough like Aikmann and dressed like him for her not to otherwise pay att
ention to him.
Who was the imposter then? And how did he vanish before the eyes of that Minneapolis audience? And where was Archie Collins?
The questions were never answered.
While the truth may never be known in this particular case, there is a possible explanation for the disappearances. A skilled magician well-versed in the use of what were called magic lanterns and limelight, a powerful light that could be directed and focused to create a vast array of optical illusions, used in that era could have faked the disappearance of both magician and subject.
In the late nineteenth century the “Skeleton Act” was very popular in sideshows and traveling theaters. Here’s how it worked:
A volunteer stepped into an upright casket placed behind a sheet of glass set at a forty-five degree angle to the stage. The audiences as well as the volunteer were usually unaware of this glass partition. Bright lights concealed from the audience shone upon and in effect blinded the volunteer. At the side of the stage, in total darkness, stood a skeleton in an upright casket placed at right angles to the casket containing the volunteer and to one side of a panel that held a vertical strip of lights.
When, at the same moment, the lights were switched off the volunteer and on the skeleton, the spectators saw the image of the skeleton in its casket reflected in the sheet of glass. It appeared to be exactly where they had seen the volunteer.
A magician, using similar aids with help from an assistant, could have created his own metamorphosis and disappearance from the stage.
Furthermore, a levitation such as that performed on Archie Collins was another common act and could have been achieved by smoke pictures from a magic lantern—a device consisting of a small metal box with a carbide lamp and colored glass slides—hidden at the rear of the stage. With the tent and most of the stage in darkness, fires were lit in braziers at the front of the stage and chemicals added to the fires to cause columns of smoke to rise.
An assistant to the magician projected a series of slides onto the smoke of a young man in various positions, suggesting floating or levitation. As the images flashed by, the movements of the smoke brought them eerily to life. It was to these images that the magician gave his commands.
Haunted Heartland Page 23