Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Paranormal Research Part 2: The Haunted Monroe House

This article concludes the two-part paranormal research series of blog posts, continuing the history of the haunted Monroe House.

When researching a haunted location, the purpose isn’t to prove the legends but to establish a connective thread between what the legends and claims say and events that can be substantiated by documents. And in this case, the evidence is building. Beginning with the violent and abusive situation in the Miars’ household, a pattern emerged that included paranormal activity, suspected infidelity, and bizarre accidents and misfortunes to the families that lived there. The Berger family was originally suspected as the source of the haunting, with some claims that John B. Berger was a violent and abusive barkeeper who punished his kids brutally. That doesn’t hold water, with the Hartford City News Telegram eulogizing him as “a man of sterling qualities, honorable to the core. He was big-hearted and genial and it is doubtful if any man in the city had more friends.”
And of course, John B. Berger was dead when the public fiasco of the Miars’ marriage became public knowledge.

In that period between 1907-1911, when the Miars’ behavior became fodder for the town gossips and their claims of desertion, cruelty, and the violent abuse of their children was hashed out in the courts and the newspaper, a series of strange disasters befell the Berger family at the same time—a shooting as the result of a hate crime; frostbite and a horse’s foot turned into gangrene and an amputation; death in childbirth; a carriage wheel falling off and resulting in a severe injury—these events seem to be interconnected with some strange energy or influence that both fueled and charged a sequence of tragic incidents that are unexplained.

The Miars children—Edna was eight, while Ernest was four—match up with the legends about the house, including a famous picture with two child-sized apparitions looking out from a window. The pattern of abuse also matches up with the claims of psychics and many of the EVPs and other communications received at the house, as well as the testimony of local residents who were brought up on stories about the residence. One medium said the energy of the haunting was fueled by an “angry jealous woman out for blood”. This, too, could refer to the Miars because the husband deserted his wife for another woman, and ran away to marry her illegally. That desertion of children was duplicated almost simultaneously by Frederick Nicaise, whose children lost their mother, Mary Berger Nicaise, in 1909 and by 1910 they’d lost their father as well. Perhaps he died, or left to find work and never returned. We don’t know, but the pattern of abandoned families seems to have continued.

And the pattern doesn’t stop there.

What makes Caroline Berger’s weird carriage accident in 1911 even more interesting is the gruesome death of Sydney Faulkner thirty years later. Faulkner lived in the upstairs apartment in 1940 with his wife, Myrl. He was killed August 18, 1940 when his car inexplicably struck the support beam of a bridge. The Muncie Star pulled no punches in its report of the accident: “The bridge beam was driven back through the car, piercing Faulkner's body, and both car and bridge were badly damaged. Use of acetylene torches was necessary before the body could be removed from the automobile."
Faulkner also had a passenger in the car: a woman not his wife. Mrs. WH Wolfe was with him that morning, and incredibly she wasn't injured.

Here again, the pattern emerges: potential infidelity and a strange accident while away from the home under suspicious circumstances.

While the Faulkners were living in the upstairs apartment, labeled as 220 ½ Monroe Street in the 1940 census, the house was owned by Harry B. Meyers, who lived downstairs with his wife, Emma, and their adult son Clayton, who was twenty-three. Meyers was a finishing superintendent at the paper mill which was the major industrial employer mid-century, and Clayton worked with him as a packer. After Sydney Faulkner’s tragic death, Myrl moved out of the upstairs apartment. A family with young children moved in later, and that’s when we start to get our first modern claims of paranormal activity, as evidenced by this August 12, 2016 comment left by an anonymous gentleman on a story about the Monroe House on HauntedHovel.com:
“I spent about six years of my childhood growing up in that house. I was always scared of the strange noises; they were not common but when it happened it sure got your attention fast. My mother would comfort me about the sounds and voices as a child but she mentioned years later about a woman she thought she had seen upstairs near my bedroom. She had always wondered if she had seen the apparition of the women who had taken her own life decades ago. I for one never liked the old house and was happy when we relocated in the early fifties to Muncie. Always been curious about the afterlife after my youthful experiences, and the house that brought it to my attention. Very good to find this site and pleased to see others chatting about the place. Brings a sense of normal to me who have spent seventy plus years in deep thought over my experiences(sic).”
But after 1940, we run into a brick wall researching the history of the Monroe House and the people who lived there. The last federal census made available to public research was 1940, since by law census details cannot be released until seventy years after the census date. Telephone directories become huge, and almost impossible to locate names by street address. The Monroe house became a rental property, although we have apocryphal online claims that previous landlords lived in the house until the late 1990s-early 2000s.

There are also claims that tenants in the house during the nineties were Satanists, and that their magic rituals and occult practices intensified the already-haunted property—claims that are lent credence by the objects that have since been purportedly discovered buried on the property: fetishes made of jewelry and human hair, wrapped in cloth; shorts that might have blood on them; and of course the discovery of the bones and skull fragments unearthed in the basement by investigators on a paranormal TV show.

It is important to note that there is absolutely no evidence to back up many of the legends’ claims. No one (that we can find) ever died in the house. There wasn’t a fire that killed a small child. In fact, there’s no evidence of the house catching on fire at any point after it was built in 1900. It’s also important, however, to mention that the original house on the property (the one built in the 1850s) may have burned down, and this house was constructed on top of what was left, incorporating wood that was physically sound but scorched.

What we did find was a series of bizarre and tragic events that could perhaps explain the origins of the haunting—and the stories that now have circulated in Hartford City for over seventy years.
In 2019, the investigations of the house are where the real questions now lie. The Monroe House has been vacant for over ten years, deserted by the living and occupied only by the dead…or the demonic, which has seemed to become the consensus around the property over the last five years. It remains to be seen as we continue to research the property what—if any—additional links can be added to the chain of documented events that still impact the house today.