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.

Paranormal Research Part 1: The Haunted Monroe House

The fact of the matter is that there’s a long string of peculiar accidents, hate crimes, tragedies, infidelity and violent domestic abuse associated with the house as far back as the early 1900s. Those events set the stage for the haunting today. And while we don’t have all the facts of the Monroe House and there are sizable gaps in our knowledge of who owned and lived in the residence, a pattern starts to emerge early that is worth evaluating.

The legends around the large, white-sided Victorian house and its extreme haunting are well-known in Blackford County, Indiana. The Monroe House, as the residence at 218 North Monroe Street in Hartford City is called, has been a mystery for decades. Neighbors have reported everything from fires to black smoky figures in the windows to loud arguments and lights coming on in the vacant home for years, but when the police show up no one is there and nothing is wrong. The ghost stories go back at least to the 1930s. When you combine the stories and legends with the historical records, a fascinating—and terrifying—timeline emerges, one that might explain the continued hauntings and escalated activity in the residence.

Psychics have claimed for years that the house is haunted as the result of horrific child abuse—a father who abused his small son and daughter so severely the event has been imprinted on the property, a literal trauma to the very foundations of the house. Investigations have uncovered Class A EVPs of small children screaming, disembodied voices interacting with investigators even through baby monitors, shadow people, the apparitions of two small children, a small blackened apparition in the upstairs windows, unexplained fires, physical attacks, and sever poltergeist activity.

But all of these are claims—allegations. What we have to do is to try to tie the current paranormal claims to the actual history of the house. That way, we can corroborate the evidence with documented fact. That's why paranormal researchers, who may not be the obsessive compulsive provokers that you find on most YouTube channel, are probably the most important members of their paranormal investigation groups. With a well-known haunt like the Monroe House, a lot of teams are content to accept the legend...the cover story of a location as absolute fact. They investigate a location and immediately defer to the legend to validate any evidence they may find.

But that's not investigation. That's intellectual laziness, and if you're part of a group who just accepts what the owner of a site has up on his website, then you're invalidating every single bit of evidence you may capture. You have to research the location honestly, and find the real history for yourself. The Monroe House is a location I investigated extensively, and the story I uncovered has little to no bearing on what the claimed history of the site is.


The house is now a triplex, divided during the tenure of the Berger family, who lived in the home from around 1900 to 1930. The Bergers were Belgian immigrants who began their life in Indiana by working in the Hartford City Glass Company as glass workers. John B. and Mary Berger had five children together, who all worked in the glass company from childhood on. John became an agent for Indianapolis Brewing and a major steamship line. He bought a tavern, invested his money in real estate, joined organizations like the Elks, the Rotary, and the Oddfellows, and became a leading citizen of the town.

In the late 1900s, two families lived in the Monroe Street house. The Bergers occupied the downstairs, but after the death of John in 1905 rented out the upstairs. Through searching newspaper archives, we discovered an article that may directly tie into the claims of the Monroe Street Haunting—and the family that lived upstairs.

On March 20, 1907, the Hartford City Telegram reported the following:

"Ulysses G. Miars, the well known bookkeeper and former paymaster at the Johnston factory, was Friday made the defendant in a divorce suit filed in the circuit court by. Mary Miars, who besides a divorce asks the custody of their three children, $500 alimony and $25 monthly for the support of the children. Mr, and Mrs. Miars were married in September, 1886, and lived together until March 1, 1907, when the plaintiff avers that she was cast upon the street to depend on the charity of strangers. Her allegations in part are: That the defendant has been guilty of cruel and inhuman treatment; that he possesses a violent and uncontrollable temper and at various times became enraged without cause, and on March 11 drove her from their home giving her no clothing other than, that she was wearing; that she was obliged to seek shelter at the home of a neighbor as it was late in the evening and she had no relatives that she could call upon for assistance; that plaintiff is weak, frail and in poor health and unable to perform hard labor although she was compelled to do so and then was not provided with suitable clothing. The family is comprised of three children—Earl, age 20; Edna, age 8, and Ernest, age 4. It is further alleged that the defendant is capable of earning $125 monthly and fully able to maintain the children by paying $25 monthly for their support. The parties named in the complaint have resided on north Monroe street and their troubles of the present week have afforded a great opportunity for the town gossips.”

To report not only a divorce proceeding but allegations of domestic violence and child abuse is extremely rare in newspapers at the time, especially in a small Midwestern town. Ulysses Miars was a well-known businessman whose life fell apart in a matter of weeks. First the public claim of abuse, then the loss of his position, then reconciliation with his wife—only to desert her a few months later for (allegedly) another woman. On December 4, 1907, the following article appeared:

“UG Miars has filed a suit for divorce from his wife, Mrs. Mary Miars, alleging that she had a cruel disposition and frequently chastised their children with a buggy whip.”

By June of 1908, Ulysses Miars wasn’t paying support for his wife and children. He was newly married—already—to a woman who got a divorce at about the same time from her husband. The only reason he was able to pay the settlement of the divorce was because his mother sold her farm. But after that? He didn’t pay his former family a dime. Ulysses Miars and his new wife (they actually married illegally, as in her divorce she was forbidden from marrying for two years) ended up moving to Ohio, where in 1949, he died—in Toledo. The only child listed as a survivor from his first marriage was Edgar, the eldest son.

What’s extremely strange about this is that Mary Miars and all three children are in the 1910 census, now living on Jefferson Street. But none of them—not Mary, not Edna, not Ernest, not Edgar—can be found on any 1920 census.

So where did they go? The child abuse and domestic violence cited in the courts was extreme and severe. Did the Miars children die young? We know there were rumors about the family before the horrific divorce, because in 1903 there was gossip around their then four-year old daughter, Edna. No one had seen the child for a while, and word spread through the neighborhood that she had diphtheria. At the time, that would have required the entire household—this is before the Monroe Street house—to be quarantined. So the Miars inserted a strange notice in the paper that their daughter "has never been bedfast on account of sickness and is now able to be around the house most of the time."
Which if you think about it, is weird. She’s not sick, but she’s able to be around the house “most of the time”?

The Berger family, on the other hand, was socially prominent and well-respected. Their children lived at home as young adults and didn’t cause any trouble. The Berger daughters had large weddings, reported in the Telegram, and the sons went into business and did very well. But in 1905, John B. Berger was diagnosed with tuberculosis.  went to Silver City, New Mexico for treatment at the Sisters’ Hospital there. But upon arrival, his case was declared hopeless and he was dead eight days later. After his funeral, the Bergers rented the upstairs apartment—to the Miars. Although the two families shared the house for a very short period of time, the Bergers began to be plagued by a series of baffling and bizarre occurrences that traumatized the entire family.

To start off with, the Bergers’ barn caught on fire. Sparks from the blaze subsequently set the homes of two neighbors, Emil Loriaux and Joe Aucreman, on fire as well. Then, John Berger’s older brother, Marshall, was stranded outside and his feet were severely frostbitten in 1905. Then a horse stepped on his foot and gangrene set in. Marshall’s leg was amputated above the knee. He recovered, only to die of pneumonia two years after his brother, in 1907.

Later in 1905, John’s son George was the victim of a hate crime, and was shot by anti-Belgian assailants as he walked with friends after a dance. Witnesses reported that the two different groups of men hadn’t interacted at all as they passed each other on the street. George and his friends didn’t apparently know any of their attackers and according to witnesses didn’t say a word to the other group.

So when suddenly the group, led by three men from Kentucky, yelled, “You goddamned frogs won’t be running this town no more!” it was unexpected. The men unleashed a spray of bullets at George and his friends. George was shot in the chest, right above the heart, and was carried home to his mother’s house. Doctors expected him to die and the newspaper reported that he was for a time “pulseless”. But somehow, he rallied and survived the attack.

Interestingly, the three attackers went to a bar after shooting George Berger, where they told the bartender they had “fixed a group of frogs”, and then disappeared from the town entirely. The bar was owned by Frederick Nicaise—who had a tie to the Berger family as well.

The Bergers’ daughter, Mary, had married Belgian immigrant Frederick Nicaise, in 1894. After five children in fairly short order, she died after complications of diabetes and childbirth, along with her newborn son, in 1909. But by the 1910 census, the five children were living with their grandmother in the Monroe Street house. The children grew to adulthood in their grandmother’s home and there is no further mention of their father, alive or dead.

In 1911, the Bergers’ daughter-in-law Caroline, wife of their other son, Elmer, was in a inexplicable carriage accident. On a trip back from the Oddfellows Cemetery when John Berger is buried, she and a friend accepted a ride fro a gentleman passing by in a carriage. On the way home, the back wheel just fell off the carriage for no discernible reason, throwing her into the street where she was badly injured. This is the first bizarre incident involving transportation.

We’ll get to the other one, which happens thirty years later, in part 2 of this article.

Timeout For Some More Paranormal Theories

Never fear--another Bell Witch post is coming for tomorrow. It takes me a while to write those posts, because I'm being very careful to cross refer through all the available source material in an effort to present the best possible relation of events as, if not fact (for two hundred years later it's hard to discern fact from legend) then at least the salient points of the original sources. In particular, I want the Bell family memories to be accurately related because, in my opinion, those stories hold the most weight and are the most likely sources to be accurate in regards to what really happened. So I'm going to hold a story from Richard Williams Bell's journal as more probable than any of Harriet Parks Miller or MV Ingram's Victorian flights of fancy. 

Now then...let's take a look at something I have been pondering this week. In my post on paranormal video viewing, I mentioned that Most Haunted's investigation of 30 East Drive's 'most violent poltergeist in the world' as one that closely mirrors the Bell haunting. You could have blown me over when I discovered that the MH guys ALSO did their live Halloween investigation there last week. I watched it last night--and you can too, on YouTube. The show is broken down into three parts, but should play back to back without you having to search for the next installment. 

Now, can I say for certain that MH's whole show isn't faked? No. Do I buy into everything that happened? No, of course not. Anytime you evaluate a paranormal show, you have to include a healthy dose of skepticism even if you do believe in the supernatural. I'd be 100% skeptical if I hadn't experienced paranormal events personally. Heck, I'm still waiting for proof on Bigfoot and UFOs and psychics and all that fun stuff. However, that's for me--my own personal belief system is based on what I experienced, and it's not my place to destroy someone else's personal experiences just because I wasn't there. So whenever paranormal activity occurs in front of a camera and a live audience, I take it at face value. 

And it's no secret that I've laughed a lot at Most Haunted in the past. Still do, to be honest, especially when some cadaverous-looking dude starts bellowing incantations to Satan in poorly pronounced Latin.

But I discovered something last night, after watching the show, that set my wheels to turning. 

In the past few years, 30 East Drive has been investigated  by numerous groups. Throw in Most Haunted's two regular episodes, and then add in the live Halloween investigation. Not only did you have the team in the house, but the incredible energy of multiple film crews and, for the live show, a horde of spectators outside on the street. Then figure in the millions of people who watched the event live internationally, thanks to their live stream on YouTube. That's an immense amount of energy, if theories regarding what fuels a haunting are accurate. But with this particular location, there's also something else that is both fascinating and disturbing. 

30 East Drive, in Pontefract, Yorkshire is now a B&B.

You think I'm kidding? Take a look for yourself.  250 pounds per night. Yowsa! At today's exchange rate, that's $376.24 per person, per night. I'd better get a luxury suite for that price, not a semi-detached house furnished in 1970's style furniture that's been beat up by a poltergeist. 

But then, it hit me. 

This poltergeist is not only getting fueled by all these investigations, but now there are casual tourists booking that house every. Single. Night. 

And they wonder why the house is haunted, and the intensity of the haunting has increased. If you take a look at the waiver all guests have to sign, you can pick up some interesting tidbits as well. Keep in mind that this is the entity that allegedly has been flinging knives around. The owner of the property is anxious to exploit the notoriety of the haunting, but is not anxious to take responsibility if some total idiot gets hurt in the course of the night. They also don't want anyone exorcising the entity because their cash cow would dry up. Additional digging on the site reveals that the owner of 30 East Drive is the producer of When The Lights Went Out--a fairly atrocious movie about the haunting from 2012. 

So this house is getting constant and increasing attention, bringing more people within the sphere of the entity and resulting in more and stronger paranormal events. 

Sound familiar?

What's going on around 30 East Drive is the twenty-first century equivalent of what happened on the Bell farm. Remember this from Richard Williams Bell?

This new development (i.e.--the entity beginning to speak) added to the sensation already created. The news spread, and people came in larger numbers, and the great anxiety concerning the mystery prompted many questions in the effort to induce the witch to disclose its own identity and purpose...The excitement in the country increased as the phenomena developed. The fame of the witch had become widely spread, and people came from all quarters to hear the strange and unaccountable voice...the house was open to everyone that came; father and mother gave them the best they had, their horses were fed and no one allowed to go away hungry; many offered pay and urged father to receive it--

There you go, Cursed: The Bell Witch idiots. Proof positive that John Bell was a horrible person that brought the curse upon himself and his family because of his lack of generosity and greed.

--insisting that he could not keep up entertaining so many without pay, but he persistently declined remuneration and not one of the family ever received a cent for entertaining.

We've already theorized that the growing number of spectators gave the entity the power and strength to continuously increase its ability to interact with witnesses. Right now, in Yorkshire, the exact same thing is happening with the same result--and the added advantages of money obviously outweigh any potential risk to visitors with the owner, whose motivation appears to be basic simple greed. So I have to wonder--what comes first?   An entity's stronger displays of power? Or people, instruments, technology, gizmos, and gadgets? 

I'm starting to see a strong case for people. Because IF the Bell Witch could talk from the beginning, why didn't she from the get go? And IF the Black Monk of Pontefract could apport knives out of boxes and throw them at people from the beginning, why didn't he chuck some butcher block innards at the Pritchard family back in the day instead of using marbles? 

I'm thinking that within the anatomy, for lack of a better word, of a haunting, there is a finite point beyond which an entity cannot go UNLESS the energy it feeds upon is substantially increased. So in our curiosity to know more about the other side, we are inadvertently empowering that which we inherently fear. 

So I started looking a little further. On my Scariest Paranormal Investigations playlist, (Note--there's a permanent link to the playlist now at the top of the left sidebar. Check back often; I'm always adding to it!) I've also listed two separate investigations by the Fourman Brothers' Living Dead group at the haunted Monroe house in Hartford City, Illinois. They were brought to the Monroe house as the result of an investigation conducted by DIGGS Paranormal that has more than FORTY videos of multiple investigations at that location. (I've since added one of their truly interesting and scary videos to my playlist) And just doing a swift check of the other groups and videos regarding that location, there is a substantial increase over the past six years from one video in 2009 to well over 50 in 2014-15 and at least ten different paranormal groups. In fact, in one of the Fourman videos, the owner of the house states that he's afraid opening up the house to paranormal research has increased the severity of the haunting--a haunting that most people consider to be demonic in nature. 

It would be interesting to conduct a serious study of haunted locations to see if investigations or tourism actually increase paranormal activity, either in frequency or intensity. In fact, I'm kind of seriously considering doing just that once the Bell Witch haunting series is completed. I was planning to consult a few paranormal experts in regards to this project, but I may give that a whirl earlier than expected. There are a lot of folks out there that contact paranormal groups when something in their house is scaring them. 

It would probably be important to them to find out that what they think is the cure is actually making their paranormal problems worse--and capable of much, much more dangerous things.