Sirrine House

I'm hoping these are still holding peoples' interest here. I try to space out the experiences I have, just so each gets its own recognition. And let me know if these are a good fit anyway, since I have a great respect for the help people receive from this community when they need it.

This year I had the opportunity to go with a good friend of mine on a tour of historic homes and landmarks in my hometown. I'd been hoping to go for years, though this tour was second to the haunted homes tour done in October. Still, this was quite a treat as many people were willing to open their homes to curious and interested people, and there were a few exceptionally old locations belonging to the town museum that would only be open for tours this one day a year.

I am an empath, and this is something I've had a hard time accepting. I feel the presence of spirits, often with their moods, emotions, and occasionally a message. More rarely I receive an impression of gender, their lifetime, and age they project. These encounters affect me physically, and because of that I often hesitate to join these tours as interesting as they are.

There were several homes on the tour, but only a handful had any activity. This is one of the active locations.

The Sirrine House (completely restored 1890s home):

This location, the Sirrine House, is one of the more famous historic properties in Mesa. It's not super well-visited since they closed it for tours except for one day a year... The historic homes tour. So this, and the other properties I share about, came from that one day of touring. For the best context, this is the information provided from the Mesa Register of Historic Homes about the Sirrine House:

"Built in the spring of 1896 as the residence of Joel E. Sirrine and his wife, Caroline Hanna Simkins Sirrine. They occupied the house until about 1905. During that time Sirrine worked as an engineer for the Mesa Cooperative Milling Company which was owned by George W. And William L. Sirrine. Joel E. Sirrine came to Mesa in 1878 as a boy. His father, George W. Sirrine, was head of one of the "four founding families of Mesa." The best local example of a Vernacular type house built in the Queen Anne Cottage Style. Exemplary of the 19th Century residential development of the Mesa Townsite. The Sirrine house was purchased and renovated by the City of Mesa and is part of the Arizona Museum of Natural History. This house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 11, 1995."

That out of the way, this place is really neat. It's tiny on the inside, with one main sitting room, a bedroom, and the kitchen. The porch would have been screened in, and there were a couple of outbuildings when it was still an intact family property.

On these annual tours, the house gets spiffed up with some props to help the visitors imagine what the place was like when it was lived in. The impression I got as I first stepped into the property was of being watched. While for many people, this feeling might be creepy, I tend to feel the emotion behind the "watching". I wasn't unnerved since the watching felt like an interested peering-down from above, like when kids watch an ant farm. No, that's not quite it. I think a better way to describe this would be saying that the spirits of the house had withdrawn a few levels away from the bustle of the visitors in order to observe from a distance.

They were still there. I knew that from the knot that grew in my chest at my collarbone, and the heat that rises around my face and neck when there's activity around me. Thankfully, they didn't seem at all threatened, neither were they threatening. So I enjoyed the tour, especially as I found an excellent reason for why the spirits might be glad to stay.

The gentleman stationed in the front room to provide information told us that while the furniture was not authentic to the house, it was period. He also described to us how, during restoration, the paint layers and wallpaper of the walls had been carefully stripped until they arrived at the earliest layers. These had been replicated by custom paper and paint companies to replicate the exact shades and patterns that decorated the house at the time of its building. A picture on the wall, an original wedding photo of Joel and Caroline, donated by their descendants, had a very positive feeling attached to it which always helps to shape the spirit atmosphere of a location.

It was the tiny and crowded kitchen that had the most activity to it, mainly because of the energy tied to the collection of items that had belonged to the property. There was a storage bin, designed and built by Joel Sirrine's own hands, on display in the kitchen, as well as several small glass containers found on the property.

Other items were props, but they were luxuries of the period, and I was surprised to feel a great pride surrounding them. The representative giving information about the items in the kitchen said the Sirrines would never have owned these expensive things, so I didn't think these feelings could be from the same spirit. But it was the same kind of "wavelength", for lack of a better word, and that typically indicates emotions from the same spirit or group of spirits. I guess Caroline, or another spirit, was more than happy to have such fancy things in their home whether or not they owned them in life.

If I could sum up the spirit energy there, I would have to say it felt as if the inhabitants sat back while their home was filled with the living, knowing that it would mark another year of peaceful solitude with only the building keepers for company.