North Manchester-Haunted Houses -At 104 East 2nd Street there is a big brick house that has apartments in it. We had the entire house as we had a big family. It was months before we discovered it had a second attic, behind a wall in the upstairs kitchen. It joined the upper attic by a passageway. I have seen at least two ghosts at this house and on frequent occasions.
The main apparition is a tall, gangly man, dressed either in period clothing from the 1800's or like the Peabody/Amish ghost. I often wonder if it is not the same being. At least five times that I recall I have seen him and my friends have had a show from him also. He will walk right past you and discount you as anything out of the ordinary. People near me have joked "Maybe he thinks you are the ghost and he is afraid to look at you".
Once, as a friend of mine and I were sitting outside of my house, a shadowy outline of him stood in the window upstairs. I said nothing. I asked my friend if he wanted to go uptown and he answered "Yeah, as long as you don't say anything about that ghost in the window", I said "Oh, you saw that, huh?". We had just left the house, we both knew there was nobody inside.
About a week later that friend and his sister and I were walking late at night. We were going towards their house when we saw that same ghost walking up the steps and on to the porch, heading for the door. We were right behind him going in their front door but there was nobody there when we got inside. We had told her about my ghost before and asked her "Now do you believe?". The answer was yes.
The second known apparition was that of a young, red headed boy that accompanied the other ghost coming down the outside basement steps. If you drive through the alley behind the house, it has those Amityville House kind of eyes. (I always say "that's what you get for building houses with faces"). There were always the classic symptoms of a haunt there like doors shutting on you as you opened them.
The second house I lived at is at 207 West 4th Street. It appears to be the same gangly, Amish looking man I see here. You could not walk the upstairs hallway without shuddering, thinking something was just about to make itself known to you. Doors would open and shut, sometimes in your face as you tried to enter a room. Inanimate objects seemed to take life. Heavy footsteps are heard often from upstairs when nobody is there and in the living room when there is nobody in it. Pictures have fallen off of the walls and landed quite a distance from where they were hung.
I remember a time when a bunch of us were playing cards in the dining room. There came a noise above us that sounded like a soldier marching in his boots. My brother said "Dang your kids are making an awful racket up there" to which I replied "Ummmm, there's nobody here but us". Besides, the way the house is built we were under a flat spot that is the ceiling of the dining room and the slope in the roof. It was impossible for anyone to be walking there. There was an attic space but no access to it.
My sister swears the spirit of our mother lives on in the house. She said she woke up one night while visiting us and a picture of our mother seemed to float across the room and land beside her bed. She could not say she was 100% positive it happened like that, just waking from a sound sleep.
My daughter, when she was an infant, was playing on the floor between the front door and the stairway that leads upstairs. Her focus shifted from her toys to the front door and her head seemed to follow someone walking. She had to reposition herself to crane her neck to see someone behind her and her gaze followed around and all the way up the stairs, crouching to see around the landing and the turn. She stared for a brief second as if the person walked around the turn of the stairs and could no longer be seen and looked at me with a slightly puzzled look, pointed her finger up the stairs and said "Mamaw". My mother died four years before my daughter was born.
An ex girlfriend was in the kitchen and, looking pale as a ghost herself, hustled into the living room and told me she heard a voice in the kitchen. Once, the bathroom door refused to let her out. We left the house later and when we returned, one of the bushes grabbed onto her. In a semi panic she bolted through the front door. I had an old candy dish that was a turtle with a hinged shell and when you pressed the head, the shell opened. As she passed the turtle, it's shell opened up and after a few "I rebuke thees" she vowed never to step foot in that house again, and she didn't.
The ghost got into a stomping fit in my living room when I was on the phone with her and she asked, knowing the answer, "is that him?". She could hear it over the phone. Across the street, the neighbors house burned to the ground. Two houses down, another neighbors house befell the same fate. The wood working factory cattycorner from me went up like kindling. Less than one month after I moved out of the house it too, caught fire.
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