From VOICES: Good Spirits by Libby Tucker

Volume 34
Fall-Winter
2008

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The Pink House’s long oral history of haunting has intrigued adults and scared children, including a few who have become students of mine at Binghamton University, but the house’s reputation does not extend beyond New York State.

Libby Tucker teaches folklore at Binghamton University. Her book, Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), investigates college ghost stories. Her most recent book is Children’s Folklore: A Handbook (Westport: Greenwood, 2008).

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Those of us who enjoy watching scary movies know that a certain kind of haunted house epitomizes horror. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, for example, the eerie, ornate mansion possessed by children’s spirits seems to cause the central character’s death. Even larger and stranger than Hill House, the mansion in Stephen King’s Rose Red seems to like nothing better than killing people in various horrible ways. Houses like these take starring roles in films, becoming both agents of evil and settings for characters’ actions.

Most haunted houses in New York do not quite rise to “house of horror” status. Kids in my neighborhood in Vestal, for example, swap stories each fall about a certain haunted house. Up on a hill at the top of Cherry Lane, this house seems dark and strange. Grass grows tall there, obscuring the entrance so that passersby cannot see anyone going in or out. Whoever lives in this house never comes down for garage sales or other neighborhood events. Could the house be haunted? Early in October, when darkness falls early and the air grows cold, stories about our haunted house start to circulate. While this dwelling comes nowhere near the horror quotient of Hill House and Rose Red, it gives kids a good scare on Halloween.

Most stories about haunted houses qualify as local legends. Many neighborhood residents, especially preteens and teenagers, like to hear about the history of houses where something unusual has happened. A case in point is the Pink House in Wellsville, New York. In Things That Go Bump in the Night (1959), Louis C. Jones traces the legends associated with Wellsville’s pink Victorian mansion. Most of these legends describe the suicide of the mansion owner’s daughter. Spurned by the man she loves, who has married her sister, this miserable young woman drowns herself in a millpond or fountain on the mansion’s grounds. In some variants, the woman’s ghost lures her little niece into the fountain, where the child loses her life. Recent narrators on the Internet tell a simpler story about a girl or young woman who drowns in the Pink House’s fountain and then haunts the fountain as a playful ghost. Wellsville historians identify the woman who committed suicide at the Pink House in 1857 as Frances Farnum, known as “Pauline” in a poem by Hanford Lennox Gordon.

The Pink House’s long oral history of haunting has intrigued adults and scared children, including a few who have become students of mine at Binghamton University, but the house’s reputation does not extend beyond New York State. No film crews arrive on Halloween to track the Pink House’s latest developments. Like most houses with a reputation for being haunted, this one excites local interest but gets little attention on a grander scale. Some houses inspire legends that appear from time to time in local papers. An imposing gray-and-white Victorian mansion in Binghamton, for example, allegedly has a ghost that carries buckets of coal upstairs late at night. Some residents of Johnson City say that if you stand outside a certain stone house late at night, you can hear spectral music played by the ghost of a little girl. Legends about these two houses have thrilled and amused local residents without becoming well known outside their immediate regions.

In contrast to these local hauntings, a private home on the south shore of Long Island in Amityville has become a notorious house of horror. This house’s history is so well known that I hardly need to summarize it here. Jay Anson’s 1977 book The Amityville Horror claimed to document paranormal events that took place after George and Kathy Lutz moved into a Dutch colonial house at 112 Ocean Avenue. After the book’s publication, the 1979 film of the same title caused a local and national furor. While some people insisted that the book and movie were based on a hoax, others believed that paranormal events had taken place in the house. The presence of ghosts was debatable, but it was well known that Ronald DeFeo, Jr. had shot six members of his family a little more than a year before the Lutz family moved in. Since Anson’s book and the movie attributed the haunting to the ghosts of an actual murderer and his victims, that kernel of truth encouraged belief.

Synonyms for the word “horror” include “revulsion” and “fear.” Both of these terms apply to people’s reactions to the DeFeo murder, which transformed a family’s home into a place of premature death. “Revulsion” also describes many New Yorkers’ response to the public frenzy that followed the first Amityville book, the movie, and the many subsequent books and movies on the same subject. Tourists caused endless inconvenience for residents of the house at 112 Ocean Avenue, who altered the house’s facade and changed its address to deter unwanted visitors. Since the original movie was filmed in a different house at 18 Brooks Road in Toms River, New Jersey, that house’s residents also had to deal with many unwanted intrusions. They painted the house blue, changed its position in relation to the river, and made other changes to discourage eager ghost hunters.

Some Amityville legend tellers attribute the haunting of 112 Ocean Avenue to angry spirits of Native Americans, whose graveyard was disturbed for the house’s construction. One narrator makes the point that the house “did not want to be destroyed” after completion of the first movie, because it had “unfinished business.” That kind of business does not sound good. It is just as well that most haunted houses simply stand on their plots of land and take no roles in dramas of their own.

Libby Tucker’s Good Spirits column was published in Voices Vol. 34, Fall-Winter 2008. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.