ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS

7. HAUNTED MANSION

★ Leonard ★

There are many beautiful Victorian-era houses in Weatherford. There are rumors that one of the most beautiful homes is haunted. That house was my aunt's house.

Beth was courageous since she was little, and she wanted to find out if the tale was true. So one night, she wanted to come along to sleepover at my aunt's house on South Lamar Street. I called her to say hello and made up a story that I needed to stay over at her home and bring my best friend for a sleepover. We were still in fourth grade at elementary school.

Aunt Betty wasn't suspicious about me asking her to stay over. She was delighted to have us for the night. So we rode our bicycles to the Baker mansion. Bianco followed us as usual. It was a large, beautiful house, and the wooden structure smelt newly painted in light gray. The rumor about a haunted house had been around for some decades.

The ghost story started with Mr. J.D. Baker was a very successful businessman in the merchandising business at the end of the nineteenth century. He owned several shops in the Weatherford area.

In 1894, the family began construction on a beautiful, six-thousand-square-foot Victorian home on South Lamar Street. The Bakers had four children: Charles, Harry, Mary, and Ethel. Ethel died at the age of twelve—the first family tragedy.

Then Mr. Baker passed away on Easter Sunday in 1899 during the most successful year of his life in his business. He was never able to see the completion of his beautiful house.

In 1908, another tragedy struck the family. Charles Baker was a buyer for the Baker Company. In the early spring of the same year, he embarked on a buying trip for the stores. No one saw him after leaving San Francisco on the way to Seattle.

He mysteriously disappeared and was never seen nor heard from again. The family posted a five-thousand-dollar reward for his body, dead or alive, guaranteed by the First National Bank of Weatherford. To no avail, no word of Charles came.

The fourth misfortune struck the Bakers soon after Charles' disappearance. His brother, Harry, was on a business trip to Chicago and tragically died from a ruptured appendix.

The last of the Baker children, Mary, married and moved to Oklahoma City. Mrs. Baker moved in with her daughter, and Mr. and Mrs. George Fant eventually bought the house in the early '40s. Nothing happened out of the ordinary when they moved in. When their teenage niece came to visit, some strange things started to occur.

In the early 1940s, their niece visited the mansion during World War II when she was fourteen years old. When she was sleeping in the eastern bedroom, she heard someone walking down the small hall and coming toward her. She was so afraid but mustered the nerve to open her eyes.

Someone was standing at the foot of the bed. She screamed loud enough to wake everyone up, and the figure disappeared into thin air. She didn't go back to the mansion for a long time until the mid-1960s.

This time, she was in the second-floor bedroom when she heard a loud wailing or moaning. The cries emanated from the area close to the dining room. The wailing went on for at least five minutes. After the wailing stopped, she went back to her room and locked the door because she was scared to death.

The next morning, a maid found a dead bat between the dining room and the hallway exactly where she heard the wailing the night before.

One day in the mid-60s, she talked to the elderly owner of a boutique in Weatherford square. The elderly owner mentioned the story she heard from her aunt. The latter attended the party at Baker Mansion sometime during the 1920s.

At the party, a loud noise was heard from a large armoire that belonged to Charles Baker. Then the door of the armoire slowly opened, and an old starched collar fell out, rolled down the hallway, and came to a stop exactly where she found the dead bat the other day.

Creepy events continued to happen after she and her husband moved to the house in the 70s. When she was alone sleeping in their bedroom upstairs, she suddenly woke up and heard something on the stairs.

When the dogs started to howl out in the garden, she heard footsteps entering her bedroom. She was so terrified that she kept her eyes closed. The footsteps approached the bed; then, she felt a hand gently touching her shoulder.

She courageously opened her eyes and jumped up to see who touched her shoulder, but nothing was there. It happened to her at least six or seven times while they lived in the house.

The worst incident of all happened one night around 1976. One of the Texas spring storms blew in with violent winds, rain, hail, lightning, and thunder. There was no electricity in the house.

She was upstairs in the bedroom alone when she heard loud pounding from the hallway's basement door. At first, she tried to convince herself that the wind was causing the door to rattle. But she knew deep down that someone was furiously pounding on the door from the basement.

So she ran downstairs, and the second she passed the basement door, the pounding stopped. She kept running toward the screen door. When she was about to leave the house, the pounding started again and became louder and angrier than ever. She was never comfortable also in the place.

A year later, she and her husband divorced, and she left the house for good. She truly believed that it was Charles Baker's ghost, and he didn't like her presence in the place. This ghost story has been one of the deepest mysteries in Weatherford.