3 St. Louis homeowners tell stories of hauntings. 'A blanket of energy around me.'

Luann Denten is standing by a fireplace in Soulard. It's in an old house, called Trapper Cottage, built before the street was there, before the Civil War, before engineers first tried to tame the Mississippi.

Homeowner Les Fields uncovered the fireplace when he moved into the house nine years ago. It had been hidden behind drywall where it had started to crumble. He'd rebuilt it.

"This is original," Denten says. She's talking about a small shaved-down piece of wood mortared into the fireplace, an easy-to-miss detail.

Fields agrees. There are three such pieces of wood that he preserved. He thinks they were put in to hold up a mantle.

"But this isn't original," she says, pointing to one of the orange bricks. Fields confirms its not. He'd filled in missing bricks from a pallet, picking the most faded orange ones he could find to match the originals.

Denten stands there for a moment, touching the worn piece of wood. "I see the original man who built the place," she says. "Really, he wasn't a trapper. He was a farmer."

Denten keeps her eyes closed, her head tilted slightly downward. She's a medium, she says. She became one after a near-death experience in middle age. Suddenly she saw shadows come alive and could hear what the dead wanted us to know. Now, she says she's constantly visited by lost loved ones or builders of 200-year-old homes or the spirits that, for whatever reason, linger.

Trapper Cottage is one of St. Louis' most haunted homes, she says. It's filled with previous residents and people who may have died there or nearby when the home was an unlicensed club at the turn of the 20th century.

"A lot of people don't realize that St. Louis is a power spot," Denten says. "It is one of the great power spots on the face of the Earth. It is the convergence of the great waters. The two longest rivers in North America converge here."

Ghosts come here, too, she says. And not just to the famous haunted houses.

The Lemp family's gothic tale of suicide, bad marriages, divorce and possible murder entertains visitors along with regular dinner-theater shows. But there are many people in St. Louis living in homes they think are haunted.

Fields is one of them. He noticed something was strange as soon as he moved into Trapper Cottage in the 800 block of Allen Avenue.

"I don't claim to have the gift or whatever you want to call it," he says. But "I feel it as a blanket of energy around me, like the walls are talking, and I don't know what they're saying."

We talked to three people who say their homes are haunted. Some were previously skeptics, others ready to embrace the gothic romance of it. But it was a problem as real to them as mice in the kitchen, and they all hired energy clearers, paranormal investigators or even priests to help subdue their ghosts.

They now reside in a sometimes uneasy peace with the paranormal.

A cry in the night

It started with running water.

Blaire Harrington heard water running in the Tower Grove South house she'd recently moved into with her wife and young son.

The Seattle natives had moved here because Harrington's wife, Elizabeth Goldfinger, had gotten transferred by Anheuser-Busch. They'd found their house pretty quickly in 2022, fallen in love and moved in.

Harrington was asleep in bed but woke up due to the noise. She thought her wife was in the bathroom, but when she looked over, her wife was still in bed.

"But my dogs weren't barking, so I was like, 'Well, I don't think it's anyone. I'm just going to go back to sleep.'"

Harrington is not a big believer in ghosts, though she did have a strange encounter back in California that she can't explain except as paranormal.

A young woman approached her and some friends and asked to use one of their phones. Everyone in the group was hesitant. "It was the early aughts. You had phone plans, it was different back then," Harrington says.

The young woman grew hysterical and shouted at them that she just needed to make a call, and then ran off. Harrington ran after her, and "she disappeared," Harrington says. "It was crazy how quickly it happened. She was maybe 20 feet ahead of me, turned a corner and when I got to that corner there was no sign of her. It was silent."

Harrington was open to the paranormal existing, but she didn't immediately leap to the conclusion that she had a ghost after hearing the running water.

Her then 3-year-old son, though, said that a man and woman were in his room. He became scared to go to sleep. Harrington remembers tucking in her son, and he'd put all of his rocks around the bed to create a circle of protection for himself.

"No one had told him to do that," Harrington says.

The painter that they'd hired to brighten up the place after they moved in said that she kept thinking someone was there and hearing noises. She got so spooked, she called her husband to keep her company.

Harrington's mother-in-law even says she encountered the ghosts. While she was upstairs in a guest bedroom folding laundry, she had a conversation with her daughter, who she had felt come up behind her. But Goldfinger was still downstairs.

Mostly prompted by worries about their son, Harrington and Goldfinger asked their real estate agent for the name of an energy clearer.

"He definitely felt a man, especially in one room of our house. He's like 'Yeah, I think a really abusive guy lived here and he died. I think he was an alcoholic.'" He also felt the presence of a woman mostly downstairs.

It's unclear who that man would have been. The energy clearer, who burned sage and incense and had Harrington and her family leave the house while he smoked out the spirits, didn't provide names.

One thing is clear though, a 1964 newspaper report says that a woman named Frances Morrissey died there. She fell off the balcony on the second floor while it was being repaired and was found on the sidewalk below. She was 75.

Her family had lived in the house for generations. An Edward Morrissey died there in 1932, and the address was listed as belonging to his son. His wife, Barbara, also was listed as living there when she died in 1939. They had a daughter named Frances.

After the energy clearer came, Harrington says the spirits settled down. Though unusual things are still happening.

Since moving in, she and her wife have added to their family, and Harrington takes care of the baby at night from the guest room, which is between the baby's room and her young son's room. At one point, she was falling asleep, and she heard her oldest son shout, "MOM!"

She bolted out of bed and ran into the room only to find him fast asleep.

"Maybe it's the spirit letting me know my son needs me, or something," she says. "That's how I'm interpreting it."

A priest clears the way

Chris Andoe also lives in Tower Grove South in Grey Fox Hills, so termed because it's near the gay bar Grey Fox Pub.

He moved in with his husband, Kage Black, in 2018 and the two almost immediately had an experience with the paranormal when Black saw a woman in black wander through the house. Andoe says he also saw a shadow pass by while he was in the shower around the same time.

Unlike Harrington, who says that the previous owners of her house had never experienced any ghost activity, Andoe says that the previous owners knew that the house was haunted.

Friend Shawn Taylor Browning said he was there at dinner parties with the previous owners and saw shadows passing by and felt something move blankets and crawl into bed with him.

But Andoe, a southerner who has written for publications around town including the now-defunct Riverfront Times and St. Louis Magazine, loves a good story.

"I've had a lot of experiences in my life — I'm aware of ghosts," Andoe says. "We weren't alarmed for a long time, because the idea of ghosts wasn't itself scary."

He wrote a lot about the experience in his book "House of Villadiva," particularly about his friend Eron Mazza, a psychic who lived with Black and Andoe and did card readings at the house in 2020.

"We noticed an increase in activity. A lot of times it was someone peeking around the corner. It was really quick, but it was constant for 7 to 8 hours afterward."

It's not immediately clear why the house would be haunted. One of its earliest tenants in 1915, was George Witsma, a real-estate broker who seemed to sell half of St. Louis their homes. By the 1930s, he lived in Ladue and operated his business out of American Theater.

After him, Mary Preusser and her husband, William, lived at the house before she died in 1935 and he followed six years later.

But Andoe says that before there was a shopping mall nearby, there was a monastery and maybe that is what kicked up the paranormal. Whatever the reason, after Mazza began the readings, the house became like "Grand Central Station," according to Andoe.

"Sitting at the dining room table, we heard a bang on the wooden front door," he says. "When we investigated, not only was nobody there, the storm door was locked." He says they heard something being dragged across the basement door and the dogs would bark at nothing.

Finally, he and Black had a priest, Marek Bozek, with St. Stanislaus, come out to exorcize the house. He blessed each room with holy water. Andoe says that the activity decreased dramatically.

"We still have some experiences," he says. "Like someone climbing the stairs or shadowy figures that the dogs snarl at."

Back at Trapper Cottage

Trapper Cottage doesn't look like the other houses in Soulard. Set back from the street with a yard, it also seems to be sitting sideways.

The house was built between 1810 and 1830 in the French Creole style. While the first story was made of bricks, the second was done in the "briquette-entre-poteaux" style, which used timber and stucco for the walls.

Unfortunately, the house fell into disrepair and was slated for demolition before its historical significance drew calls in the 1990s for it to be preserved.

Now, it's a bit unusual, with access to the second story from an outside staircase and multiple front doors. It doesn't look like a haunted house from the movies.

But with Denten in the house, spirits are getting stirred up. Even for the skeptical, there are strange things going on. Salem, Fields' black cat, is pacing around, rubbing up against everyone's legs, looking skittish.

Fields also has a camera outside aimed at his front yard and the street. In the camera, orbs are floating around. Are they bugs? The footage is in black and white, but the orbs are nearly diaphanous circles materializing and shooting out of frame in a straight line. Definitely not dust.

It could be bugs, but it's a lot of activity for a cool October night in a yard that only has a few dim lights along the front path.

"The outhouse was there by the fence," Denten says, pointing to a corner in the upper right side of the yard near the street. She points out that people used lye to help with the smell and dissolve the waste in the outhouse.

"Outhouses were the garbage disposal of the day," she says. Many of the orbs are originating from that corner.

"It's not usually like this," homeowner Fields says.

When he first moved in, he says the energy was "very angry, especially downstairs." It was enough to get him to call the Paranormal Society to investigate. Denten was there and says she was thrown against a wall during the investigation. The team had to turn off their instruments after a while and turn the lights back on because the spirits were getting so strong.

But after Fields put work into the house to fully restore it, "it's more of like a welcoming energy to me," he says.

His only instance of possibly interacting with a spirit is that he once had a dream that someone was in his bedroom with him, and he felt the covers tighten around his feet. Denten says that's what happens when someone sits on your bed.

This house has seen a lot. Now, it's a single family home, but it has been many things, including a multi-family home with upward of 14 residents.

"This area was ground zero for the Civil War," Denten says. "There were both Confederate and Union encampments here, and they were literally fighting in the streets and parading through the streets."

Union Gen. Nathaniel Lyon even dressed as a woman to sneak across town and check out the other side's forces.

But death alone is not enough to get an entity (let alone several) in your home, Denten says.

"There's a whole lot of really old houses in the area, and a lot of them might possess an essence, but they don't have an actual entity," Denten says.

Spirits need to feel an attachment to a place, Denten says, which is why so many ghosts here are former residents.

After touching the fireplace, Denten says she gets messages from Robert Cook, aka "Bubbles" a former resident who worked at Clementines and the Bastille. In the bathroom there is a soldier from the Civil War. In the tiny basement, Denten gets disjointed visions, an act of violence, a hat, sadness.

By the end, her face is soaked with tears. She has a headache and she's freezing cold.

The coldness is a sign that the spirits are there. They're touching you. They want something.

Every bit of it could be written off by skeptics. There's nothing concrete here, despite Denten mentioning a painting that meant something to "Bubbles" and Fields confirming that a friend of "Bubbles" had given him a drawing of this house. Denten even knew that it was hanging in the stairwell.

But there is a cold that lingers. It's not the cold of the chilly October evening that's chased away by a hoodie. Instead, it's in one spot, on your arm or your hand, or your neck. Denten's palm is cold, but her fingertips are warm. A spot on your arm that just won't warm up.

It's enough to make you wonder as the bells toll somewhat ominously at Saints Paul and Peters Church nearby.

Fields sums it up best. "I didn't believe in ghosts till I moved into this house."

Stay up-to-date on what's happening Receive the latest in local entertainment news in your inbox weekly!