Stories of Walton Manor

Below here I will try to recall several events that happened when my family purchased, and then moved into Walton Manor. You see Walton Manor was haunted. Not your average hear a rattle or shuffled footsteps haunted, but full-blown scare the panties off of you haunted. So many strange things happened in that house, that things most people would be freaked out about seemed commonplace. The first short story will cover our move to the house, and the first encounter with the supernatural. Ill then continue with other stories. Remember; ill try to retell these as precisely as possible, but this was 12-15 years ago. So some of the details may be sketchy. All of these stories are true. Nothing has been made up or sensationalized. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, the stories included are interesting reads.

Welcome to Walton Manor

My mother and stepfather bought an old Victorian style home when I was 15 years old. To call it a fixer upper would have been generous. The previous owners must have thought they could change this house into a garbage dump. And i am being serious about this. When we first moved in, there was garbage and refuse piled almost knee deep in every room in the house. Some walls were torn out, outside the paint was cracking, and there was a horrible stench throughout the house. We never did find out what had brought them to allow this magnificent old house to come to this state.

But anyway, let me continue on with the story. This house was located near a small town known as Petersburg Kentucky. The house, we came to find out, was built in 1859. It was used as a medical stopping post for the Civil war. Needless to say hundreds of soldiers died in this house, and on the grounds surrounding it. It was an impressively large Victorian home, complete with slave quarters and out buildings. During the first year we lived there, we managed to clean up all of the garbage, and fix a lot of the structural damage. We even managed to repair the majority of the damage to the outside of the house, so from there it looked to be in decent shape. The total restoration process took over 5 years, and that was with a full crew working on it.

The first time anything strange happened in the house, happened to my younger brother Keith. Keith is 3 years younger than I am, so at the time he was around 12. He was upstairs in his bedroom getting ready for dinner, while the rest of the family were in the living room downstairs watching television. During a particularly quiet moment, my stepfather told us to be silent, then muted the TV. We could hear my brother upstairs carrying on a conversation with someone. We could only hear his voice, but it was obvious he was answering someone's questions.

My stepfather called for him to come downstairs. Keith came down, but something strange had happened, that was for sure. He had a fairly pale pallor about him, and he walked very slowly, almost zombie like. When we asked him what was wrong, he simply replied "We have a ghost in our house, and his name is Willy". After repeated attempts at extracting more information from him, we finally gave up and went to sleep. The next day is when it all started, in spades.

The door chimes out of time

My first direct encounter with anything strange was somewhat subtle, but unnerving nonetheless. My mother and I were working in the kitchen trying to put up new wallpaper when we heard the front door chimes ringing. The ring was urgent, and constant. Like someone was mashing the bell ringer outside frantically. Now the door chimes on this house resembled the pipes on a pipe organ. The tubes were made of brass, and the smallest one being 2 feet in length. The longest was a little over 5 feet in length.

We both dropped what we were doing, and ran toward the front door. The urgency of the tone was unmistakable and we both feared something was wrong. As I approached the front door, I noticed that my mom had stopped, and was just staring blankly at the front door. That's when I remembered something. When we first moved into the house over a year ago, my stepfather had removed the doorbell chimes and discarded them because they no longer worked. He had said he would replace them with a new modern doorbell, but had never gotten around to it.  As soon as we got to the front door, the chimes stopped.

History of the house

After the chimes incident, my mother decided to do a little research on the house, in an attempt to find out just exactly what was going on. She researched it at the local archives in the town hall, and at the local historical society. That's when she uncovered some interesting facts. The house was originally built by William Walton, an Ohio Riverboat captain. He was also a very rich man, and owned all of the land from where this house was built, all the way to the banks of the river. He built the house for his family that consisted of a wife and two children.

Not a lot was known about him other than that, but some old papers refer to his wife and children dying mysteriously. There was no way we could research it farther than that. That's when it struck us. William, Willy? There was no way my 12 year old brother could have possibly known that the original owner of the houses name was William. That's when the pieces started falling together.

As I said before, the house was used as a medical stopping point during the Civil war. In the back of the house was a fairly large outbuilding that had 2 entrances, one on each end. My mom said it was slave quarters. Needless to say I was 15 years old, and had never seen slave quarters before. There was something really strange and sad about this building. You couldn't go into this building and not be sad, there was a real feeling of loss and regret that just permeated the entire building. I couldn't force myself to go in there at night, it was just too much to handle.

The hidden room

Upstairs of the house there were 4 bedrooms (yes it was a huge has, 2 baths and 5 bedrooms), one for me, one for my sister, one for my little brother, and one vacant. When we first choose rooms, it seemed random to me, but as I thought about it, it seems now that it wasn't so random after all. The one room no one chose, seemed stranger than the other rooms. It was always dark, and it was a very uninviting room. It had dark tan walls that almost looked like flesh, and the windows were nailed shut for some reason. There was only one small closet in the room, and it had no lights in it.

One of the stranger things about the house was that it had a steepled roof, but no attic that we could find. After extensive research we found the entrance to the attic in that small closet in what came to be known as the Flesh room. We decided to search the attic, just encase any valuable antiques had been left by previous occupants. After getting a flashlight and a ladder, my friend Gary and I ascended to the attic.

The attic was huge, over 9 feet high, and the floor of it was hardwood. Its almost as if they had made another bedroom out of it. But here was the biggest mystery of the house. The attic was only about 5 feet wide, then ended in a brick wall that went from floor to ceiling and wall-to-wall. The strange thing was that the brick looked very new. Its almost as if the wall was built within the last 20 or so years. We asked my mom if we could tear the wall down, but for some reason she refused. It was obvious that it wasn't there for structural integrity. Unfortunately due to circumstances you?ll soon find out about, we never did find out what was behind that wall.

The moving fan

My friend Scott and I were sleeping in my room. He was crashing on the floor, and I was in my bed. It was an excruciatingly hot August night, and the house had no air conditioning. We were alone in the house, because my parents were away visiting relatives. We brought out all of the fans in the house and blasted ourselves with them to combat the heat. We had 3 fans, all floor fans, set on high. Sometime during the night I awoke covered in sweat. I looked over, and Scott was tossing and turning, obviously in a lot of discomfort. That's when I realized the fans were gone.

I woke Scott up, and we started the search. I found one fan, with the cord neatly wrapped around it, stuffed in the back of my moms closet downstairs. The second one we found in the closet of the Flesh room, once again neatly wrapped up. We couldn't find the third one. After promising an already freaked out Scott that I didn't do it, he promptly got in his car and left. He never spent the night there again. About a month later, I was feeding our horses and had to go into the slave quarters for some feed. I found the third fan in there, wrapped neatly in a corner.

The dirt covered key

We had a dog-named Fancy. She was a sweet dog, a German wirehaired pointer. Very timid, but also very loving. My mother and stepfather were getting ready to go visit my grandmother in Corbin Kentucky. It was the end of January and we had almost a foot of snow on the ground. My step dad Gareth put on his parka, shoved his hands in his pocket getting ready to walk the dog. After about 5 minutes outside Fancy freaked out and almost broke her leash trying to get back into the house.

Gareth brought her back in and hung his coat on the rack. Fancy immediately calmed down and everything seemed fine. About an hour later they were getting everything ready to pack up. Gareth put his parka back on, and was heading for the door when he stopped dead in his tracks. He slowly removed his hands from the pockets of his parka, and his hands were covered in fresh dirt. Completely confused, my mother and father sifted through the pockets.

His left pocket was filled to the brim with fresh earth, and buried in the middle was a key. It looked like a skeleton key, the type that was on the locks of really old houses. It was freezing outside, and the ground was rock hard. To this day, we have no clue what that key was for, or why it appeared in his pocket.

The Pointing Rifle

Gareth, my stepfather, is an avid gun collector. He mostly collects rifles. One of his pride and joys is a circa 1890 flintlock rifle. All of his guns at that time were mounted over the main fireplace in the living room. Don't worry, none of them were loaded, and both my brother and myself knew not to touch them on pain of death. We were all getting packed up and ready to leave for a local restaurant. After getting everyone together in the living room, we decided who all goes in which cars (I have 10 stepbrothers and sisters, that didn't live with us at the time but were visiting), and headed out the door.

But unfortunately we had forgotten to let the dog out. Keith jumped out to let Fancy loose. He came back to the car screaming for his dad. We both jumped out of the car and came running. We heard his frantic screams coming from the living room. When we got there, what I saw floored me. All of his rifles had been taken off of the mantle, and laid on the floor in the shape of an arrow. There were 10 in all. The only one to go into the house was Keith, and he was way to small to be able to reach any of them. The arrow was pointing toward the back staircase that led directly up to the Flesh room.

The girl in the well

In the front of the house there is an old well that had been blocked by the previous owners. My friend Brandon and I were messing around near it, and we pulled the cover off. I was 17 at the time. One look inside the well and we knew we had made a mistake. There was just something wrong with it. I couldn't put my finger on it then, and its even harder now.

As we looked into the well, I was overcome with the thought of a little girl. I turned to Brandon and said "Why am I thinking of a little girl?" He stared at me blankly and said "With blonde hair". As if on queue, we both said aloud "In a blue dress!" After 30 seconds of silence, we cover the well and left. Brandon never stayed at my house again. I lost more friends that way J.

Burning down the house

Many other things happened in that old house during the years we lived there, but they became so numerous that eventually we became completely comfortable with them. We finally just started saying "Willie did it". It became our scapegoat. But then came the night ill never forget. I was 18, and my mom and step dad were going out of town. Keith was with his real mom, and my sister was away at college. After my parents left, I received a call from a friend who wanted me to go out partying with him. Unfortunately I had to decline because I was house sitting. Totally bummed, I sat down for a night of pro wrestling and popcorn.

Just then one of my older stepbrothers Mike showed up. He was the consummate drifter who wandered in and out of town. He was looking for a place to crash, and I was looking for an excuse to go partying. So I called my mom and let her know that Mike was watching the house. I then headed out the door. The next morning I came home and was greeted by 4 fire trucks, 3 police cars, 2 news vans, and a black hole where our house use to be.

Mike had apparently gotten a call from an old girlfriend and had left for the night. In the basement we had an old gas powered furnace that had developed cracks in the back of it, unknown to us. During the night, the furnace had exploded, throwing flames throughout the house. Apparently the walls of the chimneys were filled with a compound known as creosote (basically old soot and charcoal). The house went up like a tinderbox, and burned to the ground in less than 5 minutes.

I should have died that night. When I got the reprieve, Mike should have died. But neither of us stayed. When Mike asked his old girlfriend why she had invited him over, she said for some reason she couldn't stop thinking about him. But before that night she hadn?t given him a second thought in years.

The End

We have since built a new house on that spot, and things seem to have quieted down. For some reason my mom cant keep light bulbs in the house from blowing. She goes through about 10 a month. We had an electrician check it out, and the house is fine. He had no idea what would cause it.

There were so many things that were unanswered in that house, and it seems they will stay that way. All I can say is after my 4 years in that house, I'll never snicker at anyone telling a ghost story again.

Steve "SoulSaver" Maisch