Webster City, Iowa, Dec. 5
All Webster city, Iowa, is absorbed in a haunted house mystery. The house is No. 710 Boone street and is occupied by Mr and Mrs Jesse Black, their two children and Mrs Black’s mother, Mrs S.A. Jamieson, and the latter’s daughter, Eva. Committees of reputable citizens are said to have investigated the house and to unite in acknowledging that they have no explanation for the things they have seen there.
As the stories go, dishes break themselves with a loud crash; a hair brush which Mrs Black tries to keep upstairs refuses to stay there and comes tumbling down the steps; a mysterious power, right before the eyes of a committee, brought an electric light globe from a bathroom, down a hall, through a bedroom and into the living room, where it dashed itself to pieces on the floor.
A wrench in the cellar apparently threw itself out of the window and a poker in the kitchen did the same thing. A kerosene lamp is said to have danced off the table and upon the floor. A trundle bed up stairs danced about the floor.
It is said, too, that bookcases set against the wall have thrown themselves down and broken with a loud crash. Bureau drawers will pull themselves out and slam themselves back in again, tumbling things about and making much noise, in fact, Mrs Black says that the noises and the slamming of drawers have been going on for years. It is only in the last few days that the “ghost” has taken on a destructive nature, and now there is hardly a whole dish or a whole piece of furniture in the house.
Scores of curious persons go to the house daily, and a delegation sits up in the house every night and witnesses the weird doings of the “ghost.”
Ottawa Free Press, 5th December 1914.