BELASCO HOUSE
Location: The Belasco House is six miles from
Description: The Belasco House is a massive Gothic Romanesque edifice replete with stone turrets, gargoyles and faces decorated across the roof. Resembling a British castle, the interior is splendidly furnished with fine fixtures, baroque carvings and erotic sexual artwork and carvings. At least forty rooms fill the spacious mansion, including a grand hall that features an indoor chapel once dedicated to damnation, an indoor swimming room and steam room. The massive stronghold circles around an enclosed garden courtyard overlooked by the upstairs bedrooms.
Ghostly Manifestations: Nicknamed “The Mount Everest of Haunted Houses,” the
Belasco House is one of the most imposing structures ever dedicated to the
madness and venal desires of one man. Three investigations have been conducted
in the halls of this enormous edifice devoted to sin, and yet, the structure
still stands as if it still abounds with secrets. One investigator found the interior
structure to be so oppressive and cold that he dubbed it “Hell House” based on
the carnal activities once enacted in its walls.
The best conductive investigation occurred
between Late October to Late December of 1940 under the auspices of Professor
Gerald Finley from Oxford University. The phenomenon recorded included the full
range of visual, acoustic and auditory manifestations plus psychokinetic
phenomenon (poltergeist activity). One
researcher blatantly stated it was as if there was an invisible war going on to
which he was an invisible witness.
Professor Edward Rand recorded in his log
that he felt he was always being watched, but he also attributed it to the huge
size of the house and the sensory deprivation atmosphere created in parts of
the house from the boarded up windows and the massive echo affect in the
residence. Flitting shadows that he likened to that of “a crowd of people hurrying to get out of
the way” he theorized were caused by shadows reflected and carried by light
over several feet down long corridors. In the poolroom, he saw a figure lurking
in shadow that he thought was one of the other researchers watching him
although it refused to respond when he called on it. He attempted to confront
it, but it just melted into the darkness.
Sounds of whispering were recorded from empty
rooms and were recorded on one occasion. Analysis concluded that it was
possibly anywhere from thirteen to fifteen people mumbling incoherently at
once. There were no words to the sound, just nonsensical murmurings. The sound
sometimes followed the researchers from room to room and down corridors, but if
anyone tried to follow them, they’d drift off until they were gone all
together.
Doors also locked inexplicably even seconds
behind the researchers and doors that were locked sometimes drifted open. Dr.
Anton Graham was recording ambient noises across the upstairs corridor to lock
in on a humming when one door slammed shut next to him. The reverb through his
gear practically deafened him.
Graham was once called from the main foyer to
come to the chapel, but when he arrived, no one was in sight. His notebook
recorded that the temperature of the room became cold enough that he could see
his breath, but he never could decide if he had actually heard it, or if he had
been drawn to the change in temperature.
The house also proved to be an ordeal for
young Ben Fischer. The house was supposed to be a test of his psychic awareness
under the watchful eye of medium Grace Lauter, but he never felt alone. He
answered once he felt there was a strange woman who was following him around
and lurking around him at night, offering her nude body to him, but she always
smelled like a dead corpse near him.
Grace Lauter also reported a few details of
her own. She remarked that she always noticed odd extra figures lurking behind
her whenever she looked into a mirror. In fact, she once told Professor Rand
that she never felt completely alone in her room upstairs. One night, the old antique phone in her room
began ringing as is her habit she went to answer it. There was no one on it for
a while as she asked who it was and then she finally heard the voice of a young
girl asking for permission to sleep with her. Grace later wrote in her
testimony of events that the child’s voice was so unearthly that it could only
have echoed from beyond the grave.
Finley and Rand also pursued the sound of a
child crying toward the direction of the chapel and another time there was the
faraway tunes of a organ or harpsichord being played and there wasn’t even one
in the entire house. Dr. Graham and Ben
were in the wine cellar once talking about Christmas coming up and they heard
heavy tramping noises from the floor over their heads. They even remarked on
the dust being unsettled as it wafted down on to their heads, but when they
went up to see what was going on, they found no one in sight. Everyone was in
the dining room as the caterers had delivered dinner to the house.
All the written testimonies stopped between
December 13 and December 18. One last observation by Dr. Gerald Finley remarked
that he thought there was at least one or two other people lurking in the
closed off parts of the house. The front door was nailed shut one morning and
later Dr. Graham was fatally injured when a heavy piece of sculpture toppled
over and paralyzed him from the waist down. Grace became tipsy on some wine and
tried to fly by jumping off the balcony. She died on impact as young Ben
watched.
As an adult, Ben was an owlish bookish
person, but he refused to ever have another thing to do with the Belasco house
again. After his death in 1989, however, it became revealed that he had
actually been strong-armed coerced by parapsychologist Lionel Barrett to return
for one last 1970 visit to the house, if but to serve as a guide to a psychic
Spiritualist named Florence Tanner. Their stay at the house was for Christmas
week, and much of the activity then experienced mirrored past two
investigations with shadowy presences, odd voices and slight poltergeist
activity. Tanner’s desire was to send the trapped spirits into the afterlife,
but Barrett wanted to test a theory that the house was charged with energy that
caused the perceptions being seen and felt. Furthermore, he believed that
energy could be counter-acted by an equal force of energy and dispersed, but
several hours after “cleaning the house,” Barrett’s equipment started once
again detecting light in the invisible spectrum with an electro-magnetic
signature from somewhere within the Belasco House.
History: Emeric Belasco was born in 1879, the illegitimate son of an American
munitions maker named Myron Sandler and Noelle Belasco, a British actress. He
was described as a melancholic young man given into malicious acts. He
reportedly hung a cat to see if it would revive for the second of its nine
lives and when it didn’t, he chopped the cat into pieces and flung the pieces
out the window. His mother nicknamed him “Evil Emeric.”
At ten and a half, Emeric committed incest
with his younger sister. She was sent to a hospital for two months and he was
sent to a private school where homosexual teachers mentally and physically
abused him. One teacher was invited to Emeric’s home for a week, and at the
end, the teacher went home and hung himself.
Belasco meanwhile grew from a tiny child into
a huge figure of a man within a few years. He became known as “The Roaring
Giant.”
Emeric later inherited several thousand
pounds from his mother and half a million from his father. He built the house
in
In one party that started in June 1928 and
ending the winter of the following year, Belasco degraded physically and mentally
as he encouraged his guests to give into any perversion possible limited only
by the imagination. He conducted contests for the most incredibly vile ideas.
He began importing hunchbacks, dwarves, hermaphrodites and every conceivable
grotesque to mingle with his guests or indulge them. Every vice including
sadism, brutality, bestiality, mutilation, sodomy, necrophilia, cannibalism,
perversion, murder, vampirism and even drug addiction occurred as Belasco
walked the house observing the carnage of his guests. The servants left in
disgust and the guests had to tend, forage and clean up for themselves. Fights
occurred as guests fought for food. Thirteen female guests became pregnant. As
an epidemic of influenza hit the house, Belasco had the house sealed and bound
his guests to the house. No longer being maintained, the generator conked out
and guests were left to darkness. A version of a Roman circus was held as a
virgin was fed to a tiger and watched by drug-addicted doctors in fascination.
Everyone but Belasco had been reduced to the level of animals – rarely bathing,
eating and drinking everything, wearing torn and soiled clothing and killing
each other for the essentials of food, water, liquor, drugs, sex, blood and
even the taste of human flesh. Everyone
was cannibalistic by then. Belasco walked distantly among them dressed in black
and observing and enjoying the hell he’d created.
In
the spring of 1929, relatives of the guests were finally able to break in and
found everyone dead from one cause or another. Emeric Belasco was not among
them.
It was the local police and state authorities
that started the suspicions that the house was haunted as they scoured the
house for a trace of Belasco. A 1931 paranormal investigation on site ended
suspiciously. All four investigators were found dead of one reason or another.
Rational logic and thinking surmised that a still living Emeric Belasco had
returned to the house and had killed them.
A second investigation was not started until
1940. Staying in the same rooms as the bodies were found in, the paranormal
explorers recorded a deluge of weird events geared specifically for their
weaknesses and preferences. Medium Grace Lauter jumped off a balcony to her
death and shattered her legs, Physicist Dr. Anton Graham crawled out of the
house to die from a stroke, Head of the Chemistry Department at Oxford
Professor Edmund Rand became paralyzed in an accident and Psychic investigator
Professor Gerald Finley was crippled in an accident and committed to an asylum.
Sole survivor, thirteen-year-old psychic prodigy Benjamin Franklin Fischer, was
found naked on the front step in the fetal position. He refused to have anything to do with the house for thirty years
until he finally agreed to accompany Dr. Lionel Barrett and Spiritualist Medium
Florence Tanner into the house in 1970. Tanner was killed when a huge crucifix
in the chapel collapsed and Barrett fell victim to an exploding piece of
equipment. His body was found dragged twenty feet from the explosion and
impaled under a fallen chandelier.
Sometime in 1985, the aging and deserted
estate was auctioned off to New England socialite Donna Madeline Troy as a
summer home, but she instead began living in the mansion full time. A relative
of American philanthropist, J.P. Reason,
the widowed matriarch and former actress lives in partial seclusion visited
constantly by family and paranormal researchers, but she is always the cordial
hostess. Her public opinion is that the house is no longer haunted, but her
daughter, Sara, verifies that paranormal activity is still occurring.
Identity of Ghosts: “Emeric Belasco, and only Emeric Belasco... “According to Fischer, all reports of multiple surviving consciousnesses in the house were conjurations by Belasco’s spirit using the massive battery of psychic, emotional and negative energy imbedded in the house. Belasco House is reputedly the only one with this sort of occurrence with the possible exception of Vannacutt Sanitarium and Rose Red. Belasco’s mummified body was eventually found during the 1970 investigation in a secret room beyond the chapel, but who left it there and why has yet to be revealed. His adult son’s desiccated remains were found chained to a wall in a bricked-off room in the basement. Rumors are that Belasco had entombed his son up in the house in order to teach him the essence of evil or merely to cut the young man out of his life entirely.
Comments: The Legend of Hell House (1973) based on the novel by Richard Matheson. Hauntings loosely based on Franklin Castle (Tiedemann House) in Cleveland, Ohio and Waverly Hills Sanitarium near Louisville, Kentucky.