COLE HOUSE

Location: The Cole-Frasier House is located on 1511 Orchard Street off North Central Avenue on the south side of Atlanta, Georgia

Description: A split-level clapboard house, the structure sits in a wooded neighborhood alongside several of the most expensive homes of Atlanta a few blocks away from a school. It has a closed in backyard and detached garage.

Ghostly Manifestations: The stories of the Cole House hauntings go back to 1952 when Taylor and Jean Carter first bought the house. They pictured it as their dream home to raise their three children and they loved it as much as one could love a house. Within a month after moving in, their two boys often reported to their parents that there was a strange man who stood in their backyard staring up at the house. They often claimed they saw him wandering through, but they never saw or heard him themselves. The daughter, Annie, came to breakfast one morning asking if it had been her Uncle Max who was tucking her in at night. Taylor and Jean washed away these accounts as products of their children’s imaginations, but after a while, they began seeing things themselves.

“Shortly after we moved in,” Jean described year’s later events still fresh in her mind as if they had occurred a few weeks ago. “I remember stacking away all the china plates in the cabinet. I remembering separating them, unpacking them, unwrapping them and putting them in the high cabinet above the fridge. I’m only five foot four so it took me a few trips up and down the stepladder. I dragged the empty box out on to the service porch and went looking for the box with my cooking utensils. It only took me ten to twelve minutes, but when I got back, the box was back in the kitchen and all the plates were individually wrapped and back in the box. Someone one to explain how a thing like that happens?”

Jean also recalls other things, like lights she’d turn off switching back on by themselves. Thinking they were all still on some sort of timer, she had them all replaced and even had the fixtures replaced, but they would still come back on seconds after being shut off. In the middle of the night, the water faucets once in a while would turn themselves on and Taylor would scramble through the house to switch them off. The children would all be asleep as he wondered if someone was still in the hiding in the house. He had the police over several times in the time he lived there and even had the locks changed on the front and back, but things still happened.

The family often heard creaking sounds as if someone was walking through the house. The oldest son, Burke, once came home from school and saw a strange man peering out from the upstairs window and ran to a friends house saying a strange man was in the house. The watched for the intruder to come out from a few houses away, but he never emerged. The police didn’t find any signs the house was broken into.

Taylor Carter, however, began working the night shift at the firehouse. He started coming home in the wee morning hours and finding the front door unlocked and left open. He chided Jean a few times on it, but then one night he came home and felt the unshakeable feeling someone was in the attic. He took a flashlight to go up there and found the Christmas decorations strewn around after being carefully packed away in boxes. He briefly accused the children and then started looking for ways for squirrels to get inside the house.

Jean also started smelling pipe smoke in the house. No one smoked in the family and after several events with the children she started wondering if it was wafting in from another house.

After a few years in the house, Taylor was starting to think if they had ghosts and talked about the subject secretly with his wife so as to not scare the kids. One night he came home in the early morning hours and finally saw it. It was large man standing on the back porch and staring through the curtains on the glass doors into the house as if he wanted inside.

He moved his family to another house a few streets over.

A few months later, supporters working to elect mayorial candidate Lamar Thompson rented the house and soon started finding they were not alone either. Volunteers who left flyers and papers carefully stacked on closing up the house were returning and finding things scattered all over the house. Supplies including whole boxes of pencils and a delivery of campaign buttons vanished. A deliveryman leaving a package after the house was locked up pounded on the door for hours one night trying to get the interest of a man inside smoking a pipe before a fire in the fireplace. When he returned in the morning to try again, the volunteers showed him that the fireplace hadn’t been used since they were using the house.

Stories spread by word of mouth kept the house from being sold for several years. It became a white elephant to the realty company trying to sell it. It was, however, rented every Halloween to be made up as a haunted house.

In 1993, Charlene Frasier, wife of Air Force Lieutenant William Frasier, purchased the house unaware of the stories. An aficionado of the subject, she hasn’t reported much out of the unusual except for persistent curiosity seekers and trespassers.

History: Built sometime during the Late Fifties along with much of the neighborhood houses, the house has had a long history of families that have lived in it. The last known family was the Coles with the Carters living in the house from June 1952 to April 1953. It stood empty until May 1993 when Charlene Frasier bought the house.

Identity: William “Old Bill” Cole lived in the house from 1945 to 1951. When his wife departed him in 1948, his brother and his family moved in, temporarily, squeezing Bill temporarily to live in the basement made up as an apartment. After his brother moved out, bill moved back upstairs and lived alone for three more years waiting for his wife to return to him. In the winter of 1951, worried neighbors and friends who hadn’t seen him had police break in to check on him. He had died in front of the TV.

In 1987, employees of the realty company moving the old furniture out of the basement uncovered a concealed door to a small room filled with more of Cole’s belongings. Among them was a painting in his likeness supposedly created by his wife. Hanging the portrait above the fireplace in the house seems to have placated the ghostly activity.

Comments: Designing Women, Episode “Charlene Buys A House.” Hauntings based on the McGuire House, Lowell, Massachusetts.