HULL HOUSE MORTUARY
Location: Hull House Mortuary is located at the top of a hill at the end of Hull Road between Salem, Oregon, and the small community of Mathisville across the county line in Polk County not far from the Willamette River.
Description: Hull House is an intimidatingly depressive three-story Tudor structure that has been connected to and added upon to include a mortuary and crematorium. Balconies and an exterior stairway exist in the former receiving area of the funeral home; the front of which resembles a once opulent mansion fallen into neglect. A perfect location for a house filled with ghosts. The interior is almost vacant of furniture, but unclaimed property in the form of caskets, gurneys and surgical tools in the old embalming room still exist along with two deserted cars from 1987. Former upstairs bedrooms are still filled with ruined pieces of Victorian furniture. A brick wall topped by barbwire surrounds the whole structure, once considered one of the largest funeral homes in three counties. The dilapidated structure is in a state of decay, extensive vandalism and weathering from over several years. Dead trees also dot the interior property.
Ghostly Manifestations: Hull House Mortuary is one of those structures where
its reputation far exceeds its actual supposed ghost stories. Sometimes
considered the West Coast equivalent to Maine’s Mount Everest of Haunted
Houses, the Belasco House, or the infamously notorious Defeo-Lutz House in
Amityville, New York, the house has endured a history endured by local rumor
and a consistently embellished account of paranormal events to its dark history,
which sometimes reads like a Hollywood horror movie. The actual history almost
reads like Seattle’s former Rose Red Mansion; a total of almost twenty-five
people connected to the place have either vanished or have been found dead
under suspicious circumstances. Today, many of the people who have lived
witness to the dark events that supposedly occurred here claim and swear their
testimonies to be true.
Several psychics and ghost-hunters, both
professional and amateur, have visited the house to investigate and explore its
reputation, which for some odd fact seems to flare up with particular active
intensity every Halloween out of the year. Manifestations in the audible,
physical and olfactory ranges have been described here and include noises,
odors, voices, poltergeist-activity and even apparitions and moving shadows.
One visiting psychic visiting the location in an unofficial capacity was
reputedly only able to stand the powerful vibrations for a short time. She
later claimed the whole land was tainted by something “older than man” and that
death and misfortune would come to meet anyone truly foolish to stay here.
As a
matter of fact, activity is often felt far and abroad around the property.
Witnesses as far away from St. Rita’s Academy eleven miles away have reported
strange lights on the hill of the abandoned mortuary on clear summer days.
Skeptics claim cars and trucks are reflecting the lights as they turn on nearby
Route 22. Other witnesses living much closer have seen the entire structure ablaze
with lights from behind its boarded windows as if every light in the place was
turned on and left to burn for up to five minutes despite the fact that the local
electrical lines to the place were severed and rerouted away from the place in
the 1950s. Residents along Hull Road have heard screams and demented haunting
laughter wafting down from the direction of the property. Reports of cold
breezes rushing down from the hill have chilled residents with the misfortune
of being down hill from the deserted mortuary. Several of the more recent residents
in the area aren’t even aware of the old structure obscured from them by the
trees much less of the old ghost stories in the area. After 1987, several
drivers approaching the ascent to the mortuary began reporting vague figures
wandering or mulling around where Kinkade Street meets at Hull Road. One truck
driver said she attempted to climb into his cab, but she looked so “odd” that
he didn’t dare and let her join him for fear of what she could do to him.
The most popular urban legend in the area
concerns that of Angela Franklin, an eighteen-year-old high school student in
1987. Considered a gifted student once, she began delving into a Gothic way of
life in her senior in school and began wearing nothing but black and establishing
a reputation as a witch, but even her parents at the time were aware that most of
her shenanigans were for solely for attention. On Halloween Night 1987, she
avoided the local school dance and distracted as many of her friends into a
separate party up at Hull House freed from the restraints of parental guidance
and unfettered from responsibility. Old Hull House would be the best place for
a small band of teenagers to unleash their full teenage fury and inflict damage
on property already falling down around them. While no one is exactly sure what
happened next as the night continued, it is quite sure that the atmosphere and
reputation of the location encouraged Angela and her friends to look for ghosts
and the grounds started spooking them into attacking each other suspecting the
other was an evil entity. Only two of the party guests, Judy Cassidy and Roger
Voorhees, escaped the carnage and hitchhiked their way back into town. Local
police on the site the following morning found everyone dead from one reason or
another scattered across the property. (An exaggerated rumor claimed that they
were all hacked up beyond recognition). Since the body of Angela Franklin was never found despite a
detailed scrutiny of the grounds, she was declared a likely suspect in the
murder massacre that night.
Somehow, out of the local homicides, rumors
of something far more sinister in the old mortuary developed out of Cassidy’s and
Voorhees’s testimonies of the night to parallel the account of demonic
possession of Ronald “Butch” Defeo Jr. in Amityville, New York some thirteen
years prior. They both became irrationally afraid of the place and claimed that
the previous night, Angela had become possessed by something in the house and
terrorized everyone with the animated corpses of anyone already dead around
her. Even through their possibly drug-induced paranoia (both Cassidy and
Voorhees swore they didn’t use drugs that night, but they both confirmed they
had been drinking alcohol), Cassidy and Voorhees verified that Angela “orchestrated”
the night’s events, and neither of them was charged in any way for the murders
of their friends and fellow students.
Following a nation-wide hunt for Angela
Franklin, rumors of her occasionally returning to Hull House were reported for
several years. The crime scene was kept in check for three years, but no
sighting of Angela was ever made. In a corporeal sense, that is. Officers
stationed frequently at Hull House, however, started reporting someone
resembling Franklin lurking in the old mortuary. They described a brunette
young lady in a long black bridal dress who grew even more attractive over the
years appearing and vanishing on the premises. One officer saw her ascend the
exterior balcony and disappear from him despite being close enough to grab her.
Another officer trying to fight off sleep in his patrol car was jarred awake by
the sensation of being watched. Looking up to the house, he discovered Angela’s
ghost staring at him from a second floor window. Numerous Salem police began to
refuse to be stationed at the old house; they swore that the body of Angela
Franklin was still somewhere in the house!
The local district attorney who had lead criminal
proceedings on Angela in absentia meanwhile hired paranormal experts to disavow
the ghost stories and debunk them. Professional investigations confirmed the
existence of an underground stream fifty feet below the ground, which according
to legend kept the energies of the house intact, but it was also theorized that
the water in addition to shifting limestone deposits in the ground caused some
of the so-called hauntings. Electrical objects, such as flashlights and cell
phones, also refused to work in certain parts of the structure, possibly from
inherent electro-magnetic fields. A number of the researchers even experienced
moments of depressions in time. At times, they departed the property missing or
having gained as much as thirty to a full hour’s moment of time. One party
emerged feeling as if he’d been trapped in the house for more than twenty-four
hours within a period of only eight hours. Soil and environmental testing
failed to yield anything to contribute to the hallucinations and illusions
described by witnesses. It was finally theorized that the eclectic and
eccentric layout of the structure added to the isolation and absence of normal
noise turned the house into a giant sensory deprivation chamber, which in turn
contributed to mental instability. In fact, stray dogs prevalent in the
surrounding woods and birds such as pigeons and owls avoid the grounds. Within
the walls, there is no sound of a cricket at night nor of any of the numerous bats
that fester the neighboring farms.
Nevertheless, in
1992, one year after police ceased watch on the house, there were unconfirmed
rumors of students from St. Rita’s Academy stirring up something supposedly demonic
in the structure during another Halloween party. A number of delinquents were
found dead from various causes along with the priest sent to recover them. Among
the witnesses was Melissa Franklin, Angela’s younger sister, but no criminal proceedings
were filed this time. Another year later, five teens fleeing a convenience
store robbery headed to Hull House to hide out and were found dead the next
morning along with the detective who pursued them and the officer supposedly on
watch that night. Among the bodies was an intact blackened and charred female skeleton
dragged beyond the walls of the house. Dental records identified them as the
remains of Angela Franklin possibly removed from the crematorium still on the
premises. However, the identification
of the remains was never made public because no one could explain the presence
of gas still active to run the crematorium on the site fifty years after it had
been removed from the isolated location.
History: The story of Hull House Mortuary actually begins in 1810 when the
first settlers arrived in the area and began marking off settlements. The local
indigenous Native Americans warned the white settlers from claiming the hill by
saying it was cursed. They often left their insane and sick there to die, and
then returned to remove and bury the bodies elsewhere. The underground stream
prevented the evil spirits from escaping and settlers were not allowed to dig
for wells in the vicinity for fear of releasing the spirits. Legend soon claims that a Skomosh Indian
brave had vanished in the area while hunting for food. He was later found
camped out on the site after killing his squaw (wife) and papoose son for food.
He was discovered near a tent created from their skinned bodies and gnawing on
the leg of his infant son.
By 1911, Cordell Hull became a wealthy man as
a mortician, storeowner and property owner. Owner of one of the first cemeteries,
he ended up razing the location of his mortuary in town to increase the size of
his cemetery and then rebuilding it on the hill with a far larger mansion attached
to it so that he and his family could look down upon the city. Unsubstantiated
rumors, however, claimed Hull was not the image of propriety that he seemed to
be. Rumors of him having intimate relations with his female corpses soon began
spreading, then, in 1915, a maid supposed pressed by the growing enmity in the
family went mad and poisoned the whole family. She hacked up the remains and
then committed suicide by climbing into the crematorium after turning it on at full
heat. The flames pouring from it torched part of the steel doors and the heat
was so intense that little of her was found. The mortuary closed down after it
and it became city property in 1927 after the paid property taxes on the
property ran out on the mortuary. Intent of selling the former mortuary
dissolved after the original deed vanished with a county inspector and realtor
looking over the place. He supposedly became the first unconfirmed victim of
the ghosts.
Almost ten years of homicide activity places the house in the custody of the local police department. Police regularly patrol the crime scene and stand guard every Halloween. Amateur ghost hunters, would-be vandals, suspected transients and potential devil-worshippers are often chased off from the area believed to be used as a hideout for drug-pushers and violent gang members. In spring of 2002, police picked up the creators of an illegal meth lab claiming they were being observed by a figure in a black wedding dress.
Identity of Ghosts: Local legend still claims that the ghost of Angela Franklin lurks the house and grounds looking for her missing party guests. Some of the descriptions of the apparitions seen actually resemble other people who have died on the site. The female phantom patrolling nearby Kinkade Drive has been described resembling Shirley Fenardi, the St. Rita’s Academy student who led the 1992 party on the grounds. An apparition resembling Judy Cassidy has been described despite the fact that Cassidy is still alive and living in Dallas, Texas far removed from Hull Mortuary. The more homicidal furies of the possessed residence, however, reportedly harken back to claims of something more demonic in nature of Native American lore.
Comments: Adapted from Night of the Demons (1987), Night of the Demons II (1992)
and Night of the Demons 3 (1993). Haunting parallels drawn from the DeFeo-Lutz
House in Amityville, New York; Smurl House in West Pittston, Pennsylvania,; Old
Snedeker House in Southington, Connecticut and Shoe Factory Woods in Barrington,
Illinois.
The DeFeo-Lutz House, The Amityville Horror (1976)
Rose Red
Mansion, Rose Red (2002)