PARRISH HOUSE
Location: One of the most grand houses in the most affluent section of Brantford, New Hampshire, the Parrish House at 1356 Jefferson Street is one of the oldest historic homes in town. Founded by General Angus Parrish, Brantford is forty miles northeast of Manchester on Highway 149.
Description of Place: Dutch Colonial in style with high ceilings, a grand hall and a majestic circular staircase, the Parrish house has bay windows, a garden veranda and a mansard roof highlighted by four columns on the front porch. The house is almost two hundred years old and in nearly pristine condition to the day it was built filled with exquisite Old English furniture.
Ghostly Manifestations: Starting in 1969, the Parrish Family in Brantford, New Hampshire tried to keep a tight reign of the possible hauntings that they were supposedly experienced, but whispers and rumors of disembodied footsteps, of vanishing figures in hallways, of skittering noises in attics and portents of doom are hard to conceal in a small town. One of the wealthiest families in town, the Parrish Family was also the most haunted family in town.
Beginning in Late September of 1969, it was slowly being established that the Parrish family was being visited by an infestation of noises of a supposedly animal nature. Young Adam Parrish heard the sound of what he thought was bats filling the chimney of the house. His father had the house inspected and the chimney cleared, but the noises continued. Local girl Sara Whittle ran from the residence screaming that she was being attacked by bats streaming from the fireplace in the parlor, but no one saw any bats in a physical sense. Adam's mother, Carol Ann Parrish, meanwhile saw vague shapes flying over her head through the mansion and tried to swat at one of the shadows as it sailed up the staircase.
Samuel Parrish, Adam's father, meanwhile heard noises of a different time he recounted years later as akin to the sound expected of giant mosquitoes. Whether both noises were belonging to the same entity is unrevealed, but it was very apparent that something was trying to make itself known to the Parrish family in Early 1970. Carol and a servant rushed into the house on one occasion as poltergeist activity attacked the kitchen. Fine china was smashed, furniture was toppled, gas fixtures on the stove nearly alighted the room and the ceiling fixture was left swinging as if Carol had just barely missed catching what was destroying her home. In cleaning, scant burnt hairs were found on the stove and more found trapped in the gasket of the ice box. Desperate to identify what he was sure trapped in his home, Sam Parrish sent the hairs to be identified by a colleague at the university and he responded half a year later remarking that they were from a African species of tailed monkey known as a spider monkey. Just what a African species of monkey was doing in Brantford that cold winter was never solved.
Nora meanwhile heard noises of something moving through the mansion when she was alone and was keeping Adam home to protect her. The distant echoes of a lion's roar seemed to come from inside closets and that following spring, the claw mark of a vicious animal was found in the door of an upstairs bedroom, and Sam Parrish quickly had the door replaced before his wife or son saw it.
Sam Parrish also hired his employee Carl Bentley in a dual nature as a factory worker and as a bodyguard to watch over his son. He had come to believe that whatever was happening in the house was reaching out to young Adam. During an inexplicable summer fever, Adam felt he was trapped in the jungle scared for his life and Carl was there was help tend for the youth and get his strength back. Late one night, Carol was in the kitchen when she thought she saw Carl in the kitchen and asked him how Adam was doing. Carl just lifted his head up and told her flatly: "Adam Parrish is dead." Screaming at the top of her lungs, Carol raced up stairs and again found Carl, this time by her son's bed and talking to Adam. Whatever was haunting the house apparently was now impersonating the people in it. Distraught that the hauntings had targeted his son, Sam sent Adam to life elsewhere until his health returned and then vacated the house with his wife under the auspices of a European sojourn.
The following month, the New England Society for Psychic Research moved in to study the house for five months.
History: The Parrish family was one of the founding families of Brantford due to the long lasting success of the Parrish Shoe Factory in the county, created by Nathaniel Christopher Parrish, the son of General Parrish in 1802. Their local financial success afforded them the construction of one of the most opulent structures in the county; the Parrish house has been in the family for eight generations.
Identity of Ghosts: Unknown
Investigations: Physicist Warren Laurie and his team of paranormal investigators stayed five months in the Phelps Mansion documenting over 200 hours of audio phenomenon, sixty-two photographs of grainy and illegible photographs and five hundred pages of personal experiences and failed to come up with a logical explanation to what was occurring in the house. He concluded that the monkey hair could have come from a stuffed monkey statue which Abraham Parrish, Sam's father, had purchased from a taxidermy shop some years before and by then was stored in the attic. The so-called claw mark in the door could not be studied because it was long gone, but it was noticed that bats did infest old barns in the vicinity, but these New England species were not nearly as large as the type which Sara Whittle had testified to in her youth. Later marrying Adam as an adult, she also later identified them from a book as a species known only in Africa.
In trying to discern the recurring African connection behind the so-called hauntings, the society asked Goody Phelps, a Vancouver psychic and medium, to give her impression of anything supernatural in the house. Although she felt nothing at first, she later held a séance at the behest of Carol Ann Parrish and identified the soul of Edward Von Pelt trapped in the house. She also mentioned the African term of ju-man-jii, but no one knew at the time what it meant. Research into the existence of Edward Van Pelt revealed he was a big game hunter who had vanished in Africa around the confluence of the Congo River in 1888 convinced he knew where to find the mythical jungle of African lore known as ju-man-jii. African lore claims that ju-man-jii was the name of the true spirit or life essence of Africa trying to appear on Earth.
Phelps later claimed that she had seen echoes of another timeline still piercing the veil between worlds. In that reality, she described it had been Adam and Sara who had nearly unleashed the ju-man-jii energies upon Brantford before finally sealing the portal they had opened, but she also identifies two children named Judy and Peter Allsworth, the progeny of a Parrish Shoes accountant, as being connected to the phenomenon, but those children weren't even born yet during the time of the hauntings. When one mentions these names to Adam and Sara Parrish, they merely look secretly upon each other in nervous stifled silence with a childhood gleam being restrained in their eyes...
Source/Comments: Jumanji (1998) and the story by Chris Van Allsburg. Loosely based on the Phelps Mansion in Stratford, Connecticut.