Thurber House

Stories

Stories are just that. Stories and personal accounts that have been reported about the location. This section could also contain research notes as well.

Visitors to Thurber House have reported a number of ghostly encounters, from James Thurber's own experience with the mysterious footsteps running up the back stairs, to books throwing themselves on customers, to shadowy figures moving across lighted windows.

Here you'll find an introduction to some of our ghostly encounters. You also can take a haunted tour of Thurber House and other ghostly Columbus spots each October through the Columbus Landmarks Foundation.

It all began with the night the Ohio Lunatic Asylum burned on November 17, 1868. The Asylum covered several blocks of downtown Columbus, including the area where Thurber House now stands. Seven people died in the fire, and their spirits are said to be many of our ghosts.

The night of James Thurber's ghostly experience was exactly 47 years after the Ohio Lunatic Asylum burned. According to his story "The Night the Ghost Got In," Thurber was in the upstairs bathroom washing his face when he heard the heavy footsteps of a man pacing around the dining table downstairs. He thought a burglar had broken in and tiptoed to his brother Robert's room to wake him. Thurber and his brother approached the head of the stairs just as the footsteps ceased. Suddenly, they heard the footsteps launch up the steps two at a time, coming straight for them! When they glanced down, there was nobody there, though they heard the footsteps rapidly approaching. Thurber's brother ran to his bedroom, and Thurber ducked into the bathroom and slammed the door at the moment the invisible figure would have reached him.

Some of our recent visitors have ghost stories of their own. One of our Writers-in-Residence saw the shadow of a hefty man cross the window of the attic apartment. When she reached the apartment, there was nobody there, and no sign of a break in. This same Writer-in-Residence also claimed to hear the kitchen cabinets rattling at night throughout her stay.

Whether you have a ghostly experience of your own, or come to hear some of ours, it is clear there are some inhabitants at Thurber House that have remained on beyond their earthly years.

Added by: sdonley on 02/10/2015 DB#: 1190
Source(s): http://thurberhouse.org/the-thurber-house-ghost.ht...

James Thurber lived [a this location] from his childhood up through his years at OSU. He was State House reporter for a Columbus newspaper, and later had a lucrative career as a cartoonist and humorist. His stories were collected in My Life and Hard Times, and one of them, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," was made into a movie starring Danny Kaye and Boris Karloff. His cartoons and essays are dated but still amusing.

His house qualifies as haunted mainly because of an incident he wrote about in the story "The Night the Ghost Got In." He claimed to have heard footsteps walking around and around downstairs in the kitchen and then running up the stairs. I was never very interested in this until I heard that the history of the Thurber House includes a man who killed himself after pacing around the kitchen table and then running upstairs to blow his brains out. James Thurber himself later wrote about the story behind "The Night the Ghost Got In," describing the times when he and his brother heard the noises and his later investigations. This is Thurber's account of the story behind his story:

"My own experience in this mysterious area came one night, about 1912, in a house my family lived in at 77 Jefferson Avenue in Columbus . . . . It consists of the heavy steps of a man walking for nearly a minute around our dining room table, while I was in the bathroom upstairs drying my face with a towel before going to bed. At the time I was a junior at college, studying journalism, and a non-believer in ghosts. In fact, the word ghost never crossed my mind that night. I thought a burglar or crazy man had got into the house. My father and younger brother were in Indianapolis and I knew that neither of them would talk silently around that table. I roused my older brother from sleep and brought him to the head of the back stairs that went down into the dining room. As soon as he reached my side, the steps ceased. Finally, in something like terror, he asked me, 'What's the matter with you?'

"I said, in a loud voice, 'There's someone down there,' and up the stairs, right at us, two at a time, came the heavy steps of a running man. Without a word, my brother ran into his bedroom and locked the door. I stood there until one more step would have brought the invisible thing into me and then, by a reflex, I slammed the door at the head of the steps. The next day I asked the corner druggist, who had been in business there for thirty years, if he had ever heard any strange stories about 77 Jefferson Avenue. He said, in surprise, 'Didn't you know about the steps that go around the dining room table and run up the stairs?' I then began a long research on the business, even slept downstairs several nights alone, at the proper hour on the proper night of the week, but never heard the steps again. It turned out that several families had previously moved out of the house because of the steps. I turned this into a comic story called 'The Night the Ghost Got In' nearly thirty years ago, but now I am telling it factually. . . .

"My careful researches, more than forty-five years ago, revealed the story of a man who had lived in that house, had walked around the dining room table, then ran up the stairs and shot himself in one of the second floor rooms. He left a note describing his final behavior, but it was destroyed by the family. I found out, and the police have never heard of it, and I promised I would not tell about the note. . . . A strange voice, anonymous, had telephoned him at his office one morning and told him that if he went home around ten A.M., entered the kitchen door, and stood quietly in the dining room, he would hear his wife making her daily assignation with her lover and this is precisely what happened."

Thurber's research gives us a rare glimpse into the details of an apparently true ghost story. The ghost at his house was a suicide, driven to blow his brains out by his cheating wife. Incidentally, the actual date of Thurber's encounter with the ghost was November 17, 1915--exactly forty-seven years to the day after the Ohio Lunatic Asylum, which stood where the house now stands, burned to the ground, killing seven people.

Added by: sdonley on 02/10/2015 DB#: 1191
Source(s): http://www.forgottenoh.com/Counties/Franklin/thurb...

Paranormal Claims

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