The Quiet House[1]
by James N. Markels
Stuart Biddle was alone in the living room of the Bainworthy house. Except for the things scattered around him—an air mattress, a sleeping bag, two lamps, a flashlight, a laptop, a small cooler, and a cardboard box of files and clippings—there wasn’t so much as a paperclip in the whole house. The cupboards were barren, the furniture was gone, the walls were bare as bones. The house was primed and ready for a new owner to sweep in and adorn the emptiness with their life’s possessions, but there was a problem with that: the Bainworthys didn’t want to move in. And that’s why Stuart was there, camped out in the living room for the weekend.
You might not be familiar with the Bainworthy house up in Nyack, NY, and if you asked the locals for the same they wouldn’t be able to help you either. They refer to it as “Annabelle Lee’s House,” whose husband, Jonathan Longbell Winters, first bought the residence in question in December of 1920, as a copy of the original deed in the box next to Stuart detailed.
Jonathan had served in the Great War as a young lad, survived it with some dint of bravery and fortitude, and returned to the States looking to start a family and be a sheriff’s deputy. He soon fell in love with the raven-haired Annabelle Lee (maiden name: Lewiston), they were betrothed, and the house Stuart found himself in now was the one Jonathan bought (with a kindly paternal loan as a wedding gift) so that they might start a family.
The house itself is little changed from what it was when Jonathan, with Annabelle Lee shining on his arm, first entered it. The frame was squarely aligned with the compass so that each face addressed a different cardinal direction. The main entrance faced to the South, the living room (where Stuart huddled) to the East, the den and reading room to the West, kitchen and dining room to the North. The house was built in 1913 when Victorians were the rage, and this house was a perfect example of the times: a blocky, East-leaning center with three towers squashed into it haphazardly, four levels (basement, ground floor, bedrooms, attic), big bay windows on all sides, and a porch toothed with columns that marched from the front door around the side to grace the entire Eastern façade.
It was the view to the East that was the main selling point of the house. When Annabelle Lee first looked East out the living room’s windows—right about from the spot Stuart occupied—and saw the mighty Hudson River lapping calmly a mere 30 yards from the porch’s sturdy steps, she gasped in joy. Over the years, many a resident and guest would stretch their limbs and gaze upon the comforting calm waters. The Bainworthys, at least initially, hoped to do the same.
As to how the house became known as Annabelle Lee’s, it certainly wasn’t because of her penchant for decoration or throwing lavish dinner parties. A sheriff deputy’s income was too modest for much extravagance, but Annabelle Lee had little interest for such things anyway. Her pride and joy came in the form of her children—four of them sprouted from her fertile belly by the summer of 1927, and she wanted a fifth. The children, oldest to youngest, were Jonathan Longbell Jr., Martha Anne, Franklin Fitch, and Margaret Lee. (“Middle names are distinguished,” Annabelle Lee once remarked.) And, by most accounts, she doted upon them with vigor, making and stitching clothes, tending to sores and ills, tending to their spelling and grammar, and watching them play at the banks of the Hudson while dinner simmered.
But 1927 brought tragedy, and then a string of more tragedies. “Nyack Deputy Shot During Robbery” read a headline clipping in Stuart’s cardboard box, dated August 3, 1927 from the Nyack Reporter. “Twenty-seven year-old Nyack sheriff’s deputy Jonathan Longbell Winters was shot and killed yesterday attempting to apprehend three robbers fleeing from the Nyack General Bank & Trust. All three robbers, William Greenfield, Yauncey Bixby, and Dale Dabbert were later captured and are currently in jail, pending trial,” the story explained.
Annabelle Lee never saw that article. She was informed by the sheriff himself, Walter Hale, the night before the Reporter story made print. She couldn’t bear to see her husband’s picture in the paper after that. At the funeral, held just down the street at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church where the Winters family would frequent on Sundays and holidays, Sheriff Hale was there to help Annabelle Lee back to her seat after she passed Jonathan in his open coffin, his young face stonily calm, arms folded in rest.
Except for her attending the trial for William, Yauncey, and Dale (she was clothed all in black for that day, and she made naught a sound except for a solemn, “Thank God,” when the three were sentenced to death) and a visit to her parents in Syracuse in 1928, Annabelle Lee rarely ventured from the house after her husband’s death. Friends from the church tended to her charitably, bringing food and helping with chores, walking the children to school and back. As a widow with four children and little money, the rest of the community instinctively gathered to support her. Eventually, it was expected, she would marry again and carry on. That was how life went.
But it was not to be for Annabelle Lee. The Great Depression erupted out of New York City and spread quickly through all parts of the country, including the sleepy Nyack town. A local mill shut down, prices increased, people started to move away. The charity that once buoyed the Winters household dried up as families frantically tended to their own mouths first. Fewer people came by to visit her, and most of what people knew about her came from her oldest, Jonathan Longbell Jr., whose eyes had grown troubled with worry. He was only nine, and yet from the sound of things he was taking care of his mother more than she took care of him. “It’s like she’s always sick,” he told Mrs. Marksham, whose youngest son was Jonathan Longbell Jr.’s age, and a playmate of his.
That was on February 18, 1930. This is known because it was the last thing Jonathan Longbell Jr. ever said to anybody. No one visited the house for over a week, and none of the children had been seen around Nyack. On February 27, Sheriff Hale (slogging through the thick New York snow in his boots with a bag of canned foods for the family under one arm) came to check in on the Winters, only to find the children smothered in their beds and Annabelle Lee dead in the upstairs bathtub, her wrists slashed with her dead husband’s razor. Her body was gaunt, her eyes wide and sad. “Mother Kills Children, Self,” announced the Nyack Reporter, March 2, 1930—another clipping in Stuart’s box.
The residents of Nyack were shaken by the news. There was no finger-pointing, but there was a collective feeling of guilt in the aftermath. “I wish I had done more for them,” Mrs. Marksham said at the funeral held for Annabelle Lee and her children. She said that even as her own family had fallen on hard times and was faced with the inevitable prospect of having to move to a more prosperous town. “I never imagined things had gotten that bad for Annabelle Lee,” said Sheriff Hale. “I wish I had known better.” Others expressed similar sentiments, chronicled in “Nyack Pays Respects To Winters Family,” Nyack Reporter, March 6, 1930, the next clipping in Stuart’s box.
For the next five years the house stood empty after the remnants of Annabelle Lee’s family came and packed up whatever valuable possessions were left—most having been sold or bartered away for food and other necessities when the charity started dwindling. It wasn’t until September 12, 1935 when the Nyack Reporter announced in a sidebar, “Winters Home Purchased.” Gabriel Owens, a successful businessman who had managed to make it through the Depression years without great misfortune, decided that the house would make a fine place to semi-retire and have grandchildren visit, and he promptly moved in with his wife, Prudence, and youngest daughter Julianne.
Neighbors were relieved to have things getting back to normal again. “An empty house is like a missing tooth in a town’s smile,” Sheriff Hale later told Mr. Owens after welcoming him to Nyack. Nobody told the owners about what happened before their arrival—that was old news well worth burying, they reasoned. The economy was improving, prices were easier, and a wary optimism started blooming alongside the bluebells and honeycups in the spring of 1936.
Julianne Owens, a spritely twenty year-old, chafed somewhat at the slow ease of Nyack life, much preferring the comforts of the city. However, suitors, mindful of the good fortunes of her father, would still make their way to Nyack on occasion to supply their attentions. Most stayed at a nearby inn when they weren’t visiting the house, but on one occasion a particularly interested suitor, Donald Bluthe, stayed the night in a guest room (the bedroom where Jonathan Longbell Jr., and Franklin Fitch would sleep) “because it had grown so awfully late!” Julianne’s diary later revealed.
It was the next day’s entry that became much more widely known. “I awoke this morning to a terrible racket, like a dozen men hammering the walls and floors! I got up and looked out my door to see Donny [her nickname for Donald] racing out of the guest room, past me, and down the stairs. He had barely bothered to dress himself! He was shouting about an earthquake or something. By the time Daddy calmed him down outside (still in his underwear!), he said something about the bed bucking like a horse. When we looked in his room, the bed was on the wrong side of the room and turned the wrong way. Blankets and pillows were everywhere. The walls were bruised and the beautiful hardwood floor was dented all over. It was an awful scene. Donny left for New York [City] immediately, and I fear I shall not hear from him again.”
This episode was the beginning of what became a long string of strange events at the house. For example, a later suitor of Julianne’s remarked (as preserved in her diary) that while in the den he “felt a presence in the room, like air too thick to breathe, and I knew I was not wanted here.” Or there was when a business partner of Mr. Owens, Gerald Tucker, and his wife once visited for a weekend, but did not stay in the house after the first night. “Mr. Tucker said he got the worst sleep of his life. He said he kept dreaming that he was being smothered, and he’d wake up every hour gasping for air,” Julianne wrote.
It was this last observation that raised eyebrows around the town of Nyack, and it wasn’t long before Mr. Owens was told the story about Annabelle Lee. “That’s a sad story, but I don’t believe in that stuff,” Mr. Owens said. “Nothing has bothered me or Prudy or Julia since we’ve moved in.”
That much was true. If anybody saw or felt anything in the house, it was always visitors and guests—except for children. When any Owens grandchildren came around, they never saw a thing. They would delight in how all the hard surfaces of the house were perfect for bouncing balls and racing from here to there (much to Mr. Owens’ consternation). But when little Howard, the oldest child of the oldest daughter, Georgette, had fallen in the Hudson by accident one afternoon in 1938 when no one was looking, and he was struggling since he was a bad swimmer, Georgette, in the kitchen at the time preparing some tea, felt a hand at her elbow turning her to the East. Look! a voice behind her ear whispered, and Georgette saw Howard’s arms splashing against the river’s surface in vain. She pulled him out safely soon after, but it would be hours before she would step back into the house. “Georgie is spooked!” Julianne wrote.
The residents of Nyack, especially those who knew Annabelle Lee, shied away from the house and instructed their kids not to play near there. If strangers were deserving of attention, they surely had no interest in finding out what Annabelle Lee might have in store for those who still felt a tinge of guilt over the affair. By the time the Unites States entered World War II, the house was regularly referred to as “Annabelle Lee’s House” by the locals, and has been ever since.
The house subsequently passed through a series of owners after Mr. Owens died in 1949, and only occasionally would one of them comment to the locals about anything strange. This was because, for the most part, neighbors became less neighborly to new occupants at Annabelle Lee’s house, and would only meet them at church or school functions. But things changed when Old Mrs. Oppley (as she came to be known in Nyack) moved into the house in 1982.
When Old Mrs. Oppley learned of the house’s turbulent history, she saw it as an opportunity for a little fame and fortune. In 1983 she started distributing “A Guide to the Haunted Houses of Nyack” (this wasn’t the only house in Nyack with stories, you know), which prominently featured Annabelle Lee’s house as the main attraction. She organized a “Haunted House Ride” through Nyack for Halloween, renting a horse and haycart for the night and regaling the children with ghost stories as they clopped past each of the houses. Annabelle Lee’s house was the final destination, of course, and it was the only house where even the haycart driver got the chills. Steeped in the house’s lore (after having tracked down Julianne Owens—long since married, raised a family, and retired in Boston with her husband before passing away in 1991—for the details of her diary), Old Mrs. Oppley would describe the different strange happenings in a raspy whisper, her frail arms sweeping over the wide eyes of her audience. “Some nights I hear the click of metal against porcelain—tick, tick, tick—and I know it’s that old razor blade of hers in the bathtub again,” she would say with a grin. Each year she always had a new story or two to tell about Annabelle Lee’s doings at the house. No one ever visited her.
Word of the Haunted House Ride spread, and in a few years Old Mrs. Oppley had a little cottage industry going, attracting tourists from other parts of New York who wanted to see “a real haunted house.” It got enough attention for Reader’s Digest to include it as one of the “Top Twenty Haunted Houses In America,” October 29, 1991, another clipping in Stuart’s box.
But eventually Old Mrs. Oppley felt too old to keep it going, and she reluctantly put the house on the market. Carl Bainworthy, a young doctor looking for a small town to open up a family practice, spied the house listing and Judith, his pregnant wife, fell in love with the house at first sight. And so they bought it.
How Stuart—munching on a granola bar and sifting his way through the box of old clippings, deeds, and papers that described all of these things and more—found himself in Annabelle Lee’s house almost 75 years after she and her children were found dead by Sheriff Hale is another matter.
Stuart was a stranger to the house in every sense of the word. He had not known of the house or of Annabelle Lee before this morning, and indeed he was only learning about her as he read through the box. He had not even met Carl and Judith Bainworthy, the current owners of the house who refused to move in. He was merely an associate attorney at the New York City law firm of Dobowsky, Banks, O’Bannon & North, P.C., specializing in real estate law. And the Bainworthys were clients.
Stuart hadn’t been working on the Bainworthy case until the day he was given his unique assignment. He had only heard some scuttlebutt from another associate: After closing on the property and paying the down payment to the bank, Carl Bainworthy happened upon one of the “Haunted Houses of Nyack” brochures and was quite surprised to see his new house, Annabelle Lee’s house, at the top of the list. Judith, wanting no part of a haunted house for her unborn child, refused to move in. They wanted out of the deal, despite New York’s usual caveat emptor policy on real estate.
As the most junior lawyer at the firm, Stuart sometimes found himself assigned to do scut work—hunting down wild deeds, monitoring surveyors, or pacing off a particular boundary line. This assignment was a bit different. “I need you to go out to the Bainworthy house out in Nyack, stay in it for the weekend, and write up a memo on the house’s history. You know, prior owners, occurrences, local stories, stuff like that. Freeman should have a box of stuff for you to go through. I need it by Monday,” said Mr. Banks, Stuart’s supervising partner.
“Alright. But why do I have to be at the house? Can’t I just write it up here?”
“Normally, yes. The problem here is that the defendant, who sold the house to the Bainworthys, is claiming the house isn’t haunted. If it’s not haunted, then there’s no defect, and therefore nothing to disclose. We need someone to check the place out, make sure.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Why me?”
“You’re not married.”
And so, that night, Stuart Biddle shuffled through a box of clippings and papers reading up on Annabelle Lee, her slashed wrists and smothered children, alone in the living room with only a few belongings, his back to the windows so that he could watch the room and its entrances while he studied.
He had tried to order pizza earlier but was told flatly, “We don’t deliver to that house.” So he had ventured to a nearby diner for dinner with a folder of the clippings under his arm. The waitress chatted him up about the house but when he told her he was staying there, she was shocked. “What are you, crazy?” she said. “No, just a lawyer,” he replied. He had tried earlier to get a hotel room but nobody had a vacancy—a convention was going on in a nearby town.
It was dark outside, past 8 o’clock p.m., and the only sounds aside from those Stuart made were the occasional car passing by and a low, dull horn from a boat on the Hudson. The house was dead quiet.
Although the power had been switched on for Stuart’s visit, the breakers in the basement were old. So when the breakers flipped and his two lamps suddenly blinked out at 10 p.m., leaving him with nothing but a flashlight, Stuart had read enough for the evening. His heart racing, he bolted from the house, flashlight shaking in his hand, screaming loudly enough for the neighbors to hear. They knew better than to investigate.
Stuart spent the rest of that night, and the succeeding night, huddled in his car. At first he stayed in the driveway, but after an hour of having the big, lidless bay windows leering down at him, he decided to relocate down the street, and then to a well-lit parking lot beyond the house’s gaze.
On Monday, haggard and pale, he delivered his memo to Mr. Banks.
“Did you see anything?” Mr. Banks asked.
“No,” Stuart replied.
“So it’s not haunted as far as you’re concerned?”
Stuart thought for a bit. “I don’t know, but I sure as hell won’t go back there.”
Mr. Banks smiled. “I suppose that’s good enough for equity.”