Stratford Connecticut

In Stratford, Connecticut there is a haunted house by the name of Phelps Mansion. Eliakim Phelps, a Presbyterian minister, lived in the house with his wife and children during the early 1900s. Apparently, the Phelps were well known by the people of Stratford to be dabblers in spiritualism and the occult.

Locals say Reverend Phelps held a seance and inadvertantly invited an evil spirit into their house. The Phelps family reported coming home one day to find all the doors of their house standing wide open. What they discovered inside was chaos. Someone had ransacked the place, knocking over furniture, smashing dishes, scattering books, papers and clothing.

In one of the bedrooms, someone had spread a sheet over the bed and had placed one of Mrs. Phelps’ nightgowns on top of it. Stockings had then been placed at the bottom of it to suggest feet and the arms of the gown had been folded over the chest as though crossed in preparation for a funeral. The family were terrified.

Mr Phelps stayed awake that night, armed with a pistol. He walked around the house, keeping guard. But when he walked into the kitchen in the dead of night, he got a terrible shock. The kitchen was full of mysterious figures lurking in the darkness.

When he turned on a light, he found that they were makeshift dummies. Someone had stuffed the family’s dresses and clothing with rags and arranged them around the room like dummies. And all this had been done while Mr Phelps was keeping watch.

The family began to experience poltergeist activity, unexplainable knocking, objects that moved around on their own, furniture being raised off of the floor and objects being beaten against the wall until they broke.

Activity became more frantic the following day as an umbrella jumped into the air and traveled nearly 25 feet, forks, spoons, knives, books, pens and assorted small objects launched from places where no one had been standing. Pillows, sheets and blankets were pulled from beds and fluttered into the air.

The night time hours were filled with rapping, knockings, voices, screams and bizarre sounds, while the daylight hours saw objects sailing about through the rooms. Silverware bent and twisted, windows broke, papers scattered and tables and chairs danced across the floor as if they had come to life.

Determined to find the cause of the haunting, they investigated the history of the property. What they found made them shiver in fear. Centuries before, an old woman had been hung on that very spot for practicing witchcraft.

After that, the activity got worse. The Phelps children were tossed out of bed at night and sometimes were thrown up into the air and dropped on the floor.

Mr Phelps kept finding strange messages in weird scrawled handwriting telling the family to leave the house.

Finally, the Phelps family could take no more and moved out of their house, leaving it abandoned and empty.

In 1947, the mansion was converted into a hospital and the hauntings started back up again. For the twenty years that followed, hospital staff reported knocks, strange voices and doors opening and closing on their own.

By 1971, the mansion had been abandoned. One day, police saw a little girl inside the mansion and they chased her up to the third floor. Officers reported that after reaching the third floor, the girl vanished before their very eyes. Shortly afterwards, the mansion was torn down and it seemed like the haunting of Phelps house was over.