HGB Ep. 654 - Thurber House

Moment in Oddity - Standard Wing Nightjar

Most of our listeners know that Diane and I are animal nuts, and birding is one of our favorite things to do when we are camping. The Standard Winged Nightjar is a nocturnal bird that transforms into something otherworldly during the breeding season. Found in the savannas of Africa, the male of this species sprouts two absurdly elongated feathers from the middle of its wings. These feathers grow up to twice the bird's actual body length, ending in large fantastical, flat flags that trail behind it like flying kites. During courtship displays, the male flits through the sky at dusk, making these detached-looking paddles flutter above him to mesmerize nearby female Nightjars. When it lands, the bizarre appendages fold back awkwardly, blending in with its perfectly camouflaged, bark-like plumage. There are many bizarre courtship rituals in the avian world. But a bird that flies with its own trailing banners to find a mate like a cessna pulling an advertisement banner looking for love, certainly is odd. 

Thurber House

The Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio is a charming home that is now a museum and meeting place for those with literary interests. There is a tragic and haunted history to the abode. The house sits on the outer border of the former Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum, which burned down in 1868, killing seven women in the fire. Jeweler Thomas Tracy Tress accidentally shot and killed himself in the house when he lived here. Writer, humorist and cartoonist James Thurber lived in the house for a time and he had a ghostly experience that he wrote about. Spirits do seem to knock about the place. Join us for the history and hauntings of the Thurber House. 

Columbus is the capitol of Ohio.  The city is nearly smack dab in the center of the state and so it made sense to make this the center of the state government. It was planned in 1812 and named for Christopher Columbus and quickly absorbed the nearby settlement of Franklinton that had been founded in 1797. When a branch of the Ohio and Erie Canal opened in 1831, the city grew and this growth skyrocketed with the arrival of the railroad in 1850. Columbus would become one of the country's major manufacturers of horse-drawn vehicles and the story of Columbus would continue to be one of transportation and industrial growth. The town took on the difficult task of caring for the mentally ill by building the Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum. The original hospital building was completed in 1838. In 1868, a fire burned the asylum to the ground. Seven patients were killed and over 300 patients had to be moved elsewhere. A new building was built in the Kirkbride style and opened in 1877. It was the largest building in the US until the Pentagon was built in 1943. The hospital would remain open for over a hundred years, closing in the late 1980s. It was eventually demolished. The Thurber House was built on the outer edge of the hospital's property in 1873.

So clearly, the land beneath the Thurber House already had its memories long before the first brick of the house was set. There were the asylum patients who had died. But more tragedy would be added to that after the house was constructed.

Thomas Tracy Tress was born in 1865 and he worked hard in jewelry, becoming the owner of Tress Diamonds. He opened a jewelry shop in downtown Columbus. He and his wife were prominent members of the community. Tress was a member of the Mt. Vernon Commandery, the Columbus Club, the Board of Trade and the Aladdin Temple. He was also the President of a dancing club. We don't know when he and his wife moved into the house at 77 Jefferson Avenue, but they were living there on April 27, 1904.It was a few minutes before 8pm when he had returned home and was in an upstairs room having a conversation with his wife and a woman named Tine Ackerman. Dinner had just been announced and Tress told his wife that he wanted to change his collar and then he would be down for dinner. Before the women left the room, Tress walked over to the dresser and picked up an .38 caliber Iver Johnson revolver that was sitting on it. He whipped around with thew gun in his hand and scared his wife. He laughed and said that the gun wasn't loaded, but she insisted that he put the gun down. He said, "Why, it's not dangerous. Look at me." He put the gun muzzle to his left chest and pulled the trigger. The gun, unfortunately, was loaded. Tress managed to walk himself across the room to a couch and he laid down. He said that he had been foolish and then passed out. Medical help was called, but it wouldn't help. Tress died at the age of 39.

The house was named for its most famous resident. James Thurber was one of the foremost American humorists of the 20th century. He was born in Columbus, Ohio on December 8, 1894 to Mary Agnes "Mame" Fisher and Charles Leander Thurber. 

Thurber's father was a civil clerk and he used to change jobs a lot. Every time he would change a job, he would change the home they lived in. So they moved from house to house to house through most of his childhood. Much of Thurber's humorous writing was inspired by his mother because she was considered a brilliant humorist. Her jokes and theatrics were immortalized by Thurber in a lot of his own writing. Thurber had two brothers, an older one named William and a younger one named Robert. And it would be William who would shoot James' eye out. Apparently the guys were playing a childhood game of William Tell and as part of the game seven-year-old James turned around and waited for his brother William to shoot at him with what was apparently a blunt arrow. His brother was taking a long time so Thurber turned back around just as his brother let the arrow go and he was accidentally shot in his left eye which irreversibly blinded him and he had to have a prosthetic put in that eye. Later on in life Thurber would lose the vision that he had in his remaining eye due to a medical condition but he always continued to write and draw.

From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended Ohio State University and he wrote for the college paper, The Lantern. He also became editor in chief of the Sun Dial which was a humor and literary magazine. It was during this time when he was going to OSU that the Thurbers rented the house at 77 Jefferson Avenue. 

We'll come back to this time at the house as it entails the most famous ghost story about the house. Throughout the years Thurber worked for the federal government first in Washington D.C. then at the American Embassy in Paris. He eventually came back to Columbus in 1920 and worked for the Columbia Dispatch as a reporter. James got married and move to New York and in 1926 he began his career as a freelance writer. There he became friends with E.B. White who was the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web and it would be E.B. White who would introduce him to the editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross, and Ross hired Thurber. E.B. White and Thurber shared an office at the New Yorker and Thurber had been working on some drawings, which he ended up throwing into a trash can. White looked at them and thought they were pretty good, so he submitted them to the New Yorker for publication and they did publish them and this began Thurber's decades-long career of contributing drawings and writings to the New Yorker. The two men also worked on their first book together which was called "Is Sex Necessary" and it featured a number of Thurber's cartoons. Thurber collaborated in 1940 on a comedy play that  was called The Male Animal. This made its way to Broadway, became a hit, and then was turned into a 1942 movie starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. In 1947, Thurber probably published one his most popular works, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and this was adapted into a feature film that starred Danny Kaye and Boris Karloff. 

Thurber was prolific and he wrote other plays and dozens of books. In his later years, he struggled with a thyroid condition and then he was stricken with a blood clot in his brain in October of 1961. While a surgery to deal with the clot was successful, James ended up dying on November 2nd of that year due to complications from pneumonia. He was 66 years old at the time. 

Now looking back at the Thurber House, when the Thurbers moved out of 77 Jefferson Avenue, the home changed hands many times. It became a music school, a beauty shop, and a boarding house. Eventually, it fell into disrepair and it was set to be demolished in the 1970s. But before the house could be torn down, attorney Arthur Worreys purchased all of the properties on the Jefferson Avenue ellipse and his intention was to restore all those homes and turn the block into a community of non-profit organizations. There were several historic Victorian homes. 77 Jefferson was going to take a lot of work because it had extensive deterioration. The woodwork had been painted over, the floorboards were rotted out and the fireplaces had been covered up. They have managed to restore it and Robert Thurber, who was the younger brother of James, helped with some of the restoration and actually donated some items from the family. So some of the items that are in the house today, did belong to them. It now looks the way it did when the Thurber family lived here from 1913 to 1917, with the same kind of wallpaper, antique furnishings, and the woodwork has been preserved. Today, the Thurber house is a non-profit literary arts center that offers creative programming for adults and children and has the James Thurber Museum that's available for public tours. Rooms on view include the former parlor, the living room and its alcove, the dining room, five bedrooms, and the bathroom that Thurber hid in to avoid the ghost running up the back stairs. Wait, did we just say "to avoid a ghost?"

Not only did James Thurber claim to have heard a ghost in the house on November 17, 1915 and believed to his dying day that the home was haunted, but other people who have visited and worked in the house have had experiences themselves. People believe there are several spirits, including the asylum patients, the jeweler Tress and some believe that Thurber returned to this home, perhaps because of his ghostly experience or because it is a museum dedicated to him and his writing. 

The museum embraces the fact that they have a haunted history here and talk about it on their website. People have experienced unusual phenomenon over the years which included a clock chiming despite not being operational, the glass in a picture frame inexplicably shattered all over the floor, there's been sightings of glowing orbs, a full-bodied apparition of a man in a collared shirt has been seen, disembodied footsteps have been heard, people have had the sensation of being touched or poked, and witnesses have report books flying from their shelves and disembodied footsteps on the back staircase, which is also where James Thurber had heard some ghostly footsteps as well. James Thurber wrote a short story about his experience and it was entitled, "The Night the Ghost Got In." Here's how the story went: 

"The ghost that got into our house on the night of November 17, 1915 raised such a hullabaloo of misunderstandings that I'm sorry I didn't just let it keep on walking and go to bed. Its advent caused my mother to throw a window of the house next door and ended up with my grandfather shooting a patrolman. I'm sorry therefore, as I've said, that I ever paid any attention to the footsteps. They began about a quarter past one o'clock in the morning, a rhythmic quick cadence walking around the dining room table. My mother was asleep in one room upstairs, my brother Herman in another. Grandfather was in the attic in an old walnut bed which, as you will remember, once fell on my father. I had just stepped out of the bathtub and was busily rubbing myself with a towel when I heard the steps. They were the steps of a man walking rapidly around the dining room table downstairs. The light from the bathroom shone down the back steps, which dropped directly into the dining room. I could see the faint shine of plates on the plate rail. I couldn't see the table. The steps kept going round and round the table. At regular intervals, a board creaked when it was trod upon. I supposed at first that it was my father or my brother Roy, who had gone to Indianapolis, but were expected home at any time. I suspected next that it was a burglar. It did not enter my mind until later that it was a ghost. After the walking had gone on for perhaps three minutes, I tiptoed to Herman's room. Psst! I hissed in the dark, shaking him. Ah, he said in the low, hopeless tone of a despondent beagle. He always half suspected that something would get him in the night. I told him who I was. There's something downstairs, I said. He got up and followed me to the head of the back staircase. We listened together. There was no sound. The steps had ceased. Herman looked at me in some alarm. I had only the bath towel around my waist. He wanted to go back to bed, but I gripped his arm. There's something down there, I said. Instantly the steps began again, circled the dining room table like a man running, and started up the stairs towards us, heavily, two at a time. The light still shone palely down the stairs. We saw nothing coming. We only heard the steps. Herman rushed to his room and slammed the door. I slammed shut the door at the stairs' top and held my knee against it. After a long minute I slowly opened it again. There was nothing there. There was no sound. None of us ever heard the ghost again. The slamming of the doors had roused Mother. She peered out of her room. What on earth are you boys doing, she demanded. Herman ventured out of his room. Nothing, he said gruffly, but he was, in color, a light green. What was all that running around downstairs, said Mother. So she had heard the steps, too. We just looked at her. Burglars, she shouted intuitively. I tried to quiet her by starting lightly downstairs. Come on, Herman, I said. I'll stay with Mother, he said. She's all excited. I stepped back onto the landing. Don't either of you go a step, said Mother. We'll call the police. Since the phone was downstairs, I didn't see how we were going to call the police, nor did I want the police, but Mother made one of her quick, incomparable decisions. She flung up a window of her bedroom, which faced the bedroom windows of the house of a neighbor, picked up a shoe, and whammed it through a pane of glass across the narrow space that separated the two houses. Glass tinkled into the bedroom occupied by a retired engraver named Bodwell and his wife. Bodwell had been for some years in rather a bad way and was subject to mild attacks. Most everybody we knew or lived near had some kind of attacks. It was now about two o'clock of a moonless night. Clouds hung black and low. Bodwell was at the window in a minute, shouting, frothing a little, shaking his fist. We'll sell the house and go back to Peoria, we could hear Mrs. Bodwell saying. It was some time before Mother got through to Bodwell. Burglars, she shouted, burglars in the house. Herman and I hadn't dared to tell her that it was not burglars but ghosts, but she was even more afraid of ghosts than of burglars. Bodwell at first thought that she meant there were burglars in his house, but finally he quieted down and called the police for us over an extension phone by his bed. After he'd disappeared from the window, Mother suddenly made as if to throw another shoe, not because there was further need of it but, as she later explained, because the thrill of heaving a shoe through a window glass had enormously taken her fancy. I prevented her. I think I love his mother. The police were on hand in commendably short time, a Ford sedan full of them, two on motorcycles, and a patrol wagon with about eight in it, and a few reporters. They sent out the cavalry, it sounds like. They began banging on our front door. Flashlights shot streaks of gleam up and down the walls, across the yard, down the walk between our house and Bodwell's. Open up, cried a hoarse voice. We're men from headquarters. I wanted to go down and let them in since there they were, but Mother wouldn't hear of it. You haven't a stitch on, she pointed out. You'd catch your death. I wound the towel around me again. Finally the cops put their shoulders to our big heavy front door with its thick beveled glass and broke it in. I could hear a rending of wood and a splash of glass on the floor of the hall. Their lights played all over the living room and crisscrossed nervously in the dining room, stabbed into hallways, shot up the front stairs, and finally up the back. They caught me standing in my towel at the top. A heavy policeman bounded up the steps. Who are you, he demanded. I live here, I said. Well, what's the matter, you hot, he asked. It was, as a matter of fact, cold. I went to my room and pulled on some trousers. On my way out, a cop stuck a gun into my ribs. What you doing here, he demanded. I live here, I said. The officer in charge reported to Mother, no sign of nobody, lady, he said. Must have got away. What'd he look like? There were two or three of them, Mother said, whooping and carrying on and slamming doors. Funny, said the cop. All your windows and doors was locked on the inside tight as a tick. Downstairs we could hear the tromping of the other police. Police were all over the place. Doors were yanked open, drawers were yanked open, windows were shot up and pulled down. Furniture fell with dull thumps. A half dozen policemen emerged out of the darkness of the front hallway upstairs. They began to ransack the floor, pulled beds away from walls, tore clothes off hooks in the closets, pulled suitcases and boxes off shelves. One of them found an old zither that Roy had won in a pool tournament. Looky here, Joe, he said, strumming it with a big paw. The cop named Joe took it and turned it over. What is it, he asked me. It's an old zither our guinea pig used to sleep on, I said. It was true that a pet guinea pig we once had would never sleep anywhere except on the zither, but I should never have said so. Joe and the other cop looked at me a long time. They put the zither back on a shelf. No sign of nothing, said the cop who had first spoken to mother. This guy, he explained to the others, jerking a thumb at me, was naked. The lady seems historical. They all nodded but said nothing, just looked at me. In the small silence we all heard a creaking in the attic. Grandfather was turning over in bed. What's that, snapped Joe. Five or six cops sprang for the attic door before I could intervene or explain. I realized that it would be bad if they burst in on Grandfather unannounced or even announced. He was going through a phase in which he believed that General Meade's men, under steady hammering by Stonewall Jackson, were beginning to retreat and even desert. When I got to the attic, things were pretty confused. Grandfather had evidently jumped to the conclusion that the police were deserters from Meade's army trying to hide away in his attic. He bounded out of bed wearing a long flannel nightgown over long woolen underwear, a nightcap, and a leather jacket around his chest. The cops must have realized at once that the indignant white-haired old man belonged in the house, but they had no chance to say so. Back, you cowardly dogs, roared Grandfather. Back to the lines, you goddamn lily-livered cattle. With that, he fetched the officer who found the zither, a flat-handed smack alongside his head that sent him sprawling. The others beat a retreat, but not fast enough. Grandfather grabbed Zither's gun from its holster and let fly. The report seemed to crack the rafter, smoke filled the attic. A cop cursed and shot his hand to his shoulder. Somehow, we all finally got downstairs again and locked the door against the old gentleman. He fired once or twice more in the darkness and then went back to bed. That was Grandfather, I explained to Joe out of breath. He thinks you're deserters. I'll say he does, said Joe. The cops were reluctant to leave without getting their hands on somebody besides Grandfather. The night had been distinctly a defeat for them. Furthermore, they obviously didn't like the layout. Something looked, and I can see their viewpoint, phony. They began to poke into things again. A reporter, a thin-faced wispy man, came up to me. I'd put on one of Mother's blouses, not being able to find anything else. The reporter looked at me with mingled suspicion and interest. Just what the hell is the real low down here, bud, he asked. I decided to be frank with him. We had ghosts, I said. He gazed at me a long time as if I were a slot machine into which he had, without results, dropped a nickel. Then he walked away. The cops followed him. The one Grandfather shot, holding his now-bandaged arm, cursing and blaspheming. I'm gonna get my gun back from that old bird, said the zither cop. Yeah, said Joe. You and who else? I told them I would bring it to the station house the next day. What was the matter with that one policeman, Mother asked after they had gone? Grandfather shot him, I said. What for, she demanded. I told her he was a deserter. Of all things, said Mother. He was such a nice-looking young man. Grandfather was fresh as a daisy and full of jokes at breakfast next morning. We thought at first he'd forgotten all about what had happened, but he hadn't. Over his third cup of coffee, he glared at Herman and me. What was the idea of all them cops, tarry-hooting around the house last night, he demanded. He had us there." 

Thurber always maintained this happened and he changed the address of the house so that it wouldn't bring too much attention to the original house. We have to wonder what was all that running around the table about? And boy, what a commotion it started there. We find it interesting that it never seems to have happened again while they were there.

Anne Touvell, who was the Thurber House Deputy Director, told the Columbus Monthly in 2015, "... a ghost group came in here once, and the electronic voice phenomenon they recorded was clear as day. They asked the air, 'Did you accidentally shoot yourself in this house?' And, I swear, the voice came back on the recorder saying, 'Ask her.' A volunteer named Jan Williams stated in the same article, "Our cleaning people, who also clean the other buildings on the block, they say they've had stuff happen. They won't clean at night anymore. One of our writers had a dog, and it kept barking and barking at the corner in the front room; it wouldn't let her near that corner." Amy Drake shared in a Medium article about a short film that she shot in the Thurber House called Showdown in Amherst. She wrote, "I silently asked for Mr. Tress’s blessing for our filming. As it turns out he had quite a sense of humor. We used authentic late 19th century clothes from my personal collection as costumes for the film. The man’s coat, worn by actor Douglas Fries, had secure buttons when it left my house. During the shoot, one of the buttons fell off. The back of the button was engraved with the name Tress(e), as, I discovered, were all the buttons. After the shoot, I was notified via email that a bookseller had a silk advertising ribbon from Tress Diamonds for sale on Ebay. I purchased and framed the ribbon. In the film credits, I thanked Mr. Tress for his cooperation. I believe he just wanted to be remembered and involved." 

Tom Moore wrote in a News and Sentinel article about visiting the museum and the docent "began telling us a few things that have happened there including the clock that opened on its own, along with people claiming to have seen a gentleman standing behind them with a white collar when they look in the mirror above the fireplace in the parlor."

Did James Thurber really have this ghostly experience? Have other people experienced unexplained stuff here? Is the Thurber House haunted? That is for you to decide.