NILES, Mich.-Whether an old mansion in Niles is really haunted is up for debate, but the strange occurrences at the property are enough for neighbors to wonder about its history. Niles native Daundra Baker says stories persist that the ghost of a little girl walks the grounds, emitting sobs that can be heard in the house and a nearby crypt. Faye Walker talks about a helpful push that saved her from hitting her head but there was no one else there.
The story starts with the April 1870 death of 11-month-old Job Withrow Beeson. The baby was the son of William Withrow and Harriet Sophia Bacon Beeson and the grandson of Strother Beeson, a wealthy South Bend, Ind., attorney and landowner who bought the brick, Greek Revival mansion shortly after it was built in 1847 and 1848.
Strother Beeson added a special mausoleum for his mother, Judith Ann Lewis, who died in March 1869.
When the baby died, it was entombed with Lewis in the mausoleum. Believing the baby was afraid of the dark, his mother developed a habit of lighting candles in the crypt to soothe its fears.
A total of 12 family members are now entombed in the crypt.
Baker said she doesn’t believe in the paranormal, particularly since the 1950s when she’d sip iced tea and visit on the back porch of the mansion with Lillian Beeson Brownfield. The great-grand niece of Strother Beeson, Brownfield, a former school teacher, lived for years in the mansion before her entombment in the mausoleum in 1961.
Baker said Brownfield, who was 88 when she died, quickly dismissed the mansion’s ghost stories.
“She used to laugh about it. She didn’t think it was haunted,” Baker told the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune for a Friday story.
Baker said she has been in the mausoleum twice and has never seen an apparition.
Neither has Ellen Kubiak, the current owner of the Beeson house.
Kubiak said she’s aware of such occurrences as lights that seem to turn on and off by themselves. But it probably wasn’t a coincidence, she said, flashing a smile, that the phenomenon stopped after the house was rewired.
But Faye Walker tells a different story.
Walker said she was helping Christian Inden and his wife, who owned the property before Kubiak, restore the residence in the late 1980s and was coming down from a ladder when she tripped.
“I would have hit my head on a table in the hall but something hit me on the back. There was this great big ‘whap’ on my waistline that pushed me forward … It was the funniest sensation,” she said.
She said she looked up and was surprised no one was behind her.
She said the experience went hand-in-hand with one that Christian Inden related about a time when he was carrying in firewood.
“As he was coming in, the door opened and then closed behind him,” she said. “He thought it was his wife. He said ‘Thank you,’ but he turned around and nobody was there.”
The renovated mansion is vacant now and would make “a wonderful bed and breakfast” for anyone willing to buy it, Kubiak said. As for the mausoleum, it’s been separated from the mansion property and is maintained by family descendants under a perpetual care agreement reached with Niles Township in 1961.
Even if there are no ghosts, Baker says the stories are worth preserving.
“I think children are deprived if they don’t grow up with these old spooky stories,” she said. “It’s fun … it teaches kids fun things and gets them involved in history.”