The Peter Green House

The Peter Green House was built in 1869, and its historians claim it was a doomed enterprise from the start. Peter Green himself was ill by the time construction was begun, and would not live to see its completion. He was 68 years old and building the house for his new young bride, Dorris Marie Mae Green, nee Kerne, 26 at the time of her marriage, 27 by the time she moved into her home as a widow.



Dorris claimed from the very beginning that Peter haunted his house, though never malevolently. She saw him often standing in the parlor, looking silently out of the front windows, or sitting in one of the chairs near the parlor's fireplace. John, the son born just after Peter's death, also saw his father in the parlor, and further claimed that his father had intervened to help him on more than one occasion: once at the age of four to command him away from a hole in the backyard where he was playing, and in which a rabid raccoon was later discovered; again at the age of twelve he appeared to convince John not to climb a tree from which another boy fell two weeks later due to a rotten limb, breaking both legs; and at the age of thirty-two Peter appeared to John in California where John, now a newspaper journalist, was away on business, to let him know that his mother was dying (this was the only time he ever appeared away from the house).

After Dorris's death, John sold the house to Brown University, where they used it for the housing of faculty and visitors for the next 80 years or so. Residents reported footsteps, cold drafts, the opening and closing of doors and drawers, whispered voices, and other assorted phenomena. These were ascribed to both John and Dorris, as well as the occasional additional resident who happened to pass away within its walls.

These extra deaths were not excessive nor were they violent. The house itself has never been accused of evil - only of an odd absorption rate: evidence suggests that every single human to have died in or near the house has remained there - including one professor of neuroscience who died of a massive stroke in 1981 in a classroom in a building next door, and a German Shepard named Sadie who belonged to a resident post doctoral student and was hit by a car in front of the house in 1966.

Near the end of the 20th century, the house had become so crowded - and so famous for it - that rooms became difficult to rent. There was nary a spot in the house where some unexplained phenomena had not been reported (though, obviously, much of that must have been due to a bandwagon sort of effect - if one stayed in the house and didn't see a ghost, then one would feel left out and need to make up a story). By 2007 the house had become so unprofitable that Brown was unable to even sell it. Finally, in an act of desperation, they decided to move the house to a new location, hoping that this might dislodge the old ghosts or confuse them, or at least leave them behind.



The gabit failed. Each and every ghost - Dorris, Peter, Sadie, and all the rest - still reside noisily and cheerfully within the Peter Green house. The house has been converted into classrooms and conference rooms, where manifestations and disturbances are still regularly reported to not much fanfare or interest at all.