The house has been around since 1856,
built by a merchant named Thomas Whaley.
Some people say Thomas Whaley
still lives here in Spirit.
We visited at night.
Naturally, that's when you'd
expect spirits to come out.
The Whaley House is a museum now
and June reading has been the
director for almost 25 years.
A very pleasant,
very rational woman who is convinced
the Whaley house is haunted.
There is no doubt in your mind
is there that there are spirits in this?
Definitely, I think they'll always be here.
I don't believe that they are going to leave.
I think they're tide to this house.
She says. The spirits are friendly.
They never bother people,
but she says they are present.
The consensus is that there
are four main spirits,
Thomas Whaley, his wife Anna,
a little girl who used to play
with the Whaley children and a
sailor named Yankee Jim Robinson.
Yankee Jim was hanged for
stealing a boat in 1852,
four years before the Whaley
House even existed.
But the gallows stood right here where
the downstairs archway of the house.
You're built theory is that he's still
his spirit. Supposed
supposedly permeates his house.
It's manifested sometimes
by footsteps by walking.
What did you think when you
first heard those footsteps?
Well, I I really had wanted to ignore them.
To be very frank about it,
but the sounds were hard to
ignore. They were persistent
and sometimes we would hear a
sound of someone descending.
The stairs never came to the bottom
of the stairs, but they would.
It would fade out.
There have been other phenomena hard
to explain Mrs Redding and others have
heard music the way he's loved music.
There have been smells.
We get a wonderful perfume which I
think is French and belonged Mrs Whaley.
We get a fragrance of violets like dusting
powder from the girls room upstairs here
and several times the smell of cigars and
no smoking is allowed in the Whaley House
and the smell will travel.
You will swear someone's walking
and smoking toward the front door
several times,
especially around the holidays.
There has been the smell of cooking.
No one cooks in the Whaley.
Mouse anymore we didn't encounter any
strange smells while we were there,
we didn't see any apparitions but
sounds well at one point our audio man,
Rick Corcoran heard a scratching
noise in his earphones.
I can see that there's something
wrong with the mic box, right?
Why don't you do?
It hasn't been there all night.
He just started. He
checked the mikes, they seemed OK,
didn't appear to be anything wrong,
but it sounded scratchy.
I heard some scratches there,
hadn't been there all evening, and
then there is the matter of the ninth step.
You see, there's a courtroom
in the Whaley House.
It was the county seat from 1869 to 1871.
County records were kept here, but the
city Fathers decided to move the records.
Whaley resisted that idea.
So in 1871, some men broke into the house.
And took the records and away
Lee heard the commotion,
went to investigate,
and was standing on the ninth step of the
staircase when she was confronted by the men.
They had a gun.
They threatened her and her children,
and to this day on that 9th step,
the air suddenly becomes much colder.
Really, it might just be a draft,
but it is definitely
colder. I feel a cool,
you feel coolness. Right?
Now former rises what are we getting?
A cool updraft for
there is a spot downstairs where June
reading is convinced something happened.
In the past. She says very often
she can feel an invisible shield
right there and sometimes it hits you.
It will hit you in a strange way. You'll get.
You'll get a real strong chill from it.
I couldn't feel a shield,
but it did feel colder.
Suddenly legends have grown
up around the Whaley house.
There were stories of screams
of bolted windows suddenly.
Flying Open June Reading
has witnessed none of that,
but once she says she and another woman
heard a man's laughter right behind them,
it was loud and there was no one there
except she thinks the ghost of Thomas Whaley.
Proof of all this, well,
it's hard to come by.
There are photographs that appear
to show some kind of apparition.
Then again,
they might be shadows or reflections.
The only real proof is to see
or hear or smell something.
June Reading has heard and smelled.
Others claimed to have seen,
and they are convinced that
even when the doors are locked,
the lights are off and all the
people have left this beautiful
old house is still occupied.