"My own family was always a little superstitious. If you look at my cousin Sam’s writings, there is no doubt that at one time he believed in ghosts. And I still have a very charming cousin in Saint Louis who insists, after all these years, that the house she grew up in on West Pine Boulevard was definitely haunted. No sooner did the family move into that home than strange things started happening. And that’s when the house was brand new! The servants began complaining that a strange man was also living in the house. They told of him walking through the place in the evening, stopping at any open doorway, and staring in, as if he were looking for someone. At first, nobody took the complaints seriously, until all the servants quit. Then the new domestics made the same complaints!

"Finally, my aunt sat down and asked everyone to describe completely who, or what, they thought they saw. When she heard their detailed description, she became very upset. She sent for the family photo album and showed them a photograph of the person they described. The servants became very excited, and identified the man in the picture as their nightly visitor. The only trouble was, the man in the picture was her brother-in-law - dead for over a decade!

"He was never seen in the house again, but other spirits supposedly took his place. One was Ruth Stewart, a famous aviatrix of the 1930’s. She was a close family friend who gave her dog, Wrinkles, to the children, when she no longer had time to care him. One evening, the youngest daughter in the house woke up and saw Ruth standing by her bedside. She really loved Ruth but, that night, she became frightened. The next morning, she told her mother, ‘I saw Ruth last night, and got scared. I didn’t want her to know I was afraid, so I just told her I was awfully tired and went back to sleep.’ Later that day, they received the word that the aviatrix had been killed the night before in a plane crash in Pennsylvania.