By Connie Cartmell
Copyright ©1996 Connie Cartmell

Through most of the eight years her housekeeper lived with and cared for Lindsay, the mansion was tranquil. But she vividly remembers one frightening incident.

"I was in my room late one night and from out of the corner of my window I saw a dim light in a window opposite my own," she said. "This room was never used. I’d never seen a light in that room before. I was too afraid to investigate where it was coming from."

When morning came, the housekeeper told Lindsay about the strange light.

"Were you up during the night?" she asked. "Did you go into the front bedroom or turn on a light?"

Lindsay told her caretaker she had not.

Cecil Schwendeman, who headed restoration of The Castle for the Bosleys two decades ago, and the house has always been full of mystery.

"I didn’t mystify very easy," Schwendeman said. "But I suppose you could let your imagination go in that place."

Schwendeman said he knows of several strange, unexplained incidents.

"When Mr. Bosley first bought the place, we checked it out at the end of every work day. I kept finding a single screen ripped," Schwendeman said. "One Saturday night we found four or five fraternity boys from the college hiding in a closet. They were all in pajamas and scared to death to move."

He said he’s been inside The Castle a hundred times or more, and every single time he’s noticed something new, something different.

"The house always seemed alive to me," he said.

Lou Moore, a tour guide at The Castle since it opened to the public as a museum in 1994, was a visitor there as a child. She tells of a modern-day "haunting" she and others experienced after a recent training meeting.

"We’d all come downstairs after a tour of the house," Moore said. "Some time passed and we heard a faint thumping and muffled calls for help."

The group set off haltingly to investigate. There was a pause at the bottom of the staircase. They listened. Again the cries were heard, even louder this time. The group climbed the stairs and approached the closed door to the third floor. Then they knew.

"Accidentally, when we visited the tower room, two of the ladies in our group had gotten locked in," Moore said.

The scare was fleeting, but memorable, especially for the frightened women locked briefly in the dimly lit attic.