Catlin House

A 1912 mansion turned Lackawanna Historical Society HQ. EVP: 'I'll let you know.' Full-body figures on the stairs.

"A horse length. This one goes first." That is what a paranormal investigator's recorder picked up in an empty upstairs room at the Catlin House in Scranton, playing back what sounded like a voice that had not been in the room when the recorder was running. A second recording, made after the investigator asked out loud for a response, returned the words "I'll let you know." The Lackawanna Historical Society, which has owned the building since the 1940s, keeps both clips. Staff walk visitors past the room during the October ghost tours.

George Catlin built the house in 1912 on Monroe Avenue, in what was then a newly rich part of Scranton. He had come up to the city from New York in 1870, traded law for finance during the coal boom, buried his first wife, married Helen, and decided, childless, to build something permanent. The architect was Edward Langley, locally famous. The house is three stories of brick and stone, heavy with Arts and Crafts woodwork, and it was designed to host. George and Helen threw parties. George died in the house on June 8, 1935, at ninety, of a brief illness, which is about as gentle an ending as Scranton handed out that decade.

The Historical Society moved in after Helen's death. They have been there eighty-some years now, surrounded by the creeping edge of the University of Scranton campus, filling the rooms with the wrecked-and-salvaged objects of Lackawanna County's industrial past: coal-town signage, mining gear, shipping ledgers, silver, photographs of dead miners. One theory among the society members is that the ghosts are not the Catlins but the unknown origins of everything shelved and cased on three floors, each object carrying its own small crowd of people who used it.

Members report the uneasy stuff you report in an old house full of old things: full-body figures seen from the corner of the eye on stairways, a feeling of being watched in the third-floor storage area, a cold patch in the basement that does not track to any vent. Nobody is especially frightened. It is the Historical Society. They take notes.

The ghost tours, Scranton After Dark, meet at 232 Monroe Avenue on October weekends. The tour guide will show you the room where the EVPs were recorded, play you the clips on a phone, and then ask if you want to say anything out loud to see what comes back on a recorder. Most people, George's house being what it is, don't.