Glenn House

Three Glenn children died as infants in this 1883 Cape Girardeau Victorian, and tour guides have heard escalating screams from behind locked doors while a board meeting recorded phantom footsteps walking to the children's bedroom in official minutes. Ghost Hunters investigated in 2020.

Every Christmas, staff at the Glenn House in Cape Girardeau wrapped empty boxes and placed them under the tree as decorations. Every morning, the boxes had been opened. Nobody could explain it. They eventually stopped wrapping presents altogether.

The house at 325 South Spanish Street was built in 1883 by Kentucky architect Edwin Deane as a wedding gift for his daughter Lula and her husband David Glenn. It's a Late Victorian painted brick home with Tuscan columns, a turret, and an oriel window, renovated to Queen Anne style around 1900. David Glenn was president of the First National Bank and ran Glenn Mercantile Company. Electricity arrived in the 1890s. Hot water heating came in 1899. The Glenns lived well, by Cape Girardeau standards.

But the family history that matters here is darker. Three of the Glenns' children died in infancy: Henry, David, and Virgil. The specific causes aren't recorded in surviving documents, but infant mortality in the 1880s and 1890s was brutally common, and these children died in this house. Their daughter Ruth survived, living until 1960. David Glenn's bank failed in the early 1900s, and without FDIC protection, the family lost everything. They left the house in 1915.

The paranormal claims trace back to newspaper articles in the 1960s, shortly after the Historical Association of Greater Cape Girardeau acquired the property in 1968 from Mr. and Mrs. Robert Erlacher. By 1974 it was open as a museum, and the stories have been accumulating for over fifty years.

The most specific account comes from tour guides Tom Neumeyer and Christy Mershon. They were on the front porch during a special tour with about ten mothers and their teenage sons when three escalating sounds came from behind the locked front door. First a moan. Then something Neumeyer described as "a cat screeching when its tail gets stepped on." Then a final noise like, in his words, "two cats being dropped into a gunny sack." They unlocked the house and searched it. Nobody was inside.

Around 2003, the board of directors was meeting in the house when they heard the front door open, footsteps climb the stairs, walk down the hallway, and enter the children's bedroom. One of the board members was a retired university professor. They searched the entire building. The front door was locked. Nobody was there. The incident was noted in the official board meeting minutes, which makes it one of the few ghost encounters documented in organizational records.

Christy Mershon was present for another incident when a television crew was leaving the house. A massive crashing noise erupted, like every door in the building slamming at once. The crew's footage showed all the doors standing open. But the microphones picked up the sound clearly.

The children's bedroom draws the most reports. Visitors and staff hear footsteps there when the upper floor is empty. Items inside the room shift positions between tours. The activity seems focused on that specific space, which tracks with the infant deaths and the board of directors' experience hearing footsteps walk directly into that room.

A&E's Ghost Hunters investigated the Glenn House in 2020, in an episode titled "The Glenn Family Curse." The team debunked several claims but couldn't explain everything. The common attribution for the activity is the ghost of a young girl, possibly one of the Glenn children or someone from the extended family, who fell down the stairs. She's the one credited with moving items, opening presents, and walking through the hallways at night.

The house is open May through October, weekends from 1:00 to 4:00 PM. Admission is five dollars for adults, two for children. It landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Somewhere inside, someone is unwrapping the Christmas presents again.