In Brief
For years, guests at Whispers Estate in Mitchell, Indiana swore they heard a little girl singing in the parlor. In 2010 an investigator found the source wired into the staircase. The rest of the house is still busy at night.
The Full Story
For years, the proof at Whispers Estate in Mitchell, Indiana was a little girl singing. Ghost hunters spent nights in the front parlor and heard her clear as anything, a child's voice working through "Ring around the Rosie," and they walked away certain. The story said she was Rachael, a 10-year-old the family had taken in, who knocked over an open flame while sneaking a look at the Christmas presents, was badly burned, and died two days later in a room upstairs.
In July 2010, a Skeptical Inquirer investigator named Kenny Biddle spent a weekend in the house and went looking for her. He found a 25-watt Pioneer bookshelf speaker tucked under the staircase, set between a hole and a floor vent, wired back to audio equipment the previous owner had left running in the cellar. "For many years, ghost hunters had visited the house and heard the singing, convinced they were hearing the disembodied voice of a genuine ghost," he wrote. The singing claim vanished from the estate's website soon after.
The fire itself was never dated. The house's own history declines to put a year on it, and the retellings can't agree, some saying 1912 and others 1921. No death certificate, no newspaper, no county record has turned up to settle it. The whole story traces back to the estate and the people who pass it along.
The house was built in 1894. Dr. John and Jessie Gibbons bought it around the turn of the century, and he ran his medical practice on the lower floor for some 26 years while the family lived above. Three of them died in the upstairs master bedroom: an infant named Elizabeth of unknown causes, Jessie of double pneumonia, and Rachael, carried up there to die after the fire.
That master bedroom is the room people still talk about. Guests report waking to labored breathing and a weight pressing on the chest, the way the guides say Jessie went. The closet has its own habit: the doorknob jiggles and the door swings open on its own, as many as five times in a couple of minutes. And the whispers the place is named for don't come from across the room. People say they arrive up close, directly into the ear.
The owner has felt enough of it himself. "I started hearing noises," Van Renier told a Louisville news crew of an early night in the house. "I had my mom on the phone until I got my ass out of here." The estate runs nightly investigations still, flashlight tours through overnight stays from about 8pm to 6am. The singing got debunked and pulled offline. Everything else stayed on the program.
