HAUNTED LAWRENCE

The Goodrich House is a majestic Queen Anne–style home located
along Massachusetts Street, just a few blocks south of the city’s main
commercial district. * While during the verdant seasons of spring and summer
a roadside view of the structure is often obstructed by several magnificent
trees, as soon as the weather cools and the leaves begin to fall, the building’s
lovely façade becomes visible to all.
But this charming exterior disguises a rather eerie secret: the house is
haunted by the ghost of a girl, whose spirit some have even seen wandering
the hallways of the old building.
Who exactly is this young woman, and why does she remain in the
residence? This question has been the subject of intense speculation.
According to RealHaunts.com, during Quantrill’s Raid, a girl (who some
say was named Catherine) “was raped and then killed in the basement of this
house.” Following this, her body was dumped in a well located somewhere
on the property. Due to this horrific event, her spirit was unable to find
rest, and to this day she still haunts the place where she was so gruesomely
demeaned and slaughtered.
While this account makes for a disturbing and effective ghost story, it is
almost certainly apocryphal. First, prior to his attack, Quantrill specifically
ordered his troops to “shoot every soldier you see, but in no way harm a
woman or a child.” His followers listened to him (unlike in the case of the
* Some call the building the “Lynch House,” after the building’s previous owners, Dick and
Marie Lynch.
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Albach House), and consequently, no women were assaulted or killed during
Quantrill’s Raid. Second, this house was built in 1890, almost thirty years
after Quantrill’s Raid, by a fruit merchant and the eighth postmaster of
Lawrence, Eugene F. Goodrich.
Goodrich owned the house until 1911, when it was sold to William
and Sarah Cockins. The Cockinses eventually passed the home onto their
daughter and her husband, Carol and William E. Tenney. For the next few
decades, the house was owned by many people until it was acquired by Dick
and Marie Lynch, who turned it into apartments. By 1999, the building was
sadly rundown and dilapidated, but it was soon purchased by Drs. Erin and
John Spiridigliozzi, who restored the home to its original Queen Anne style.
So while it is highly unlikely that the home is haunted by a victim
of Bleeding Kansas, this does not mean that the building is without a
paranormal inhabitant. After the article on RealHaunts.com was posted,
an individual going by the moniker “K Taylor” commented on the post
and argued that the Quantrill’s Raid story was highly suspect: “I believe
the house was built in the 1890s which was well after Quantrill, so I’m not
The front of the Goodrich House. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).
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sure about the rape story.” However, while K Taylor repudiated the story
as posited by RealHaunts.com, they ultimately did concur that the house
was haunted. Citing personal experience and anecdotal evidence garnered
from friends, they wrote:
I lived in the Lynch house with various roommates for almost 2 years up
until the current owners purchased the home. It was a rental property for
several years and there were many tales among the downtown college crowd
from people that either lived there or knew someone who did. I only had a
couple of unusual experiences when I lived there, however my roommate
[regularly] heard footsteps on a boarded up stairway and a few times
suddenly blurted out, “There’s someone in the room with us.” There was an
afternoon that I was home alone and the buzzer type doorbell began to ring
as if someone was just holding down the button. I figured it was maybe just
an electrical short, however I started getting annoyed and said out loud for it
to stop. This continued for about an hour and would cease everytime [sic]
I would tell it to “Stop already!” One snowy night I actually called [the]
police because I was so absolutely sure that there was someone walking
around the rental office downstairs. [There was] no one there and no
footprints in the snow.…[I had] a couple friends that refused to come into
the house altogether without knowing the haunted reputation.
K Taylor is not the only one to assert that the house is haunted. According
to Dr. Erin Spiridigliozzi, the current co-owner of the home, previous
occupants have relayed a number of interesting stories, with reports of doors
mysteriously shutting being among the most common.
Some of the other stories are a little more involved. According to one
former occupant, “The [ghost] has grabbed my feet while I was asleep. It
also liked to turned the attic lights on and off, and open and close [the] attic
door in the bathroom.”
A couple who had formerly lived in the Goodrich House relayed a
bizarre incident that involved their dog. According to them, they had gone
to a show one night and left their dog home alone. When they returned,
they found that it had torn open the screen of the second-floor window
and jumped out. According to the two, “[The dog] was sitting on the porch
waiting for us when we got back—he was completely freaked.”
A final individual recalled myriad incidents that they had experienced
while living in the house:
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We had lots of experiences with the ghost. We lived in the apartment on
the second floor. We’d hear the front door slam pretty often, and go down
and find it locked. The bedroom to the north had a closet with really heavy
plywood sliding closet doors, which were broken and off the track—really
hard to move. A couple of times they would slam back and forth. Pretty
freaky. The big bedroom on the south side…had a closet that didn’t stay
shut. There was a padlock bracket so you [had to lift it] up to secure it. It
would fly open at times. Once we keep [sic] trying to keep it closed, put a
pencil in, and it still flew open, breaking the pencil. I had a vintage sweater
that I’d find some mornings folded up and set on the bannister. A lot of guys
said they were pushed in the hallway at night, or woken up from sleeping
on the couch, their feet having been pushed off. Guys seemed to have more
physical pushing or touching than women. I got to admit it was weird, but
I never felt threatened at all.
But if the Quantrill’s Raid story is surely a fiction, then what is the source
of the haunting? K Taylor explained, “I had a friend that did some research
and told me that there was a teenage girl by the name of Margaret Acock
that died from consumption in the home around the turn of the century.”
Is there any substance to this online assertion? A search of area newspapers
turns up no mention of a “Margaret Acock,” and the name is not to be
found in cemetery records of the area.
But the answer might not be that simple. As mentioned earlier, in 1911,
A.E. Goodrich sold the house to William and Sarah Cockins. Seven years
prior, in 1904, their sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Marguerite Tenney, died
of tuberculosis in Chicago. Because she had previously attended high school
in Lawrence (where, according to the Lawrence Daily World, “her happiest days
were passed”), her body was returned to the city, and a funeral was held in
the Cockins house on Tennessee Street. She was later laid to rest in Oak Hill
Cemetery. Is it possible that “Margaret Acock” is just a combination of the
misspelled names Marguerite and Cockins? It seems likely.
If this is the case, and the spirit of Marguerite Tenney is the one roaming
the halls of the building, why is she haunting in the Goodrich House of
all places? After all, young Marguerite never lived in the house. However,
both her grandparents (William and Sarah Cockins) and parents (Carol and
William E. Tenney) did. In fact, the Goodrich House was in the hands of
the Cockins-Tenney family from 1911 until 1932. Could it be that the spirit
of Marguerite was drawn to the place where her beloved relatives were, and
she simply decided to stay? Spiridigliozzi seems to agree with this hypothesis,
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saying, “I do think the most plausible explanation is that the ghost [of
Marguerite] followed her ancestors back to 1711 Massachusetts. I can think
of no other explanation.”
Regardless of how the house became haunted, Spiridigliozzi believes
that the spirit’s presence is nothing to fear. During the renovation of the
house, Spiridigliozzi sealed up crystals, information about her family and
a photograph of herself into the building’s walls, so that the spirit of
Marguerite would know a bit more about Spiridigliozzi and how much she
cares for the structure. Since then, the spirit that so many people claim to
have encountered within the confines of the building has quieted down.
The Goodrich House is located at 1711 Massachusetts Street.