Description of Place: Hull House is an intimidatingly depressive three-story Tudor structure that has been connected to and added upon to include a mortuary and crematorium. Balconies and an exterior stairway exist in the former receiving area of the funeral home; the front of which resembles a once opulent mansion fallen into neglect. A perfect location for a house filled with ghosts, the interior is almost vacant of furniture, but unclaimed property in the form of caskets, gurneys and surgical tools in the old mortuary and basement embalming room still exist along with two deserted cars from 1987. Former upstairs bedrooms are still filled with ruined pieces of Victorian furniture, some of which exist in a semi-preserved state. A brick wall topped by barbwire surrounds the whole structure, once considered one of the largest funeral homes in three counties. The dilapidated structure is in a state of decay along with extensive vandalism and weathering from over several years. Dead trees also dot the interior property.

Ghostly Manifestations: Hull House Mortuary is one of those structures where its reputation far exceeds its actual supposed ghost stories. Sometimes considered the West Coast equivalent to Maine’s Mount Everest of Haunted Houses, the Belasco House, or the infamously notorious Defeo-Lutz House in Amityville, New York, the house has endured a history kept alive by local rumor and a consistently embellished account of paranormal events to its dark history, which sometimes reads like a Hollywood horror movie. The actual history almost reads like Seattle’s former Rose Red Mansion; a total of almost twenty-five people connected to the former mortuary have either vanished or have been found dead under suspicious circumstances. Today, many of the people who have lived witness to the dark events that supposedly occurred here claim and swear their testimonies to be true.

Several psychics and ghost-hunters, both professional and amateur, have visited the house to investigate and explore its reputation, which for some odd fact seems to flare up with particular intensity every Halloween out of the year. Manifestations in the audible, physical and olfactory ranges have been described here and include noises, odors, voices, poltergeist-activity and even apparitions and shadows. One visiting psychic visiting the location in an unofficial capacity was reputedly only able to stand the powerful vibrations for a short time. She later claimed the whole land was tainted by something “older than man” and that death and misfortune would come to meet anyone truly foolish to stay here.

As a matter of fact, activity is often felt far and abroad around the property. Witnesses as far away from St. Rita’s Academy eleven miles away have reported strange lights on the hill of the abandoned mortuary on clear summer days. Skeptics claim cars and trucks are reflecting the lights as they turn on nearby Route 22. Other witnesses living much closer have seen the entire structure ablaze with lights from behind its boarded windows as if every light in the place was turned on and left to burn for up to five minutes despite the fact that the local electrical lines to the place were severed and rerouted away from the place in the 1950s. Residents along Hull Road have heard screams and demented haunting laughter wafting down from the direction of the property. Reports of cold breezes rushing down from the hill have chilled residents with the misfortune of being down hill from the deserted mortuary. Several of the more recent residents in the area aren’t even aware of the old structure obscured from them by the trees much less of the old ghost stories in the area. After 1987, several drivers approaching the ascent to the mortuary began reporting vague figures wandering or mulling around where Kinkade Street meets at Hull Road. One truck driver said a spectral female attempted to climb into his cab, but she looked so “odd” that he didn’t dare and let her join him for fear of what she could do to him.

The most popular urban legend in the area concerns that of Angela Franklin, an eighteen-year-old high school student in 1987. Considered a gifted student once, she began delving into a Gothic way of life in her senior year of school and began wearing nothing but black and establishing a reputation as a witch, but even her parents at the time were aware that most of her shenanigans were for solely for attention. On Halloween Night in 1987, she avoided the local school dance and distracted as many of her friends into a separate private party of drinking, drugs and debauchery up at Hull House freed from the restraints of parental guidance and unfettered from responsibility. Old Hull House would be the best place for a small band of teenagers to unleash their full teenage fury and inflict damage on property already falling down around them. While no one is exactly sure what happened next as the night continued, it is quite sure that the atmosphere and reputation of the location encouraged Angela and her friends to look for ghosts, and the grounds surely would have started preying on their imaginations, likely causing them to attack anything they thought was a supernatural entity. Only two of the party guests, Judy Cassidy and Roger Voorhees, escaped the carnage and hitchhiked their way back into town. Local police on the site the following morning found everyone dead from one reason or another scattered across the property. (An exaggerated rumor claimed that they were all hacked up beyond recognition). Since the body of Angela Franklin was never found despite a detailed scrutiny of the grounds, she was declared a likely suspect for questioning in the deaths that night, but after more than thirty years, she has yet to be apprehended although locals still claim to see her loitering around the house and grounds.

Somehow despite the odd deaths in the house, rumors of something far more sinister in the old mortuary developed out of Cassidy’s and Voorhees’s testimonies of the night to parallel the account of demonic possession of Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr. in Amityville, New York some thirteen years prior. Cassidy and Voorhees both became irrationally afraid of the place and claimed that Angela had allegedly become possessed by something in the house and terrorized everyone with the animated corpses of anyone already dead around her. Even through their possibly drug-induced paranoia (both Cassidy and Voorhees swore they didn’t use drugs that night, but they both confirmed they had been drinking alcohol), Cassidy and Voorhees verified that Angela “orchestrated” the night’s events, and neither of them was charged in any way for the deaths of their friends and fellow students.

Following a nation-wide hunt for Angela Franklin, rumors of her occasionally returning to Hull House were reported for several years. The crime scene was kept in check for twelve years, but no reputable sightings of Angela were ever made. In a corporeal sense, that is. Officers stationed frequently at Hull House, however, started reporting someone resembling Franklin lurking in the old mortuary. They described a brunette young lady in a long black bridal dress who grew even more attractive over the years appearing and vanishing on the premises. One officer saw her ascend the exterior balcony and disappear from him despite being close enough to grab her. Another officer trying to fight off sleep in his patrol car was jarred awake by the sensation of being watched. Looking up to the house, he discovered Angela’s ghost staring at him from a second floor window. Another officer caught her sitting in his back seat through her reflection in his rear view mirror, but as he spun around, he found himself by himself. Members of the Salem police eventually began to refuse to be stationed at the old house for Halloween patrol; they swore that Angela Franklin was still living somewhere in the house!

The local district attorney who had lead criminal proceedings on Angela in absentia meanwhile hired paranormal experts to disavow the ghost stories and debunk them. Professional investigations confirmed the existence of the underground stream fifty feet below the ground, which according to legend kept the energies of the house intact, but it was also theorized that the water in addition to shifting limestone deposits in the ground caused some of the so-called hauntings. Electrical objects, such as flashlights and cell phones, also refuse to work in certain parts of the structure, possibly from electro-magnetic fields caused by the crisscrossing electrical lines in the area. A number of the researchers even experienced moments of depressions in time as well as displacement and brief confusion. At times, they departed the property missing or having gained as much as thirty to a full hour’s moment of time. One party emerged feeling as if he’d been trapped in the house for more than twenty-four hours within a period of only eight hours. Soil and environmental testing failed to yield anything to contribute to the hallucinations and illusions described by witnesses. It was finally theorized that the eclectic and eccentric layout of the structure added to the isolation and absence of normal noise turned the house into a giant sensory deprivation chamber, which in turn contributed to mental instability. In fact, stray dogs prevalent in the surrounding woods and birds such as pigeons and owls avoid the grounds. Within the walls, there is no sound of a cricket at night nor of any of the numerous bats that fester the neighboring farms.

Nevertheless, in 1992, one year after police ceased watch on the house, there were unconfirmed rumors of students from St. Rita’s Academy stirring up something supposedly demonic in the structure during another Halloween party. A number of delinquents were found dead from various causes along with the priest sent to recover them. Among the witnesses was ironically Melissa Franklin, Angela’s younger sister, but again, no criminal proceedings were filed this time. Another year later, five teenagers fleeing a convenience store robbery headed to Hull House to hide out and were found dead the next morning along with the detective who pursued them and the officer supposedly on watch that night. Among the bodies that night was an intact blackened and charred female skeleton dragged beyond the walls of the house. Dental records identified them as the remains of Angela Franklin, seemingly charred from the crematorium still on the premises. However, the identification of the remains was never made public because no one could explain the possibility of gas still being active to run the crematorium on the site fifty years after it had been disconnected from the isolated location.

History: The story of Hull House Mortuary actually begins in 1810 when the first settlers arrived in the area and began marking off settlements. The local indigenous Native Americans warned the white settlers from claiming the hill with legends that it was cursed and that the sick and insane retreated there to die from exposure. The underground stream prevented the evil spirits from escaping and settlers were not allowed to dig for wells in the vicinity for fear of releasing the spirits. (A variant of this legend ironically pops up in connection with the alleged hauntings of the Lutz House in Amityville, New York.) A local legend claims that a Sokomosh Indian brave had vanished in the area while hunting for food. He was later found camped out on the site after killing his squaw (wife) and papoose son for food. He was discovered near a tent created from their skinned bodies and gnawing on the leg of his infant son.

Originally built as a mansion, the structure was built in 1911 by local businessman and entrepreneur Cordell Hull, a mortician, storeowner and property owner who owned one of the first local cemeteries. He later ended up gutting the location of his mortuary in town to increase the size of his cemetery on the property and then rebuilding it on the hill on a larger scale next to his mansion. He had chosen the location as a place to reflect his wealth and importance; however, unsubstantiated stories claimed Hull was not the image of propriety that he seemed to be. Rumors of him having intimate relations with his female corpses soon began spreading through the echelons of the Portland elite. In 1915, a maid supposed pressed by the growing scrutiny of the escaping stories of the family went mad and poisoned the whole family. She hacked up their remains and then committed suicide by climbing into the crematorium while it was running at full heat. The flames pouring from it torched part of the steel doors; the heat was reportedly so intense that little of her was found. The mortuary closed down after that and became county property in 1927 after the paid property taxes on the location ran out on the mortuary. Intent of selling the former mortuary dissolved after the original deed vanished with a county inspector and realtor looking over the place, again according to legend, but there is no history to be found to confirm this. He supposedly became the first unconfirmed victim of the ghosts.

Almost ten years of suspicious criminal activity has since placed the house in the custody of the county and the local police department, mostly because of the 1987 sequence of events, an incident which became the basis of a horror movie. Police now regularly patrol the crime scene and watch over the structure every Halloween. Amateur ghost hunters, would-be vandals, suspected transients and potential devil-worshippers are often chased off from the area believed to be used as a hideout for drug-pushers and violent gang members. In Spring 2002, police picked up the creators of an illegal mobile drug lab claiming they were being observed by a figure in a black wedding dress.

In 2010, another movie based on Angela Franklin and Hull House was developed; this one was filmed at the Broussard Mansion in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Identity of Ghosts: Local legend still claims that the ghost of Angela Franklin lurks the house and grounds looking for her missing party guests. However, some of the reported descriptions of the apparitions seen here actually resemble other people who have mysteriously died on the site. The female phantom patrolling nearby Kinkade Drive has been described resembling Shirley Finnerty, the St. Rita’s Academy student who hosted the 1992 party on the grounds. An apparition resembling Judy Cassidy has been also described despite the fact that Cassidy is still alive and living in Dallas, Texas far removed from Hull Mortuary. The more homicidal furies of the seemingly possessed residence, however, reportedly hearken back to claims of something more demonic in nature.

However, local high school teacher, William Cassidy, Judy's brother, has an opinion on the location. A local expert on the structure and closet paranormal researcher, he became fascinated with the structure from Judy's experience and has visited the location several times, taking numerous photos and leading tours with reluctant permission of the police. He has also several times tried to acquire the house.

"I'm not convinced Angela still haunts the house." Cassidy confesses. "Since 1993 when her remains were found, urban explorers and visitors looking for ghosts there have described someone that doesn't match her description. They have all described separately a brunette figure dressed completely in black. Before 1993, this figure was described as tall with long curly dark hair and dressed in a long black dress. That's how Angela Franklin was described. Since then, the figure is described as brunette and curvy with white skin, round features and clad in a black jacket and a low-cut black dress with dark boots. Now, that's exactly how Shirley Finnerty looked when she died in the house in 1992. Can you explain to me how eleven people since 1995 have accurately described a girl that has been dead for over twenty-five years?" 

Source/Comments: Night of the Demons (1987/1992/1993) - Haunting parallels drawn from the DeFeo-Lutz House in Amityville, New York, Smurl House in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, Old Snedeker House in Southington, Connecticut and Shoe Factory Woods in Barrington, Illinois.

The DeFeo-Lutz House from the "The Amityville Horror" (1979/1982/1983/2010)

"Police Investigate Deaths at Hull House" by Jaime Kinkade, Salem Dispatch, November 1, 1986

"No Answers in Mysterious Deaths at Hull House" by Gwen Podewell, Salem Dispatch, November 3, 1986

"Local Legend to get Hollywood Make-Over" by Jaime Kinkade, Salem Dispatch, March 3, 1987

"Local Students Vandalize Landmark" by Mary Jane Betzler, Salem Dispatch, November 2, 1994

"Hollywood Interested in Second Hull Movie" by Elizabeth Keena, Salem Dispatch, August 30, 2009