On a winter night in 1969, three intrepid PiPressers spent a sleepless night in the supposedly haunted Chauncey Griggs Mansion on St. Paul’s Summit Avenue.
They were invited by the house’s then-owner, a local publisher of books on the paranormal named Carl Weschcke, to investigate rumors that it was inhabited by ghosts — but they fled before dawn after hearing what sounded like footsteps approaching their room.
“We all agreed on one thing,” they wrote. “There is no prize on earth that could get us to spend a single night alone in that great stone house.”
Designed by celebrated St. Paul architect Clarence Johnston, the 24-room mansion was built of red sandstone in the early 1880s for local merchant Chauncey Griggs.
Griggs moved out in 1887 and the house changed hands several times over the next few decades. It was repurposed in 1939 as the St. Paul School and Gallery of Art.
Weschcke, who died in 2015, bought the house in 1964 and converted it back into a private residence. Soon after he moved in, Weschcke began hearing footsteps and doors closing while he was alone in the house, he said.
One Saturday afternoon in 1967, Weschcke claimed, he was in his library when he turned around to see a man standing in the doorway.
“Neither of us moved. There was no sound. We just kept standing there face to face,” Weschcke told the Pioneer Press in 1969. “He wore a dark suit. His face was long and thin. His hair was bushy and white. He seemed to have an expression of surprise when he saw me.”
After about 30 seconds, Weschcke continued, the man faded away — evaporated into nothing.
Weschcke wasn’t the first person to report a ghost in the house. Delmar Kolb, an instructor at the School of Art, lived in the building’s basement for a time in the 1950s.
One night, “I awoke and saw a figure at the foot of my bed,” he told the Pioneer Press. “At first I thought it was an intruder. It was a thin figure dressed in black. I remember clearly it wore a top hat.”
Like the man Weschcke reported seeing in the library, this figure also faded away, Kolb said.
Intrigued by these and other stories about the house, former Pioneer Press reporters Don Giese and Bill Farmer decided to visit the house for a series on the paranormal. They brought photographer Flynn Ell to capture any ghost sightings on film.
Read their account of the night they spent in the Griggs mansion.