Investigation Dates: January 13 & February 24, 2020
Expedition Team: Dave Miller, Jim Hall, Norm Miller
HISTORY: this beautiful house on Linden Avenue built in 1919-1920 was owned by Mr. Rust who owned Rust Bakery in Miamisburg. The old part is a Sears Catalog House with additions added on later. The Morris family purchased the house in 1969 and have owned it 50 years. We interviewed Betty, a retired teacher who was a very sweet and educated person. Her husband Ross, a former elementary school principal and assistant school superintendent died a year earlier. The house looks like it could be featured in a magazine as every room is decorated beautifully.
CLAIMS: There are many incidents. Betty stated she began feeling things and hearing things as soon as they moved in. Russ began hearing children playing and children’s laughter in the hallway upstairs. One Saturday morning he heard children laughing and he told them to stop it. He immediately went upstairs to find both of his children sleeping soundly. Her sister and husband came to visit and slept in the back bedroom. The sister heard children in the hallway but when she got up to look there were no children. Betty’s kids were not in the house at that time. This independent witness who knew nothing about Ross’s claims to hear children substantiated the claims.
Late one evening after 1:30am Betty went down to the basement to get the laundry. She knew she left the stairs door open and unlocked. When she climbed the stairs she found the door locked. Betty hammered and yelled to try to awaken her family on the second floor as they were sleeping. She was scared at first but then felt calm. Suddenly the door lock unlatched and swung open (Photo#1). She mounted the final two steps and ran into the kitchen. No one was there. She ran upstairs and found her husband and kids sleeping soundly.
One Christmas Eve the family came home from church. Betty walked into the dining room, bent over to get dished from a cabinet (Photo#2), stood up and saw a figure. It had a face but no features and no arms. The person was wearing an old ruffled shirt. Because of that Betty assumed it was a man.
Ross was given a pocketknife and always carried it with him. It disappeared. Two weeks later it appeared on the chest in the bedroom. Also, in the bedroom, the music box came on one time all by itself. Another time Betty was napping while Ross was in the hospital. Betty felt a warm hand put a blanket over her. An hour later she awoke and thanked her adult daughter. The daughter said she was never upstairs and did not put a blanket on her. The blanket had come from the linen closet in the hallway where the children’s voices are heard.
A final oddity. Betty found one day on top of her lingerie in a drawer was $44.44 in cash. Ross claimed he did not put it there. Later that summer one of the Rust family children came back for a reunion and asked to tour the house. Lois Rust told a story where her mother had $50 taken from her purse when Lois was a young girl and Lois was accused of stealing it. Lois had not taken the money and it was never found. Was the $44.44 returned by the ghost?
INVESTIGATION: This house may have a residual haunting since there have been the same continuous reports of children’s voices laughing and playing. Jim Hall and I took dozens of photos and did EVP’s in all of the second floor rooms and the first floor dining room.
We spent two hours just on the second floor since that was where the great majority of claims of children’s voices took place. One significant piece of evidence was collected. Jim placed the EMF meter in a children’s crib in the back bedroom which Betty said was a playroom for her children. When asking if any of the Rust family children played in this room the meter lit up several times (Photo#5 & #6). Betty has invited us back to investigate anytime we want in the future. From the claims, there appears nothing malicious about the ghosts that reside in this house.
