The house looked haunted. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to tell ghost stories.
I stood in front of the beautiful – and allegedly haunted – stone mansion, talking to a local newscaster from the Quad Cities. She had seen an advertisement for the event that I was going to be doing there and had approached me about a television interview. How could I say no?
The interview went well, and we went our separate ways, both pleased with the result of our collaboration.
That segment turned out to be a huge help for the show. Regardless of how much advertising I had done, several people who came had heard about the event from that short, 2-minute segment. By the time that I started telling my first ghost story, it was standing room only.
While I talked, my wife sat in the sitting room across the hall, doing some work on laptop. I didn’t mind. She wanted to support me, but she’s also heard me talk more about ghosts and true crime than any spouse should have to endure.
My two oldest daughters had also come along to help me out, wandering freely between the sitting room with their mom and listening to me.
When the show concluded and I left the stage, my wife met me in the hallway as the guests left to take a tour of the house.
Before I could say anything, she told me, “You’re not going to believe this. I think there was a ghost in the other room with me”
I was a little skeptical. “You’re kidding me, right?” I said.
“No, seriously! Something happened over there during the show.”
Maybe she wasn’t pulling my leg after all, I thought. After a moment, I asked her to tell me what happened.
My wife said that she was sitting in the room by herself. Behind her was a baby grand piano, sitting next to a window.
Although she could hear me talking in the room across the hall, the sitting room itself was very quiet. Suddenly, she heard something scrape across the wooden floor behind her, near the piano.
Her first thought was that it was my two daughters screwing around. Her Mom Fury summoned forth, she turned to very quietly, yet firmly, tell them to knock it off while I was doing the show. But when she turned, there wasn’t anyone there.
She stopped what she was doing, looking around. The room was empty.
There was no way that anyone could have come into the room behind her except through the window, which were firmly shut. No one had walked past her either, and even if they had somehow gotten past her without her seeing, there was no way that they could have gotten out of her sight fast enough for her not to see.
The conclusion was that somehow, someway, the piano bench had been pushed across the floor by something that she couldn’t see.
I was stunned. I usually only tell ghost stories, not go looking to end up in one. Maybe rumors about the house were true. Maybe the Renwick was haunted after all.
—
I first visited the Renwick Mansion in 2010.
It was part of a historic homes tour that featured some of the most historic and ornate homes in the city of Davenport, Iowa. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know a whole lot about it. I knew two things for sure: first, it had been built in the 1800’s by a man named William Renwick, and second, that it just looked really, really cool.
Renwick was a high-powered businessman who hobnobbed with some of the most important people in the region at that time. At some point, he would probably have entertained these people at his house, and having a plain home just wouldn’t do. If you wanted to impress them enough for them to want to do business with you or be a part of their social circle, you needed to show off that you had the money and prestige to hang with them. And show it off he did.
William Renwick’s mansion was designed in the Italianate style, a very distinctive style that originated in Italy but became popular in the United States during the mid-1800’s.
The exterior was built of cut limestone, with tall windows and large eaves supported by ornate decorative brackets. A majestic porch led to a double-doored entryway framed by round pillars.
Perhaps the most notable feature of the home was the fourth-story tower leading to a belvedere. A belvedere was essentially a room specifically placed in a building to showcase a particularly stunning piece of scenery. In this case, it was a breathtaking view of the Mississippi River valley surrounding the rapidly growing city of Davenport.
Of course, I learned about all of that later. That first visit all I did was try and take in the tall ceiling and ornate woodwork. It was like a place out of time, like you had dropped in to have lunch with Mr. Renwick himself.
The house made quite an impression on me, and I never forgot it.
Now, eleven years later, I was back. I stood outside, watching as the dying rays of the sun played across the stone walls. I couldn’t believe that I was actually going to be doing a show there.
I had gotten this crazy idea for a live event where I told people ghost stories that had come from some of the mansions in the area from inside one of them. It was going to be a free show – mostly because I wasn’t sure if anyone would pay to hear me at the time – and they would get a tour of the mansion afterwards.
I decided to start with the Renwick.
Like so many places, the Renwick doesn’t necessarily advertise its ghost stories. But if you ask the right people, they’re more than willing to share a few.
For instance, one woman who had spent a lot of time in the house claimed that she had experienced some strange things in the basement.
When she would go down there for whatever she went down there for, she would often find the covering of one of the light fixtures lying across the room. And it wasn’t like it had fallen off and rolled across the floor. It was like someone had taken it off and very carefully placed it there.
The woman would pick up the covering, put it back on the fixture, and then go about her business.
She would go back to the basement later in the day, only to find that the covering was lying back across the room.
Several visitors over the years claimed that they saw the spirit of a little girl in the house. One of the most notable stories of the young apparition was from a woman who had rented the house for a baby shower.
After the event was over and everyone was cleaning up, the woman’s daughter came up to her and asked her who the other little girl was.
“What little girl?” the mother replied.
“The girl who was at the party, mom. Who was she?”
The woman was completely confused. There hadn’t been any other little girls at the event.
A lot of people think that a place has to have some kind of dark event to have taken place there to give rise to a ghost. Disappointingly, the Renwick has a pretty uneventful past.
While it was very cool and very fancy, the Renwick was, at its heart, a place for William Renwick to raise his family. There were no gory murders, no horrible fires or tragedies.
After William died in 1888, the family continued to live in the house for several more years. In 1907, it was sold to St. Katherine’s School, and all-girls boarding school that was right next door. After the school moved, the Renwick became part of a nursing facility.
Once again, nothing bad. St. Katherine’s was a respected boarding school for several years. There were never any controversies or horrific events; no history of teachers torturing children and burning their remains in a back bedroom.
It was the same with the nursing facility. By all accounts, it was well run and the residents treated with respect. No elder abuse, no overcrowded conditions where the patients were horribly mistreated.
Regardless, the ghost stories persist.
Several years ago, a young woman was staying in one of the Renwick’s guest rooms when she woke up in the middle of the night.
As her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, she realized that she wasn’t alone. In the corner of the room, she could just make out an elderly couple. They just stood there, watching her.
She was too shocked to move or speak. Who were these people? What did they want? Finally, she found the force of will to open her mouth to say something. But before she could, the couple vanished, leaving nothing but empty air.
Back in the present, I made my way into the front hall. It was just as beautiful as I remembered it. Looking to the right, I saw a spacious room with chairs set out. I figured that must be where the show was going to be, so I went inside.
There was an elevated wooden stage to my right, with stairs leading up. Slowly I climbed up to get a look at where my audience was going to be.
The chairs kept going from that room, through an archway and into another room about the same size as the first. In that room, opposite the stage, was a bar stocked with several different brands of alcohol. As my eyes drifted over the bottles, I figured that at least I would have some place close to drown my misery if the show didn’t go well.
I took a deep breath and thought over the ghost stories that I had practiced.
Several ghost hunting groups have been allowed to investigate the Renwick. Some of them have claimed to have seen the nameless little girl, but many of them only see a shadow about the same size and shape as a little girl drifting through the house. Others say that they’ve seen different shadow figures dart past doorways.
Many investigators have captured something called Electronic Voice Phenomena, known more commonly by its abbreviation: EVP.
The way it works is that someone goes to an empty room alone or in a group with a recording device. Turning it on, they let the recorder run while they ask questions like “Who are you?” or “How did you die?”
Later, they play back the recording and listen for answers. Several have said that something in the Renwick has answered them back.
I pushed the stories to the back of my mind, filing them away for later. Stepping down, I went to talk to my host.
Shaking my hand, the host and owner greeted me. After some small talk, he took me into the sitting room across the hall from where the show was going to be. Like the other rooms, it was large and ornate, a marble fireplace on one side.
The only furnishings were a small table covered by a black tablecloth, a few chairs, and a baby grand piano and bench. By that time my wife and daughters had joined me. In next to no time, we had set up my laptop and books on the table, ready for the signing after the show.
I double-checked everything, talked with my family a bit, then went back to the stage to wait for my guests.
Looking around, I marveled at how well kept the house was. Sadly, I remembered that hadn’t always been the case.
By the early 1990’s, the Renwick was run-down and in serious need of repairs and updating. In 1997, the property was completely renovated under new ownership. In its new life, the mansion was a bed and breakfast and wedding venue, something that the new owners – my hosts for the evening – had continued.
The sound of the front door opening brought me back from my reverie. The first people had just arrived.
And once they started coming in, it didn’t stop. I had expected maybe a few dozen people. I got more. A lot more. That night I played to a packed house while my wife played with a ghost across the hall.
Later, I talked with the owner, a natural skeptic, about what had happened in the sitting room. Thankfully, he didn’t judge. Although he preferred to find a natural explanation for anything allegedly paranormal that happened in the house, there had still been a few things that he just could not explain.
Taking out his cell phone, he began to tell me about a comedy show that had happened in that very room a few years prior.
At that time, they hosted comedy shows in the house once a week. that night, the comic on stage had a water bottle resting on a stool next to him. The cap was off, sitting in the middle of a flat, level stool seat.
In the middle of the act, the bottle cap suddenly slid across the stool and onto the floor by itself.
It was so startling that the comic actually stopped in the middle of what he was saying and asked the audience, “Did you guys see that?”
Nearly everyone in the room had, and no one could figure out what had happened.
Finally finding what he was looking for, the owner turned the phone over so that I could see the screen. Pressing a button, he said, “Here. I have it on video.”
As I watched, the bottle cap very slowly and steadily slid across the stool, then picked up speed and dropped to the floor. It looked like someone was pushing it like one of the toy cars that I had when I was a kid, excepting that there wasn’t any hand there to move it.
On another occasion, the antique wooden blinds near the stage suddenly opened on their own. Surprised, the audience watched as they shut themselves just as quickly.
The owner told everyone that there were air vents below the blinds, and a burst of air had caused them to move. However, after taking a more careful look, he didn’t believe that the air could blow out hard enough to make the shudders do that.
When he was finished, I realized that we were the last ones in the house. I thanked him again for allowing me to use the Renwick for the show and stepped out into the night. I looked back up to take one last look at the mansion.
It really was beautiful. But was it actually haunted?
I thought back over the stories that I had both told and heard that night. Did the phantom of a little girl cause the blinds and the bottle cap to move? Was it maybe her voice that so many paranormal investigators had heard answering their questions? Or was it the elderly couple that had been seen in one of the guest rooms?
Opening my car door, I climbed in and started the engine. Maybe it had been the little girl that had moved the bench, curious to see what my wife was working on. I smiled. She always did have a gift for working with kids.
Slowly I made my way down the driveway and into the city, leaving the Renwick and its ghosts behind.
Sources
Brassard, John, McCarty, Michael. Eerie Quad Cities. Charleston; the History Press, 2021.
White, Meghan. What is Italianate Architecture? National Trust for Historic Preservation, 4/16/2019
The Lumber Barons – The Renwick Dynasty. QCPastport.com
St. Katherine’s/St. Mark’s – A Davenport Tradition. Davenport Public Library blog, 9/22/2008