The haunting in historic Junius Heights

The Carroll family claims so many unusual happenings in their homes that they have padlocked and avoided rooms

If you live in the historic Junius Heights neighborhood, you may need to stock up on bundles of sage and cans of blue paint for the fall. The spirits are restless, according to Shawn Carroll, who has lived on Tremont Street his entire life and owns almost 50 properties in the area. Carroll continues to experience ghostly occurrences and unexplained events. He and his family members, as well as folks renting his properties, have tales to tell. Creepy ones.

“Time to pull the sage out,” he says, laughing, as he explains that he sees a definite increase in paranormal activity from September through November. Adopting the Native-American practice of burning sage, he ritually cleanses his home with the herb at least annually, sometimes more often. He believes that burning sage rids people and spaces of negative energy and spirits.

Carroll also adds “haint blue” paint to the ceiling of his porch and the porches of all his properties. “Haint” is a corruption of “haunt,” and the light blue shade and belief in its power derive from African slaves, he says. Legend has it that ghosts cannot cross water, and the blue is thought to trick the spirits, warding them off.

But some spirits are stubborn, Carroll says. Since moving into their Craftsman cottage, Shawn and family hear disembodied cries at one window. Even visitors to the home have heard the cries and ask about them. A bit of research by the family revealed that two young boys died in a fire and were found huddled by that window.

Carroll and his wife, Mary, can offer no explanation for an energy that seemed to linger in a back bedroom. The room served as a nursery for their oldest daughter, Macy, whom they often found watching and babbling with someone in the room. When they later put another daughter’s crib in the room, she, too, followed something with her eyes, but she often cried out in terror. Family pets refused to enter the room. As a result, Carroll tore down the room. “Down to the dirt,” he says. “But it didn’t work. It moved upstairs.”

Daughter Grace, now 15, tells several stories about the room. When she was 7, a closet door facing her bed often opened by itself, revealing a little girl or a tall man wearing a top hat. One morning, she found three deep scratches on her chest and three on her arm. Grace tells the stories matter-of-factly.

“You grow up with them,” she says.

Directly above that space is a bedroom, which is now padlocked from the outside and unoccupied. The family says it frequently hears chairs rolling around, drawers and closet doors opening and closing and heavy footsteps.

Another bedroom downstairs has become “The Room No One Will Sleep In.” Several of the Carroll children who slept in the room years ago reported seeing orbs of light every night.

Macy remembers an incident she calls “The Ax Man.” She was 13, when she began waking up every night at about 3 a.m. One night, she heard a sound like “a rake on concrete,” followed by “an ax chopping wood.” As the noises traveled higher on the outside wall, she screamed, went outside and found no one. A few weeks later, Macy had a friend over for a sleepover. The friend, who knew nothing of the incident, woke Macy up during the night, terrified. She described the same sounds.

“I had seen my dad being nonchalant about the experiences, so I had the same attitude,” Macy says.

After purchasing and beginning renovation of a house on Victor Street, Carroll was sitting in the kitchen one day when he says he saw “a milky-colored, see-through woman, about 5 feet tall, peering around the kitchen doorway. Then I saw her floating across the living room.” He called out, “I saw you!” and the figure “darted back across my view quickly.” A while later, he heard knocking at the door, and as he approached the door, it opened by itself. “I must admit this scared me a bit,” he says.

Upon completing renovation, he rented the house to Ryan Rynbrandt and Jessi Kennedy, never mentioning the ghostly woman. A few months later, Kennedy asked Carroll if anything had ever happened in the house. “When we first moved in,” Kennedy says, “I would see things out of the corner of my eye — like someone was moving very quickly across the room. It always seemed like it was a small-framed shorter person. It never felt uncomfortable, just eerie.” They have also heard noises coming from a downstairs room. “Many times, I hear something that sounds like the entire shelf just fell over, but when we go in nothing has been disturbed,” Rynbrandt says. “This happens frequently.”

Eeriest of all, however, was a sighting by Rynbrandt at a party held at his home. Carroll attended, and Rynbrandt says he was sober. It wasn’t a scary or menacing feeling. Quite the opposite. She seemed very happy. But it was definitely disconcerting.”

PATTI VINSON is a guest writer who has lived in East Dallas for more than 15 years. She’s written for the Advocate and Real Simple magazine.

By GEORGE MASON