Happy Halloween! This is a particularly weird one in any number of ways, but to keep from trying to list all the forms of dysfunction we’re probably feeling, let’s check in with the celestial and supernatural worlds.
Something to consider as you work your route, or sit on your porch this evening; this Halloween not only gives us a full moon, but a blue moon too. That is, the second full moon in a single month, and a rare occurrence. The last time Halloween featured a blue moon was 1944. And this time, the moon will be lined up with Mars right beside it, which probably means something you’d need a spiritualist to explain.
Blue moon aside, you won’t even see another full moon on Halloween for another generation; 2039, to be exact. There also won’t be as much of it as with the so-called super moons we’ve seen a couple of times this year. Tonight’s moon view is reduced to a mini-moon, when it is at its farthest point in orbit around the earth. At any rate, you’re under an exceedingly rare sky tonight.
By 7pm it will be a clear starlit evening with a temperature of about 52 degrees and a light breeze from the Southwest.
There are documented ghost stories associated with many parts of Lafayette Square. 2015 Park Avenue was built on the site of the German newspaper publisher Emil Preetorius’s house.
Passersby years ago reported a young woman in a billowing nightgown waving her arms wildly from the balcony whenever there was a full moon.
The first post-restoration residents on the north side of Park Avenue’s 2300 block could have sworn they heard horses baying and beating their hooves during thunderstorms. According to Julian Curzon’s book about the great 1896 tornado, there was a three-story mansion and carriage house in that spot, destroyed by the cyclone. The family huddled in the basement while the roof flew away and the bricks and mortar fell above them. Their coachman was with them then, as he had been for 40 years. He was devoted to Bess, the family horse, and he was distressed to hear the traumatized steed in the carriage house. He ran for the stable, and reached it in time to free Bess, who escaped, while the coachman was killed as the carriage house collapsed around him. The history jibed with the shared stories of the new residents.
In the early 1970s, the new owner of 22 Benton Place, a teacher at St. Louis University, was wrapping up a long day of rehabbing on the house. He saw dimly, “in a freak leap,” the dim image of a grown woman at the top of his stairs. Years later, an elderly woman who once lived in the house paid a call, and told the owner of the death of her brother, who contracted malaria in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and returned home to die. The owner felt that could explain the persistent cold spot in a bedroom on the third floor. He wasn’t alone in his suspicions – there were other stories from Benton Place, and one house in particular, where a constant stream of noise and flying furniture was only resolved through an exorcism.
On Albion Place, a new owner in his home for less than a week, noticed a reddish brown stain on the recently poured concrete floor of the basement. He called the previous owner, who hadn’t noticed anything, but agreed to come later to take a look at it. When he descended the stairs week later, neither of them could find what had been a fairly large stain, Some later research on the owners part turned up a sad tale of murder in the early 1970s. A young man pushed his own father out of a second floor window, onto a brick barbecue, killing him. From then on, the house would occasionally turn themselves off or on, or dim for no apparent reason. The owners and their four year old daughter became used to this, and admirably considered their ghosts friendly spirits.
In fact, it’s said that in Lafayette Square, the longtime owners that share their spaces with bygone residents say they love their homes so much that they don’t intend to leave when they die either.
Stay safe and have fun!
Thanks to research sources, including:
space.com at https://www.space.com/halloween-blue-moon-full-moon-2020 and https://www.space.com/42289-halloween-night-sky-guide.html
UMSL Mercantile Library
Lafayette Square Marquis; December, 2000.
Docent notes from Haunted Holiday House Tour 2000
