Photograph Courtesy of Maud Kelly
August 1965. Dim gaslights lined the streets of West Cabanne Place at dusk. Fourteen-year-old Mort Hill and his 18-year-old sister Holly sat in a car parked in front of their house. The siblings were laughing and visiting when Mort suddenly heard the sound of low, rumbling voices coming from outside the car. He turned to see three figures with long black robes striding down the street. Hoods covered their faces, and bell-shaped sleeves cloaked their hands. They glided along, the one in the middle carrying a scepter. The group nearly brushed the car as they passed, coming so close that Mort could make out the robes’ tightly woven fabric, shining in the streetlight. Looking down, he suddenly realized the group was floating. Before he could ponder the sight any longer, the figures disappeared.
The siblings ran inside to tell their family about the sight. Their mother, Pat Hill, gasped. “I saw them, too, last night!” she said. “But I thought I was crazy.” As she’d been dressing her daughter Carrie for bed in a second-story bedroom, she’d looked out the window and saw a similar group of hooded figures floating down the street. The Hills had just moved from a small ranch house in Florissant to the brick house on West Cabanne Place, located several blocks northeast of what’s today the Delmar Loop; with her brood still adjusting to the new home, Pat had decided not to tell anyone about the sight. Besides, who would believe her?
•
Today, lit by electric streetlights, West Cabanne Place doesn’t feel spooky at dusk. The people strolling down the street—my mother, Uncle Mort and our neighbors Shelley Billingsley and Vate and Alyson Singfield—are ready to talk, and I’m enjoying the way their voices overlap, corroborating sightings and stories. Three children walk with us: my 3-year-old, Finn, my 6-year-old, Maeve, and Alyson’s 7-year-old granddaughter, Haley.
West Cabanne Place’s history stretches back more than a century, to the time when the neighborhood first sprouted up at the end of the 19th century. Back then upper-class citizens looking to escape the dust, teams of horses and people swirling around Vandeventer Place found retreat at the edge of the city. Developers had smartly foreseen the desire for people to get a bit farther into the country. Enter the platting of West Cabanne Place and the birth of St. Louis suburbia. Wealthy citizens bought in because it was accessible by trolley and newly paved Lindell Boulevard. The first lots were sold in 1888 for $2,750; three years later, the price had risen to $3,500. Many of the elegant homes incorporated Queen Anne details, with shingled roofs, clapboards and front porches—a relatively new look in St. Louis at the time.
The residents brought with them a gaggle of laundresses, stable-keepers and maids. Soon developers snatched up more land, and the area began to buzz with activity. The first flats arose on Hamilton—in the larger Cabanne district—in the early 1900s, and as the first half of the 20th century marched on, the new suburbia’s elegance began to disappear. By the ’60s, residents called their private street “The Island,” as it seemed just beyond the tumult of North St. Louis and its cycles of integration and white flight, demolition and neglect. The historic neighborhood remained one of the more successful areas of integration throughout the ’60s and even today, after citizens returned the street to city ownership at the end of the 20th century.
When my family moved there in 1965, their North County neighbors thought it a bold move, but it was a natural one for my grandfather, Maynard, who had marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala. He loved the city. He loved the house. His children, he felt certain, would love it, too.
Decades after my relatives first moved to West Cabanne Place, I asked my Aunt Holly about seeing the trio of ghosts with my uncle when she was a teenager. “I don’t remember that at all. I have so little memory and regard for it that I’ve been wondering if I was even there at all,” she said, alluding to her skepticism of the paranormal in general. “Of course, I don’t have a melancholy bone in my body, so if that’s what the ghosts were looking for, I couldn’t see them. Plus I was nearsighted, so maybe I literally couldn’t see them.”
I think this is interesting, the idea that some people are more susceptible to the supernatural than others. On one hand, I think of myself as not wanting to have anything to do with ghosts. I avoid scary movies because I’m so easily terrified. Yet maybe my fear is a form of openness to this other realm. Maybe I invite it.
•
March 1981. Tucked in a bedroom with a turret jutting from its left corner, I traced the bedsheets with my fingertips. My family had just moved to Florissant from South City, and I would join them once summer came. For now, at the age of 8, I lived along West Cabanne Place with my grandmother, Pat. My grandfather, Maynard, was not long dead, and the house would be sold by this time next year. As I lay in bed, I suddenly heard the sound of three children, two girls and a boy, giggling and whispering. I could almost hear what was being said, but not quite. I ducked my head under the covers, put my hands over my ears and nearly stopped breathing. I stayed under the covers all night and from that point on slept in my grandmother’s room. Like her, I thought it best not to tell my story to anyone. Years later, my uncle and aunt would tell me of similar experiences.
•
There are many stories. The trio of floating spirits comes up constantly. My other uncle, Jimmy, saw them twice. A neighbor once told him, “You’d better get home before dark, or those three men will get you, and the one with the poker will poke you in the belly.”
Alyson, on the other hand, recalls playing in her yard as a child and seeing “a whole group of ghosts, wearing robes with hoods, just kind of milling around.” This information falls as satisfyingly into place as the final piece of a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. In my mind it gives the floating group a destination—friends, even. It would stand to reason—at least so much as the supernatural holds to any rules of logic—that one carried a scepter only on occasion and that some people saw them going west while others saw them heading east. But it raises more questions: Why were the ghosts in white when the trio of floating spirits was invariably described as wearing black? And who were these hooded figures? I rack my brain for an explanation.
The neighborhood was originally named for Dr. James Sheppard Cabanne, who subdivided the land he inherited from his father, Lucien Cabanne—one of five sons and two daughters of Jean Pierre Cabanne, who came to St. Louis from France at the turn of the 18th century, founded the American Fur Company and bought a large chunk of Spanish Land Grant property. Though the area was called the Cabanne district, other wealthy and politically active St. Louis players—including Hamilton Rowan Gamble, provisional governor of Missouri during the Civil War—owned land there, too.
Among Cabanne Place’s famous inhabitants was Confederate Col. Alonzo Slayback. At one time the well-known lawyer owned a farm that his daughter Minnette wrote about in her diary: “It was about nine miles from our house, and we occasionally drove out to inspect it—oftener than Mama liked. It bored her terribly … She did not like the farm, and when Papa died she allowed it to be sold for the mortgage on it. That farm afterward became the fashionable Cabanne district.”
What Minnette fails to mention in the diary entry are the details of her father’s death. Following his stint in the Civil War, Slayback had moved to St. Louis to establish his law practice. His brother, Charles, had moved to the city from New Orleans, where he was a member of Krewe during Mardi Gras. Hoping to bring a similar event to St. Louis, the Slayback brothers congregated with the city’s brokers and robber barons to form the Order of the Veiled Prophet in 1878. Taking his lead from a Thomas Moore poem, Slayback created the name and mythology for the court of Khorassan. The Veiled Prophet Ball was born.
The same year, a journalist named John Cockerill took over as editor of the newly established St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 1882, the newspaper endorsed John M. Glover, a man who was running for Congress against Slayback’s law partner, James Broadhead. When the paper printed Glover’s accusation that Slayback was a “coward,” the lawyer and former war hero rushed the offices of the Post on October 13, 1882. Cockerill reacted by grabbing a gun from his desk drawer and firing. Just four years after starting the Veiled Prophet Ball, Slayback was killed in a much-publicized fashion.
Could it be that the hooded figures were connected to the ball? Or were the figures tied to other groups that Slayback had joined? Of course there’s no way to know for sure, but such history provides fodder for the imagination and raises new questions.
I ponder these stories as we continue our walk, past my grandparents’ old place and a home that was once owned by George and Margaret Laidlaw.
•
According to neighbors and family, the Laidlaws originally hailed from Scotland. Centuries ago, they had waged a longtime feud with another clan. As the tale goes, a Laidlaw murdered the other family’s oldest male child when he was an infant, still in his mother’s arms. Seeking revenge, the family swore a curse that the murdered child and his mother would forever haunt the oldest male Laidlaw.
Centuries later, during the middle of the 20th century, George and Margaret were entertaining at their home along West Cabanne Place. During the dinner party a guest went upstairs to use the restroom. Several minutes later, she came down shaking and in tears. “Who was that woman in the bathroom who was drenching wet and holding out the baby?” she begged of her hosts. George immediately suspected his older brother had died, passing the curse on to him. Indeed, he received a call the next morning. The elder Laidlaw had died.
A second tale involving the ghosts of a mother and a baby dovetails with the Laidlaws’ story. My Uncle Mort tells it best. At sunset during the ’60s and ’70s, the sound of high heels pounding along the street could often be heard. The steps would head west, turn around and come back before stopping abruptly across the street from my grandparents’ house, next to the Laidlaw house. Suddenly, the steps would be replaced by the sound of a crying baby. “The baby would just cry and cry,” recalls my Aunt Caroline. “We would go over and look around the bushes, but we would never find anything.” Vate and Alyson’s father, Waldorf Singfield, believed Cabanne Place was haunted, so he contacted a parapsychologist. During his visit, the parapsychologist stopped at the exact spot where the baby was often heard and said, “There was a murder here. A woman was killed here.”
•
It’s dusk now. Listening to these stories, I contemplate the root of any good ghost story. I imagine two possibilities: 1) These stories are in fact moments in time that somehow, perhaps because of a powerful or traumatic experience, become tied to a certain place and live on through stories passed down through generations; or 2) a spirit is an actual individual, a person playing out those moments just before death like a character in some Edgar Allan Poe tale. Naturally, the latter troubles me—especially at the thought of my own trapped soul—so I choose to believe the former, that a moment can be so pivotal, so vivid, that it keeps replaying like some home movie rummaged out of a dusty attic.
We stop for a break. The children, who are hot and tired, run through a sprinkler on a nearby lawn that once belonged to Gwen Giles, the first African-American woman to serve in the Missouri State Senate. A park down the street is named for her many accomplishments. But Alyson recalls a story about Giles’ personal history.
•
July 1984. Rose Singfield sat on her back porch. Her neighbor, Sen. Giles, was in San Francisco for the Democratic National Convention, while Giles’ daughter, Carla Odom, took her newborn son to the doctor. In the meantime Carla’s husband, Mark Odom, stayed at the house with John Holmes, Giles’ second husband. Over the course of the day, the men began arguing, and the fight quickly escalated. Holmes pulled a gun on Odom. Hearing shouts, a neighbor called the police.
In the meantime, Carla returned home, cradled her baby in her arms and walked inside. The police arrived shortly after and followed her up the stairs. At the sight of the police, Holmes panicked. He shot Mark, Carla and himself. Afterward the 10-day-old baby, whom Carla had been holding in her arms when she was shot, was rushed to the hospital, where doctors determined he was in stable condition. Mark also recovered. While at the hospital, however, Singfield heard someone say, “That must be the baby of the lady who died.” That was how Singfield learned Carla had died.
•
As this story unfolds, my eyes grow wide. I feel the same way I did when I was 8 and wanted to drown out the children’s whispers by burying my head under the covers. “Wait,” I say. “Isn’t it a little strange that on the street where two separate ghost stories involve murdered women holding babies, an actual woman was killed while holding her baby?”
“Oh my God,” Alyson says. “I’d never thought of that before.”
Mort shakes his head and murmurs, “No, me neither.” Suddenly, there’s nothing else to say.
It’s late. The children are tired and must be taken home. As we leave, the street becomes busy again as people venture outside to enjoy the warm evening. I want to stay. I love the camaraderie here, the beautiful houses, the history. My grandfather was onto something with this street. More essential than loving it, his family has been formed by it.
Yet after hearing the story of Carla Odom, I find I don’t enjoy turning over these ghost stories in my mind the way I did before. Carla and Alyson were close friends, and Alyson found herself reliving conversations with her neighbor even a year after Carla’s death. Today, Carla’s son lives and works in St. Louis and stays in touch with the Singfields.
I realize these are more than ghost stories. If there is something beyond these moments, this life, it seems less important now.
