Stories of unnatural occurrences at theWhittemore House,Washington Unive-sity’s faculty club, began nearly 40 years ago. Upon investigation, some of the oft-repeated tales crumble like vampires in the light of day—but other, new stories of the supernatural are unearthed, along with whispers of a mysterious death and a child’s bones buried beneath the house.
The tale of Whittemore House begins with the man who built it, Henry C. Haarstick. A Gilded Age entrepreneur whose life reads like a Horatio Alger story, Haarstick created an international shipping empire on the banks of the Mississippi River. A razor-sharp financier, he co-founded the Veiled Prophet Ball, at which his great-granddaughter was crowned queen, and established a family that has belonged to the elite St. Louis Country Club for a century. Yet today, few know the Haarstick name, because Henry Haarstick left no male heirs.
Does Haarstick’s restless spirit still walk, 86 years after he took his last breath? Myrna Savoldi thinks so. The former assistant manager of the faculty club says she and the manager, Art Kleine Sr., sensed a presence back in 1969, when they were preparing to open the faculty club, and the signs continued for years thereafter. “Late at night, after the last guests left, Mr. Kleine and Shirley [Sweeney, his assistant] would hear balls bouncing and children playing,” she says. “We’d hear people talking in the lobby in the tone and cadence of anger.” At the time, they thought it was the Whittemores, urging them away. “We didn’t belong,” she says. “That’s the feeling you got.”
Of 12 professors queried for this story, not one has had an otherworldly experience at the Whittemore House. Of course, as the staffers point out, the faculty are not around at odd hours, nor do they venture into the attic or basement.
“I was here by myself, staying in the attic,” says Willie Holt, once the caretaker of Whittemore House, who now works in the kitchen. “It got so I couldn’t sleep at night. There were noises from people talking downstairs and arguing. Other times, I heard party sounds—glasses clinking, the piano playing. It got so I’d go and sleep outside on the back lawn.
“I told Mr. Kleine, and he stayed here and heard the party music and angry voices in the lobby. Then another worker stayed on the third floor, and he could hear the Christmas music and fighting. He felt the hot air when one of them passed by.” Jean Williams, hostess and floral designer, swears she has “locked the windows in the living room at night, been the last one out, come back in the morning and they’re open.”
Ann Chanitz, the club’s sales-event planner, reports working late one evening and hearing “what sounded like a child’s musical toy.” A month later, Chanitz started to tell the assistant manager what she’d heard, and the woman interrupted: “You heard a child’s music box.”
During a dinner at the Whittemore House, when a woman complained of a chill in the room, David Ferriero, executive director of the research libraries of the New York Public Library, turned and said abruptly, “This place is haunted.”
<hr/>
Who lived in the Whittemore House? The story begins with 13-year-old Heinrich Christian Haarstick. He and his parents left Germany and arrived in St. Louis in 1849. The city was reeling from a cholera epidemic and the great fire that had wiped out the riverfront. But young Haarstick, who became known as “Henry,” seized each setback that befell him and bent it into good fortune. In his twenties, he became co-owner of a distillery. It was destroyed by fire shortly thereafter, so he bought out his partners, rebuilt the distillery and sold it, making his first fortune at age 31.
Foreseeing the boom in river traffic, Haarstick next bought the only barge line in St. Louis. As his peers laughed at him, he turned St. Louis & Mississippi Valley Transportation into the largest barge line in America. Barking orders in his thick German accent, he bought out his competitors, opening foreign markets throughout Northern Europe and South America, across the Mediterranean and in the West Indies. No kernel of grain grown in the West went down the Mississippi and out to sea that Henry C. Haarstick did not control.
The public accused Haarstick of monopoly, but it was all legal. He went on to make two more fortunes, in a chemical plant and in banking. He and his wife, Elise, were now more than wide-eyed immigrants with newfound wealth; among his papers at the Missouri Historical Society Library is an invitation to dine at the White House.
Haarstick wanted a new mansion to reflect his station in life. He commissioned two houses on Forsyth, giving one to his younger daughter, Emma, and her husband, Clinton Whittemore. Haarstick moved into the other house in 1912 with his wife, their elder daughter and her husband. By 1928, all four had died, and the grandson named for Haarstick, stockbroker Henry Haarstick Whittemore, moved in with his bride, Margaret Anne (“Margie”), a Pittsburgh debutante. The parties began.
Henry and Margie’s daughter, Gayle Whittemore Williamson, recalls “men in black tie and women in long evening dresses. Pianists played big band and Charleston music on the two pianos. The maid and bartender served the drinks before dinner, and there was a lot more drinking after dinner—whooping and hollering. I used to peek at them from upstairs and watch them try to get to the end of the driveway.
“Mother hated it when people ate her food,” Williamson says suddenly. “After one Christmas dinner, my brother was eating a leftover drumstick. Mother took the turkey away from him and locked the leftovers up in the big walk-in safe.”
Young Gayle often went next door to see her paternal grandfather, Clinton Whittemore Sr. “I’d walk the grounds with him,” Williamson says. “He used a cane with a little revolver at the bottom, and whenever a bunny peeked out of his hostas, he shot it.
“There were never any rumblings of ghosts when we lived there,” she adds. “My grandfather would have shot them.”
<hr/>
During the 22 years after the Whittemore House was built, five residents died. The first four—Haarstick, his wife, their daughter Ida and her husband—were all elderly and died natural deaths.
The fifth was a 3-month-old baby.
Henry and Margie Whittemore were close to Henry’s brother, Clinton Whittemore Jr., and his wife. In 1937, both couples adopted daughters from the Cradle Society, in Evanston, Ill. Clinton’s baby—Barbara, nicknamed “Boo”—grew up to become a
Veiled Prophet queen. Henry’s baby, Leigh, never grew up.
“The Cradle insisted that everyone take a nanny from the agency,” Williamson says, “but Mother, known to be frugal, hired a local woman to take care of her baby.”
Eric Colen, whose parents were servants to the Whittemores, remembers the sad New Year’s Day 1937: “My father had to go next door to the annual party and tell the young Whittemores that their daughter had died.”
The nurse had fed the baby, put her to sleep on her back and tucked her in tightly—too tightly, the family decided. The infant had vomited and choked to death. “The family faulted the nurse for not being diligent,” says Colen. “They faulted the Cradle. And the agency faulted them for not using one of their nurses.”
Baby Leigh was interred in the Haarstick mausoleum in Bellefontaine Cemetery. The cause of death remains uncertain. Henry Whittemore, usually mild-mannered, blamed his wife for being too cheap to hire a nanny from the Cradle. The couple fought bitterly.
<hr/>
If the spirits said to haunt the house are not relics of greed or grief, could they hark to an early landowner? A title search graphs the historic power shift in St. Louis, from the French Creoles to the Anglo-Americans to the Germans. Marie Therese Bourgeois Chouteau, St. Louis’ first grande dame, known as Madame Chouteau, had a daughter, Maria Louisa Chouteau Papin, who became a major landowner thanks to a 1796 Spanish land grant of 2,200 acres. She sold a southern chunk of the Papin tract to Thomas Forsyth, a hero of the Indian Wars. The land passed to his grandchildren, one of whom was Laura Forsyth Tesson.
The 1904 World’s Fair leased the Tesson tract to build the French Pavilion and the Forestry, Fish and Game Building. After the fair, the property stood vacant until Tesson sold 51.55 acres to Union Trust in 1909.
There was a reason the bank wanted those alfalfa fields. Washington University’s once-fashionable downtown neighborhood was marred by urban blight. Robert Brookings, who sat on the bank board and presided over the board of Washington University, saw a way to protect the new “Hilltop” campus: surround it with an upscale residential enclave. So he had the bank plat and subdivide the land for homes, and he and Haarstick, another bank official, bought lots themselves.
Haarstick landscaped the grounds with gazebos, circular ponds and 100 magnolia, catalpa and pine trees. For an architect, he looked no farther than across the street, where Scottish architect James P. Jamieson had designed Brookings Hall, Graham Chapel and Robert Brookings’ home, now the Alumni House. Jamieson also designed Princeton University and Bryn Mawr College.
When the widow of Haarstick’s grandson donated the Whittemore House to Washington University in 1966, the place looked to Joe F. Evans, then assistant vice chancellor of business affairs, like a perfect setting for a faculty or alumni club. Construction began—and so did the stories.
<hr/>
“We were outside. A con-struction worker who was excavating found the bones. The workmen were shocked,” says a witness who wishes to remain anonymous. “The bones were small, childlike—a skull and what seemed to be a leg. They were collected in a plastic bag.”
Myrna Savoldi remembers that the construction workers and Whittemore staffers were “hurrying to get the house ready to open. It was sometime between Labor Day and Thanksgiving 1969, late in the afternoon, and everyone was winding down to go home. The construction crews were digging in the back, and they found bones. The men said they were definitely human, not animal. Mr. Kleine and his assistant came running downstairs, and Mr. Kleine wouldn’t let any of us outside. I think he didn’t want us upset.”
The assistant, Shirley Sweeney, says, “It was in the afternoon, late. Mr. Kleine told everybody who was upstairs to stay upstairs. Everybody freaked out, if you want to know the truth. Everybody [who was standing outside] took a look—the work crews, Art Kleine, myself.”
Evans dismisses the stories: “I don’t recall anything about bones’ being found, and I’m sure I’d have remembered.” There are no official reports of remains’ being found. The contractor who renovated the house is dead and his firm disbanded. The subcontractors are no longer in business, and Art Kleine Sr. died in 1988.
If bones were indeed discovered, it was 36 years ago, before laws and custom changed the way in which remains are handled. So they, too, must remain a mystery, adding to the general aura of the house.
Holt, who has worked at the Whittemore House for nearly four decades, sums it up: “You can feel something, like warm air passing by. You can even hear them. But you can’t see anything.” He shrugs. “Those feelings are always going to be here.”
By Ellen Harris and Sunny Pervil
