A Eulogy

I spent my morning at a funeral today. I've been to many funerals over the last few years.  I gave the eulogy at this one.   In honor of my grandmother, who was a fantastically difficult woman but who never failed to inspire me,  here is her eulogy. She is the little girl in the picture above.  The house behind her was her family home The Newton-Allaire house.  I know her ghost has gone home to the house she loves now.

My grandma Kay, Kathleen Allaire,  was a woman with a personality that was larger than life. Whether you loved her or hated her, she always made an impression and nobody ever forgot her. Even those who met her only in passing were marked by her strength of will and her passion, even up until the end.



As a child, my best memories of my grandmother were in her spectacular house. The Newton-Allaire house has been in her family for 140 years and she spent her life renovating it and turning it into a proper Victorian mansion. To me, she seemed like a dowager empress in the old house. We would drive for hours to reach her in the very North of Michigan and there we would find her waiting in her mansion amongst the old trees. I loved the summers I spent up there with her in her house with all of my family around me. They are some of my fondest childhood memories. During these visits, I would go up and visit my grandmother in her room and she would always give me candy and tell me stories. She talked about her days as a teacher or her days as an actress. We shared our passion for ghost stories and history. While I was up there, I went through her large library of ghost stories and horror stories. She nurtured a love for all things haunted and old and beautiful in me, which I still have today.


Even in her last days, when I visited her in Harbor Chase Assisted Living or in the nursing home, she would always share stories with me. On one of my last visits to see her, she talked about her childhood in Detroit when Detroit was beautiful and grand. She told me about how she convinced her mother to let her take the street car to the old opera house to see shows. Her mother let her go only if she was with her older sister, Miriam. Together they would ride the street car as often as my Auntie Mimmie would take her and my grandmother fell in love with the theater. It is not surprising that she loved to act and that performing was one of her great passions in life. To me, she always seemed like she was on stage. I will miss her. 

Restless Nights in the Victorian Mansion

I am home now.  I am sitting in a quiet room in the Newton-Allaire house.  The house is a beautiful as ever.  It has been sitting empty for fours years now and the ghosts here are quiet.   The last time I was here my grandmother still lived here and the ghosts were loud and and robust, but years of silence seems to have lulled them into a deep sleep.   I don't feel them here like I used to.  They are a whisper hidden in quiet corners.   The ghosts were always most active here at night, making sleep challenging.  That seems to continue and the house still groans, reminding me of nights when I sat up searching for the source of strange footsteps and phantom whispers.

As I've explored the old house,  I've found bits of my history and ancestry.   The stories of the ghosts that have always lived here with us have come to light.  The house was built in 1871 by Archibald P. Newton who in 1876 was elected first president of the village of Cheboygan.  He built the stately house, with its cupalo top as a wedding gift to his bride Cornelia Allaire, who was his second wife.  We call Cornelia Allaire Aunt Newton.   Mr. Newton came to Cheboygan from St. Helena Island where he and a brother Carl in 1853 bought the island and where they built a good dock and large store.  In Cheboygan, he entered into business of processing hemlock for the sap which was an essential in tanning leather.  Mr. Newton loved to stand in his glassed in cupola atop his mansion and look out at the boats in the straights.  So do I.

Aunt Newton survived her husband after his death.  She died in 1916 leaving her entire estate to her only brother, Joseph Allaire who lived on a nearby farm.   Joseph Allaire was my grandmother's grandfather.  The house passed on to their children Charles and Bert Allaire in 1934 when Joseph Allaire died.  Subsequently the house was inherited by Bert Allaire's widow Irene Allaire.  She was my great-grandmother who we all called Nonnie.   The house is now in the hands of my mother and her 2 cousins and sister. 

I hope it will stay with us and it well re-awake into the living, breathing house I remember it to be when I was child.  Now it sleeps, but everything that sleeps can be awakened.

 

 

 

Cheboygan on Dwellable

The House that Haunts My Dreams: The Newton-Allaire House

If you have followed my blog regularly,  you know my family owns a large Victorian house in Northern Michigan.   This house was my favorite place in the world as a child.  It was the cradle of all my dreams and the inspiration for my first stories.  It whispered to me in my sleep and made me believe that there was more to life than we can see, touch, and taste.  The house's ghosts were old and they followed you throughout the house.   I loved the ghosts in the house as I loved the house.  It bound me to a history I knew little of and made me part of a family that went back for generations.

Over the last few years, the surviving members of my family have tried desperately to sell and get rid of this haunted piece of our family history.   This week,  I'm going up to make one final plea to keep it.  My mother and I and our families will take a long drive up North.  It is a thousand miles for us and we will see if there is any hope left.  

My dream is that we could rent the house out.  It is a few blocks from the beach and one block to the bookstore and movie theater.  It is a twenty minute drive to Mackinac City and Mackinac Island.   It has 8 bedrooms and is filled with ghosts and histories.  It seems like it would be a good vacation rental and then we could stay in it during our off weeks.   We will see.  This will be an up hill battle.   Either way,  on Monday I'll post pictures of the old house and use a few of the ghost hunting skills I learned last Friday to see if I can talk to some of the ghosts in the house.  I'm hopeful.  The ghosts talked to me when I didn't want them to as a little girl.  I'm pretty sure they should be even more talkative now that I do want them to talk.

I may not blog again until I get there.   I can't wait.  The painting above is one of the many paintings I did of the house.  Even if we sell it,   the house will always be part of me.

My Ghosts

The ghosts of my past having been pulling at my heart strings lately.  The pull is so strong is tangible.   The pull started long before my visit to my grandmother yesterday,  but she only made it worse.  For most of my life my grandmother was the dowager empress of the family.  She sat in our old, family house  like a queen.  Our family house is in Cheboygan, Michigan and it is 150 yrs old.  It has been in our family for all those long years when my great, great, great uncle  built it as a wedding present for my great, great, great Aunt Newton.  The house was haunted.  It wasn't something people spoke of often, but it was certainly a given.  Entire batches of photographs were thrown out because white mists permeated all of them obscuring the faces of the living.  Strange noises came and went at night.   There was a cold spot in the middle of the old kitchen at midnight. 

There are so many stories it is impossible to list them all.   I visited once after a wedding.  I never took out my wedding clothes at the house.  I left them at the bottom of the suitcase.  After my departure,  they were found laid out on the floor of the attic.  There were no children or pranksters present during that trip.  Strange things like that were just normal there and that house was and is my favorite place in the world.  When I was a girl I used to hide under the piano in red parlor so I wouldn't have to go home.  The house was my home.  It was huge and beautiful and it was part of our family legacy.   With eight bedrooms and  2 kitchens and 2 parlors, a library, a den, and a dining room it was large enough for my entire family to meet in every summer.  All my aunts and uncles and cousins would fill the halls with laughter and drinking.   The adults would play cards well into night and the children would creep around the darkened rooms when we were supposed to be asleep. 

Many years have past since those days.  The family has broken apart.  Everyone got divorced and the cousins were left drifting in the wind.  Even my grandmother,  the dowager empress herself, has dementia and must now sit alone in a nursing home while her castle sits empty.   Yesterday, she and I looked at photos of the old days and I wanted to weep.  Ghosts drifted in and out of the pictures like family and she smiled and spoke of the house like a person.  To her,  the house is alive.  It is her great love and best friend.  The house is for sale now and  I have no ability to stop it.  It sits empty while the price drops as no one wants an old mansion in Northern Michigan.  My grandmother says some day she'll go back there and maybe she will, but not in life.  Maybe some day her ghost will join the others and she'll be empress once again.  I wish I could be there when she returns.  I wish we could keep our haunted castle.