Peninsula In Passage

found it, scenically, at Eagle Point. In 1970 they added a wing to the house for a shop, garage, dorm for the kids and a studio for his mother who painted. A worn tenant house, two rooms up, two rooms down plus a kitchen, stands not far from the family home. When Cornell was a child the house, patched together from parts of other buildings, was painted green with white trim and a green metal roof. The original room had a ceiling only seven feet high with hand-hewn beams and the original pine floors had been re-planked. Cornell and his father had an elaborate model train layout set up in the original room and he remembers playing in there as a child and feeling the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. “It was spooky, something going on there, “he says. Years later an aide at Obici Hospital mentioned that her mother and older sister had lived in the tenant house, probably in the 1930s, and told stories of it being haunted. They slept upstairs and swore that some nights they felt the sheets being eased off and their feet tickled. And they heard a baby crying, but no babies were in the house. Phyllis Cornell, who is originally from Buffalo, New York, tells about Esmeralda, the nice ghost that lives in the main house. When Phyllis first came to the house to visit before she

and Cornell were married she slept in a room over the library and woke up to find an indentation in the bed covers that looked like someone had been sitting there. “I felt like someone was there, watching over me,” she says. Cornell points out the gashouse, a sturdy brick outbuilding that stands not far from the main house, which had been fitted with gaslights. The lights were powered with gas generated from calcium carbide in the gashouse and piped into the main house. He says - When the lights dimmed they’d send one of the kids out to drop a calcium carbide tablet into the tank in the gashouse. I remember a story about the calcium carbide salesman who brought a briefcase-size kit to dinner with him. After dinner, as the candles and oil lamps were about to be lit he’d activate the light in the demonstrator kit by dropping a tablet. The

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