Spring Street Haunting

From Echoes from the Grave
by Larry Wilson

It was on December 30, 2011, that I was contacted through email by a good friend of mine named Janice Hibbert. Her email simply said, “My daughter needs help with stuff going on in her house, can you call me?”

She listed her phone number in the email for me to contact her, so I immediately called her back. I have known Janice for over fifteen years, as we both work together at the Illinois State Board of Education, but I also know her through our likeminded interest in the field of paranormal research.

Janice is a very knowledgeable and respected paranormal investigator in her own right, and has investigated many locations herself in the Central Illinois area. Since her family was involved, Janice wanted an independent investigator not emotionally connected with the family to look into the strange happenings at the house, so she contacted me.

Janice explained to me that her daughter Hannah and Hannah’s boyfriend Sam had moved into a two story white rental house along South Spring Street in Springfield, Illinois on November 1, 2011.

The house is located in a lower middle class neighborhood in the south central part of Springfield that is made up of a mixture of both owner and tenant occupied homes. This particular house is divided into two apartments, an upstairs unit that is occupied by an older gentleman who likes to listen to jazz music and who is also known to consume more than his share of alcohol. The downstairs apartment is where Hannah and Sam lived.

On several occasions after moving into the house, Hannah and Sam experienced very uncomfortable and odd feelings. They felt like they were being watched and were not alone in the house. On one particular occasion, as she was putting some things away in a closet near the front of the apartment, Hannah thought she heard a voice coming from inside the closet. She shrugged it off as her imagination or possibly just someone walking past the house on the side walk to the front of the apartment.

The uneasy feelings of being watched and that some unseen force was present continued, so Hannah contacted her mother and explained to her what was going on. Janice told me that she too had a similar uneasy feeling in the house both in the bedroom and the basement areas, and especially in an old storage room in the basement…