Felt Manor
125 S Prospect Street
(#50 West Side Tour)
The following story was written by Ms. Cindy Pepple, a former owner of the Felt Manor. This elegant 23 room brick mansion is located at 125 S Prospect Street. Information on the history of Felt Manor can be found at stop #50 on the West Side Tour.
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Until I lived in the Felt House, I can’t honestly say I really believed in ghosts. We bought the house in the 1980s, as an existing Bed and Breakfast known as The Felt Manor. It was built in 1848 for Lucius Felt, a wealthy merchant in Galena. The mansard roof and third floor were added in the 1870’s.
I first noticed odd things when we moved in. There were four marble fireplaces on the first floor. I would come down to the parlor in the morning to discover things on the fireplace’s mantle rearranged! The first time I just figured I had moved things when I was dusting and didn’t put them back. However, after four or five times I knew better. This was happening when no one else but my five year old daughter and my Beagle, Jimmy, were in the house with me.
Then, I had an odd experience with the very first guests who stayed with me. They asked if I could build a fire in the green parlor room’s fireplace first thing in the morning. It had rained a cold rain all night and the firewood was wet, but I built a fire anyway and used a whole fire starter log. Once the starter log was completely burned, the fire went out. The actual logs beneath the starter log were still cold to the touch. The guests ate breakfast and checked out, and I cleaned rooms. About four hours later, I walked into that parlor and there was a perfectly blazing fire in the fireplace!
At one point we closed for a week to add another bathroom on the second floor. We had friends over to help us with it. At the end of one of the days when we were finally done with the new bathroom, I put my daughter to sleep on the third floor. The four of us adults were in the parlor, we called the library, relaxing and talking. I was sitting in a wingback chair facing the door to the large center hall that typical Italianate style houses have. My dog was sitting at my feet facing the door. I saw the shape of a woman in a long black dress sort of float past the door in the hallway! My dog got up, ran to the doorway and looked down the hall in the direction she went. So clearly, my dog Jimmy saw her too. I looked down the hallway expecting to see something, but the hallway was empty!
Everyone who has seen this apparition has described her the same way, wearing a long black dress.
(According to those who have seen the woman dressed in black, she looked very similar to this picture.)
One Saturday evening in late February, a couple rang our doorbell and asked if we had any rooms available. They had driven from a Chicago Suburb for just a day trip. It was beautiful sparkling sunny day and the entire weekend was supposed to be just beautiful. They decided that after a late lunch and a sufficient amount of wine, they didn’t want to drive back after dark. Although they had no luggage, they decided to stay with us. We put them in our best room which had two large, very tall windows overlooking downtown in the valley below.
On this particular weekend, although none of the guests in our five guest rooms knew each other prior, they all befriended each other. When I headed to our own quarters, all the guests were in the large parlor having a great time. I asked what time each couple would be coming down for breakfast, wrote it down, and said goodnight.
When I came down to start breakfast at around 6 am, there was a check and a note from the impromptu guests that just said, “We had to go.” And they thanked us for our hospitality. I wondered what went wrong that caused them to leave so abruptly. I hoped they wouldn’t have a difficult drive because it had just started snowing, which was totally unpredicted. About two hours later the phone rang, and it was the couple who had left. He said before they went to bed, he pulled down the window shades in the room. He woke up at around 4 am and the shades were rolled all the way up. He asked his wife if she raised the shades and she mumbled, “No,” and fell back asleep. He got up and pulled the shades back down. Those windows are so tall I never completely raised the shades because I would have to get on a chair to pull them back down.
As he was standing in front of the window he heard a woman behind him say, “You’d better go now. It’s going to snow.” He spun around, but no one was there! His wife was still sound asleep in bed. He had a particular aversion to driving in snow. He was so freaked out by hearing this woman as plain as day, he woke his wife up and told her to get ready to leave! He said just as they pulled into their driveway when they got home, it started to snow. There were already four inches on the ground in Galena.
We came to have the opinion that she was a caretaker ghost. Several guests saw her over the few years I was there. She would generally be seen in areas of the house that servants would be in. And then one day my daughter said, “Mommy, I wish that lady would stop shaking my bed!”
I was like, “What lady?”
She said it was the lady who would gently shake her bed to wake her up to go to the bathroom at night. She’d go downstairs to the bathroom and when she came back to bed the shaking would stop.
Years after I sold the house, I met a man who had lived in the house for a time with the previous innkeepers. The innkeepers had a son who was about the age my daughter was when we lived there. We talked about the house and the previous owners, and then he brought up the ghost. The man said they had all experienced her, but particularly the little boy. He said she would shake his bed every night until he got up and went to the bathroom. I almost fell off my barstool! I had just met this person, and I had never told anyone what my daughter said she experienced. And here he was, describing the exact same thing!
There was a beautifully written account of life in that house, by Lucius Felt’s granddaughter. She wrote her memories about it from the time she was a small child. They would take the train from Chicago to Galena. They would spend their summers in the big house on the hill that Grandfather built. Many of her recollections involved Cook, and Margaret, the nanny. Margaret had been the nanny for her mother and her aunt, and she remained in the house as a servant after they were grown and gone. She stopped living there only when she was in her 80s and too old and feeble to dust
anymore. She had been living and working in that house since she was fourteen. We will never know for sure, but we think faithful Margaret is still taking care of the house and it’s occupants, whoever they may be. Particularly children.
Lucius Felt's granddaughter, Catherine, around 8 years old.
Catherine B. Clementson , 79 years old.
(Please go to #50 on the West Side Tour to read about Catherine's early life in Galena. Her recollections present a rare and unusual look at the Galena few people can remember-- the Galena during the lively times at the turn of the century.)