Stories of hauntings surround 130-year-old house

Stories of hauntings surround 130-year-old house
November 3, 2010
by Meg Hagerty
Poststar.com

If the walls of her Cedarwood B&B really could talk, Sharalee Falzerano thinks they'd have plenty to say.
But "Boo!" wouldn't be one of them.
When the Falzeranos were in the process of buying their inn, Sharalee said there was talk about the "haunted" farmhouse on the unpaved road a half-mile off the main thoroughfare.
In its 130-year history, the house has had nine owners, including Lewis and Sharalee, and accommodated women patients with tuberculosis in the early 1900s.
It did, however, sit abandoned for a while.
One person told Sharalee that when he was a teenager, he walked past the deserted house and saw an older woman waving from the porch.
"(The story) started going around that the house was haunted. I never felt or saw anything, and I was waiting for something because I was scared myself," Sharalee said. "It seems the stories are from young people under 25, including my son who, his first night there, swore that something was next to him as he was sleeping on the floor in the dining room. He kind of froze there for 15 minutes, and my son is not a flighty kind of guy."
She admits other strange things have happened, like the time during the renovation that her son-in-law said a lollipop he had placed on a dresser moved from one spot to another, or the night her son's girlfriend stayed by herself in the Poet's Corner and looked out the window at 3 a.m. to see a woman walk by.
The next morning the girl asked Sharalee what she was doing out in the yard in the middle of the night, and of course, Sharalee hadn't been outside.
She wrote a bit about the history of the farmhouse for a story in the local newspaper but preferred to call the house "lonely," rather than abandoned, or haunted.
A few years back, a renowned psychic was giving a lecture at nearby Garnet Hill Lodge, and a crew from "Psychic Kids," a television series on A&E about children with paranormal abilities, was scouting the surrounding area for a house with a spooky past for an upcoming combination feature.
Sharalee said the "Psychic Kids" producers had read about her one-time lonely house when they called her to ask if they could film at the Cedarwood B&B.
She said she thought it would be fun to have publicity for the inn by having the paranormal show there, but a week before they were to start in the spring of last year, she had second thoughts.
"What if I do find out that it's haunted? How am I possibly going to live here? I started freaking out until I researched the show," Sharalee said. She didn't feel any paranormal activity would turn up.
A cameraman walked around with Sharalee for about 45 minutes, peering into each room. Then host Chip Coffey arrived and went through the house by himself. He said he felt the presence of a woman on the second floor porch and told of a little boy named Frederick.
"My research never found anything about Frederick, but the house was a sanitarium at one time, so I'm thinking that possibly workers with their children, if anything, that's were that would come from," Sharalee said.
As it turned out the program, which ran in November 2009, focused more about two "Psychic Kids." The house merely played a supporting role as a backdrop.
After the program aired, they received a few calls and gained a few guests because the house had been part of the broadcast. "We also had a few kids drive up the driveway, too," Sharalee said.