Free The Sallie House Haunting: A True Story by Debra Pickman Page B

in, their gender, the years in which the person lived, the date they died, and sometimes how old the person was at death as well as the cause of death.
    I was sure that the information we had gathered, along with the cemetery records, would pay off and we would find the child who was haunting our house. I was looking for a girl between the ages of four and seventeen. As I flipped through the pages, however, I was disheartened. A majority of the listings of young children were boys, and none of the children had a last name that corresponded to anything on my list. This suggested that no child had died in the house.
    All I could think was that we couldn’t stop here. There had to be something of significance I was missing. Feeling empty-handed, I again enlisted the help of a friend and we began searching newspaper articles and obituaries, as well as church records of births and deaths. Not only were the older records handwritten and worn, but church records, possibly the most informative records available, were in Latin. We looked at microfilm and photos, and pulled even more books and files from their shelves. Eventually we broadened our parameters to include young females with a date of death between the late 1800s and the mid to late 1900s.
    We found fifteen possibilities and initial cross referencing ruled out five of them. We ended up with six Sallys or Sallies, as well as three others who had died within the specified dates but without notation of their ages, first names, or gender.
    Of those ten individuals, six died between 1927 and 1943, which ruled out the information that Barbara had shared with us before. There was a child named Sallie Isabell Hall who died in 1905, and three others that died in the late 1800s: Sally M. Foster died Feburary 1865, Sally White died Feburary 12, 1891, and another child, noted as being four years old (no first name listed) died in 1894 in the town of Lancaster. We ruled out Lancaster, leaving us three individuals with the name Sally or Sallie.
    Out of those three, we realized one possible connection to one of the surnames. The Hall family was a black family that lived around the corner and up the block from the Finney house. Although we had no proof, we thought this family might have worked as servants for the doctor. Although this information certainly did not validate the name of our ghost, we thought perhaps it would be helpful down the road. In the end, the countless hours of research didn’t really help at all. We never found a child with the name Sallie who had ever lived in the house, much less died there.

eight

    The next day was July 29—the day Barbara was due to visit. I began the day with my normal activities, still looking around cautiously at everything as I entered a room. By now, it had become a habit to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary. Quite often I had found myself peeking into the nursery for things mysteriously out of place, or for a crayon-written response to the note I had left on the clipboard, but there seemed to be no activity anywhere.
    Knowing that Sallie wanted my attention, I began to talk to her as Barbara had suggested. I told her I was happy that she was still with us, and I thought it was nice when she did things to let us know she was around. “When you do things like that, I know you’re here in the room with us, and then I can talk with you.” I tried to make small talk, one-sided of course, and asked her if she liked it when I talked to her. I also reminded her that Barbara was coming later that day and that she had no reason to be scared. “Barbara’s just a friend who’s going to try to help all of us.”
    Barbara was scheduled to do a radio talk show where listeners could call in and ask questions. I thought listening to the show would give me some insight into her psychic ability. During the first half of the show, she talked about psychic phenomena and told about how she had come to know she had abilities.
    As a young