Regarding Harvey     

(Author's note: This post has nothing to do with Jimmy Stewart - but everything to do with Paige and Harvey. You be the judge.)

As always, unapologetically unedited.     

Dude, I've been ghosted. Not in the usual way, but genealogically speaking. Please bear with me as I navigate this ectoplasmic neighborhood to explain what the heck has been going on. You see, I need to get genealogically from the "Granddaddy of all Cool Ghosts," Phillip Babb of the Isles of Shoals, to the spectral residents of a house in the Antebellum South, owned by his very own descendants.

Got all that? Cool. I'm all for handing out quizzes at the end (or a couple of Advil, if you prefer).

        

Recently, I connected my new friend and client, Paige Dunham (never quite sure how to refer to someone you've never met?), to her ancestor, Phillip Babb (1634-1671). And, of course, as you might have guessed, Phillip Babb who happens to be that Granddaddy of all Cool Ghosts. (I'm not really sure he meant to be; it just sorta turned out that way for Old Phillip.) As you may recall, Phillip is believed to have been an irascible pirate (no proof) and is said to walk the small island where he once lived, scaring local residents and tourists with a long knife. Phillip, to his credit, was also the subject of several missives, one notably by author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Is that cool, or what?

Long story short, I recently wrote about how "Phil's" great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Babb, married a dashing eighteenth-century Quaker boy-toy named David Rees. They hightailed it South, setting up housekeeping in the charming vicinity of Newberry, South Carolina. From there, the dynamic duo went on to have oodles and scads of kids who begat many more oodles and scads, until pretty much everybody had forgotten about Grandaddy Phillip of the Isles of Shoals and the fact that the Colonial progenitor of all persons, Babb, was happily now a legendary ghost.

             

    Above: Unofficial family portrait of Elizabeth Babb and husband David Rees 

Connecting Paige Dunham to Phil's ghost wasn't all that tough, but needing further verification, I reached out to genealogist and author Daniel Greig Babb, an expert on (wait, that's a test question...) "all things Babb." I wanted to confirm the line from Phillip to Elizabeth Babb Rees, which he graciously did for me. This helped solidify my account of the old ghost and the lines connecting Paige to Old Babb. Daniel Greig Babb and I have stayed loosely in contact when, about a week ago, he messaged me to say:

"I'd like to introduce you to Beth Collins. It turns out you and she are researching the same line, that of Elizabeth Babb and David Rees." (Quiz question #2)

  

Above: Beth's mother, Emma Jane (Fry) Roberts (1890-1957), in front of the Laramore House           

After the normal emailed introductions between Beth Collins and me, and after determining which of Elizabeth Babb and David Rees's oodles and scads of children Paige and she were descended from, I asked in one of my usual, not-so-funny attempts:

"So, have you met your old ghost yet?"

The reaction I got was unexpected.

"Oh! How exciting? I didn't know about that one."

That one? 

Okay, call me crazy, as I'm no aficionado of grammar (obviously) or semantics, but doesn't the phrase "that one" imply there are more ghosts, or at least "more than one"? Are there more ghosts in Phillip Babb's family?

I will do my best to relay the story to you as it was relayed to me. Well, not exactly, but as you'll read, I think you'll see what's been going on in the Babbs' ectoplasmic neighborhood. There are a lot of parts to the story, and I won't be able to touch upon them all in this short post (which means I may flunk my own quiz!). But suffice it to say that a certain Antebellum house on Hawkinsville Road in Newberry, South Carolina, built circa 1820, eventually came into the possession of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson and descendant of Phillip Babb, the Granddaddy of all Cool Ghosts. 

And his name was Harvey Roberts.

Now, if I have this right, Harvey inherited the house from his father, Eugene Summerfield Roberts (1888-1954), who had always admired it as a young man and wanted to buy it. The house was previously owned by a man named Laramore, and Beth (Harvey's niece) relayed the story to me that Laramore had committed suicide in the front room of the house. She said that the place was so haunted that when a burglar broke in to steal the antiques and valuables, he fled out a window, so scared that he left all the loot behind. But wait, there's so much more!

From Cousin Beth:

"Mr. Laramore committed suicide in the front bedroom, so he's the one that haunts it. Several aunts have seen him. An uncle that married into the family didn't believe in ghosts. The morning after the first time he spent the night there, he asked who was walking up and down the hall all night. When told it was Mr. Laramore, he believed."

         

   

The place grew in notoriety, and Harvey Roberts, an unmarried man some described as flamboyant, grew acquainted with and nurtured an association with newspaper reporter Violet Moore from The Macon Telegraph. The house became Harvey Roberts's life, as if the very spirits who lived there possessed him. Even when the house was badly infested with termites, he bought wood from a similar house and had it rebuilt.

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Regarding Harvey:

"The house was my uncle's life. When termites got into the kitchen, he bought another house, tore it down, and used the tongue and groove wood to replace what was destroyed. The article mentions Violet Moore and her ghost stories. She was a family friend and wrote for the Macon Telegraph. The story of Uncle Harvey buying the rocking chair would have been something she pulled out of her hat and something they had a good laugh over."

           

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The stories of the house and its hauntings are best related through the writings of Violet Moore, and I'll include a few excerpts here. I think Violet's stories about the house, the newspaper clippings, and Cousin Beth's emails tell it far better than I can. (And yes, there will be no quiz on all that today.) It's just fun stuff – knowing that a descendant of Phillip Babb and a nearer-than-distant cousin of Paige Dunham's owned a very old haunted house filled with ghosts in Newberry.

              

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More on the House:

"The house is no longer there. In fact, the avenue of cedars leading to the house have been taken down, too. My uncle offered the house to the town, but the mayor refused it, so it was sold. Later, it was bought by a Montezuma man who always loved visiting the house. He made a fortune, started Steinhatchee Landing in Florida, bought the house, and moved it board by board to Florida. It was supposed to be a restaurant there, but a recession hit and I don't think it was ever rebuilt. It was the last remaining plantation house in the area; all the others burned. There are other classical houses, but they are all cotton houses from the 1920s. Ours was from the 1820s."

More from Cousin Beth:

"  I just have to laugh. Uncle Harvey said that when Miss Violet needed an article, she made up a ghost. 

        She is talking about Mr. Laramore there with a little embellishment. There wasn't a rocking chair on the front porch. If you look at the pictures, the side of the house is screened in. Everything happened out there in the summer - even the TV was there. I have one of those rockers that was on it and it hasn't rocked by itself the first time.

        The bed story is true. My mother had four sisters and when they came in from a party one night they just climbed into any bed (there were 7 bedrooms). She was in the bed and felt someone get into the other side. The next morning she found out that no one had slept with her.  

          Uncle Harvey slept in the adjoining bedroom, not the haunted one. We do think Mr. Laramore scared away some burglars one time. Uncle Harvey had a stroke and went into a nursing home. My aunt dropped in one time to check the house and found that the stereo had been dropped in the middle of the floor and a window broken. (This window was in the old trunk room which opened directly to the outside instead of a porch, link most of the windows). What the police figured was that the robbers were frightened while stealing the stereo so they dropped it and jumped out the window. As you can see from the pictures, the main level is really the second story. We credit Mr. Laramore for scaring them away. You read how the house was furnished with period pieces. They knew the robbers didn't know the value of things because the paperweights near it were worth a few hundred dollars a piece. The stereo was a cheap one Uncle Harvey bought when he inherited a collection of 78 speed records. ( I forgot I had them and donated them last year - there were 1,004 records"

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Sadly, the house is no longer there, which of course sucks.

The best part of all this for Paige, though, is the discovery of her Cousin Beth Collins. Beth is an avid ghost hunter in the Savannah area. (I should mention she says a couple of cocktails always help when out ghost hunting!)

So, I guess we owe a big thank you to Phillip Babb, the Granddaddy of all Cool Ghosts, for bringing the family full circle and introducing us to interesting characters like Harvey Roberts and Violet Moore, and especially Beth Collins. 

You just gotta keep those old ghosts alive!

       

Paige's Cousin Beth - and the Savannah Ghost Romp 2014