Polite poltergeist

Former midtown residents discover that sometimes, a haunted house is a tidy house

Some media critics argue that stories of the paranormal distract the public from more pressing news topics and indicate a decline in media standards. We at the Voice tend to agree that sensational coverage of any topic sells our readers short. But, given nature’s vast “unknowns” and human history’s longstanding catalog of supernatural reports, we thought it worthwhile to direct at least a little straight-faced curiosity toward the subject, especially given the season. Our house is divided between those who brush off every ghost story as hogwash and those cautiously skeptical but reluctant to discount them. That’s the balance we’re striking as we dip a toe into this realm.

Informal polling of friends and acquaintances turned up nearly a dozen stories of paranormal experiences. People of all ages and walks of life reported hearing ghostly voices or eerie music, witnessing items toppling over and falling off shelves or observing a darkness lingering in a corner. The most detailed, compelling account we found is retold here.

Rose Mary Winget is a longtime family friend of mine who now lives in Arizona. The last house she and her husband, Larry, owned in Tulsa was a 2-story midtown Tudor, probably one of the original homes in that area, Winget said. 

About a year after the couple moved in, their oldest son, Tyler, came home on leave from the Army. They were out the day he arrived but told him to make himself at home. Winget said that when Tyler entered the house, he heard the shower running upstairs.

“So he hollered at us and said, ‘Hey, I’m here. I thought you were gone,’” she said.

When he didn’t get a reply, he took his bags upstairs and noticed that the sound of the shower had stopped. In the bathroom, he found the shower curtain, walls and tub wet.

“He was totally freaked,” Winget said. “ … He was a big tough military guy, but he was totally freaked out. So he ran outside and stayed in his car and wouldn’t come back in until we got home. We’ve always laughed about that, and of course we couldn’t explain the situation, but I figured he suffered from an over-active imagination.”

Winget is a precise, orderly person, so she was concerned when one diamond earring from her only set went missing a few months later. After cleaning out her jewelry drawer and conducting a thorough search, she gave up. A few weeks after it went missing, Winget was startled when she opened a drawer in her bathroom and found the earring.

“That was totally weird,” she said. “We did not have a housekeeper at the time, so it’s not like someone else found it and stuck it in there. Larry knew I was distressed. He didn’t know where it was, either. But there was my little earring.”

After giving it some thought, the Wingets each began to wonder whether Tyler might have been onto something.

“I didn’t just immediately say, ‘Oh, there is a ghost,’” Winget said. “But the more I thought about it and tried to find out who might have done that—put my earring in the drawer—I never came up with anything.”

A few months later, Winget left for work before her husband got out of bed—“and Larry does not make up beds,” she said.

After work, she came home to find the bed beautifully made with tailored tucks and precise folds.

“Very neat and clean,” Winget said. “You could bounce a penny off the bed, it was just so tight and nice and beautiful. And when he got home, I thanked him for making the bed for the first time in his life.”

Larry said he hadn’t made the bed, and they went upstairs together.

“And there it was, still just gorgeous and beautiful,” Winget said. “And he said, ‘I swear to you I did not make it, and even if I had made it, it wouldn’t have been to that precision.’ It would have been just covers kind of tossed up. And this was a perfectly made bed.”

At that point, they both started to get “weirded out,” Winget said. Other odd things happened upstairs over the next few years; they found bath mats inexplicably turned over and items on bookshelves that didn’t belong there. Then, the pets started acting up.

Sparky, a cat that usually roamed the entire house, “took to sitting at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, and would not go upstairs and would kind of howl … ” Winget said. “We couldn’t even entice it upstairs. We could pick it up and carry it up ok, but it would not go up anymore. And it never did again.”

After their dog, Nixon, started sitting at the foot of the steps and groaning, he stopped going upstairs, too.  

“He used to always come up and sleep with us in the bedroom, and he would not come up,” Winget said. “He would sleep downstairs.”

Winget said the pets’ behavior “throws it into a whole new category.”

“There’s no way to change what an animal does like that,” she said. “And that is what they did. They did not return to the upstairs.”

Gradually, the couple came to just accept that a ghost lived with them. They didn’t speak publicly about it except to their close friends, but Winget suspects their experience isn’t that uncommon. One of their friends in Chicago disclosed to them a few years ago that his house has been haunted for years.  

“As we swapped stories, I realized he actually does believe us,” Winget said, laughing. “He doesn’t think we are full of crap. And we believe him.”

Before these events, Winget had never accepted the concept of paranormal events.

“It opened my mind, when these things happened, to that dimension,” she said. “And I realize that right now, I believe that there is that dimension. I don’t understand it; I don’t particularly study it or puzzle over it or anything. I just know that it’s there, and I don’t pooh-pooh when I hear other people’s stories about it anymore. Depending on the source, of course,” she said, laughing.

Winget sold the house in 2001, and it sold again in 2002 to the present owner, who did not respond to the Voice’s inquiries.

“Of course, there was nothing revealed in the sale information that [the owners before us] had ever had a ghost,” Winget said. But then again, when we sold it, we didn’t reveal that we had one, either.”

A woman who lived in the home during the ‘90s declined to have her name published but shared two experiences in the house. Once, she was reading to her toddler son downstairs in the living room when he looked over toward the front door and said, “Who’s that?”

She didn’t see anything and asked him what he was talking about.

“That man,” he said.

When she asked where, he said, “Oh, nevermind.”

Her son seemed to have “some ability to perceive, and see things, like young children often do,” she said.

Prior to that event, her son was upstairs in the bath (the same bathroom where Tyler Winget had his scare) when he picked up a toy and spoke the French word for it. She had never spoken French with him.

“I don’t know that that’s anything to do with the house, but then again, who knows,” she said. “… It’s French, at the age of one.”

When the Wingets moved to Arizona for better weather, they wondered if the ghost would follow. They wouldn’t have minded if it did; whoever it was kept things tidy and never frightened the couple. But it didn’t seem to travel with them.  

“It was a ghost at the house,” Winget said. “It wasn’t a ghost of the Wingets, unfortunately.”

Spooky spaces

A selection of Tulsa’s most notorious haunted landmarks // Photos by Jen Hoppa

Tulsa Garden Center
J. Arthur Hull purchased the Tulsa Garden Center shortly after its completion, and his wife, Mary, died of an illness soon after. Her body was displayed in the arboretum prior to the funeral, and visitors say the room retains a distinct chill to this day.

Brady Theater
The epicenter of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, the Old Lady on Brady has seen its share of ghastly happenings. But the legend of its haunting was born a year earlier. Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso came to town for a sold-out show, and while touring the surrounding area, his car broke down and he had to walk back to the Brady Theater in the rain. He later died of complications from a throat infection and is said to haunt the building in revenge.

Will Rogers High School
In the ’70s, Will Rogers High School band director Dr. Carl Barnett died of a heart attack while conducting Bach’s “Come, Sweet Death” in a performance at the school’s auditorium. Ghost stories do not come more neatly wrapped than that one. His spirit is said to roam the theater in a white tuxedo.