Haunted Places in Davenport, Iowa

Davenport's Most Known Haunted Places

We had been at the residence only three months and activity began. It began with the turning on the stereo and randomly changing channels. I excused it as a short in the stereo and purchased a new one. Yet, even the new stereo seemed and appeared to do the same and it was then that I learned the feature of locking the buttons on the system as I began to blame the cat. I didn't want to jump to conclusions and I wanted so badly to ignore the facts that were slapping me in the face.

Soon objects began to come up missing and then reappear when we entered back into the room within minutes. The lights would turn on by themselves, and dim when activity began to increase. The sounds of an old record player began to play, accompanied with moaning.

It was after a small electrical fire that it got my full attention. After many hours of research at the library and on the internet at home, I found the results of the investigation.

The house was built by the previous owner, so it was not the house itself that was the haunting, it was the land. The subdivision was once plotted out in larger plots and Forty Ninth Street didn't exist in this owner's abstract. In fact, the abstract included a plot that took up five houses, our neighbors as well. It was not of my character to come out and ask the neighbors, "Hey anything weird ever happen to you?"

Instead my answer came to the door one night. This individual was one that used to live in the house that was adjacent to our house. The house was abandoned as the sewage pipe had burst open and the house was now owned by the city of Davenport, Iowa. No one could buy the house as each time that it went onto the tax auction it was slipped under the rug.

The individual explained some of her activity and it was then that the abstract that I had found was compared to her house's deed. It was stipulated in her deed that the house was never to have, "Blacks, Mexicans or of any other heritage live in the house." That I put nicely, as the deed was much blunter giving the time period of the writing of the deed and slang of that time's era blared at me in black and white.

I read our deed which said in similarity, much the same. Yet, the abstract that I had found on the internet connected much deeper than what I had found merely in the deeds. The plots of land were once owned by the St. Ambrose Church.

The owner of that plot of land was a pillar of society for his time, as he was involved in the St. Ambrose church, but blacks, Chinese, and Mexicans were banned from living on their plots of land. The abstract that I had found bared this news deeply and said that it would remain his forever.