Lemont House
Lemont House sits in the little town of Lemont, not far from from Penn State in Centre county, PA. And in the Lemont House is its resident ghost, Edith Ross.1Centre Daily Times – 10/31/1994
Tenants of the Lemont House will tell you about Edith Ross.
She opens and closes locked doors. She sets off motion detectors.
She still climbs the stairs of the combination general store and house she inherited from her father, Elmer.
Quite an accomplishment for a dead woman.
With Halloween here, the whole frame structure at the corner of Pike and Elmwood streets seems just the place to scare up a ghost story or two.
“I think if Edith was going to be doing anything, it’d be cleaning all the time,” said Jane Nuss, who grew up in Lemont during the 1940s and 1950s.
Lemont folks, like Nuss, who knew Ross say if she haunts the building, it’s to make sure it’s well cared for.
Ross, who never married, spent her life tending her home, store and flower gardens.
“All she did was sweep the front porch so she could yack to anybody who came by,” said Nuss. “Oh she would love to talk.”
Nuss, once worked at Creative Interiors, one of six businesses located in the renovated building.
“I always said if I ran into Edith, that’d be all right,” she said.”now, Elmer, I’d be the first one out the door.”
Edith’s father, Elmer Ross, was a very stern-looking person, she said.
The Lemont House was built sometime in the mid-1800s as a general store. It had many owners and shopkeepers over the years but it remained “The Clover Farm Store” to its patrons.
Edith’s grandfather, J. Irving Ross, bought the structure in 1887. At his death, it passed on to his son, Elmer. When Elmer died in 1966, Edith inherited it.
Folks contacted Thursday said she died not too many yeas later, although no one remembered when.
Joe Rishell has owned the building for eleven years. He didn’t know about her when he bought the place.
One night he was alone in the building working late at his business, Complete Floor Coverings of Lemont. The building’s locked back door opened and closed, so Rishel got up to see who it ws.
Nothing.
Then he felt what he calls “a cold presence.”
“I went home,” he said. “I had no idea if it was all in my mind, but I wasn’t going to question it. Would you?”
Tenants have reported to Rishell they’ve heard a voice call “Are you there?” when working late at night on the second floor. Others, like Rishell, have felt the cold rush.
Edith’s picture hangs on the wall next to the stairway she purportedly climbs up and down.
It’s a turn-of-the-century photograph of a young girl in a high-waisted dress with broad collar standing before a picket fence in a flower garden. A huge bow ties back her long hair.
Two more pictures hang in Elaine’s Hair Design on the second floor. These pictures, taken later, show a woman seated next to her aged father. She wears a dark dress and has bobbed hair.
Young or old, the smiling woman doesn’t look like someone who would take to haunting.
Elaine Weaver, owner of Elaine’s, is a a great-niece of Elmer Ross. There is a family resemblance to Edith.
Because she can’t keep an eye on the reception room from her beauty parlor, Weaver installed a motion detector that rings when anyone enters.
Occasionally, Weaver, who’s been a tenant for 18 months, finds no one waiting.
The first time it happened, the bell rung twice.
“It was just enough time for someone to come in, walk around, and go back out,” she said. “That’s when I started to say, “Hi, Edith.”
People have tried to convince Weaver sunlight sets off the detector. But sunlight doesn’t pout through the windows until afternoon hours, and the bell seems to ring mornings.
“Somebody thought a spider might be building a nest, but I took it apart and that wasn’t happening,” she said.
“There’s never any rhyme or reason to any of it,” she said. “The door doesn’t open, the sensor just goes off.”
Like other tenants, Weaver has found locked doors left open.
Nancy Stewart, owner of Creative Designs, is a skeptic.
“I say if she’s around, she must be friendly,” said Stewart “And she must like what we’re doing here because she never bothered me.”
“I don’t know if this place is really haunted – people have hard and seen things they say,” she said. “I’m not a superstitious type of person myself. If something falls off the shelf, I say it just fell off of the shelf.”
Edith’s mother, Gertrude Ross, died in 1922, when Edith was only twenty years old, so it’s quite likely that she was quite used to being the lady of the house. Her father, the stern Elmer, died in 1962, at age 97, a widower for 40 years.
Edith was born in 1902 and died in 1974. She is buried at Spring Creek Presbyterian Cemetery with her parents.
Since there doesn’t seem to be any sign of trauma in the old house, perhaps it really is Edith’s desire to keep watch over the property that keeps her there.