Location: Rose Red is located at the end of Spring Street in Seattle, Washington. It surrounded by a long wall that surrounds the property.
Description: Affectionately known as Rose Red, the Rimbauer Estate is a Tudor Gothic mansion painstakingly constructed between 1906 and 1909 on forty acres of land covered in cedar and pine. Because of its eclectic style, it has an indiscernible number of rooms placed somewhere between a number of seventy to seventy five. Secret doors link rooms to hallways stretching over the elegance and royal opulence of the whole edifice. The house has a sixty foot entry hall, a banquet hall and Grand Ball Room. Other prominent locations in the mansion have been created with a flair for creativity and artistic license such as the Perspective Corridor, the Mirror Library and the Upside Down Hall. One floor at the bottom of the back stairs was designed so that anyone looking at it from above would sense the illusion of being a hundred stories up instead of just two or three. The Health Room is actually a green house attached to the kitchen. The library boasts 6,000 volumes and the study includes a suit of armor, a brown bear shot and killed in the Swiss Alps, a Bavarian pipe organ, Eastern carpets and a display of German mark smith pistols. The stone and brick facade is behind a wrought iron fence and a set of stone pillars holding up the Rimbauer crest. There is an island in the round driveway and statues from Italy decorate the estate. There are numerous windows and half a dozen chimneys.
Ghostly Manifestations: In a period of forty-one years between 1919 and 1960, twenty-six people have been described as having vanished in the confusing labyrinthine halls known as Rose Red. Numerous searches have been started for these people, but to no avail and every venue has been explored. To those who believe the extraordinary, Rose Red has swallowed them all up. The truth of the matter is that logical reasons, however unproven, have been found made for most of these disappearances, but then it is the last thirty two percent that have made Rose Red so much to be feared.
Following the disappearance of Ellen Rimbauer herself, the few servants still working in the house started reporting random sounds and strange occurrences such as the sound of Ellen crying from empty rooms or laughing from vacant halls. Many of them started leaving following the sounds while many tried to stay close to their duties, but with Ellen missing and reportedly vanished the house, even the most loyal did not want to stay in the imposing edifice. By time Adam Rimbauer was old enough to come home, there was not a servant left and without the family fortune, he did not want the house.
Adam reported several things about the house. Rooms he measured seemed to change in dimension when he measured them later. He started getting lost as he searched the house as if new walls were popping up and new rooms were appearing. His wife reported seeing a figure that vanished just out of eyesight. Photos he took of rooms did not match when he compared them later. He once stepped out of a third floor bedroom and found himself a few steps from the first floor foyer. It was almost as if Rose Red was some huge organism constantly restructuring itself.
After his death, his widow started entering the house looking for antiques to sell for money. Her son, Stephen, became lost while exploring the place and in a story he told several years later he said he had encountered the ghost of his grandmother standing on the steps to the attic.
There have been only two documented investigations of the house and the two of them cite similar and practically identical phenomenon. The parapsychologists staying in the bedrooms of Rose Red with the permission of Steven Rimbauer have described a majority of phenomenon bordering between typical and the unusual. The ghosts have been described as resembling decomposed and desiccated corpses wandering the estate and peeking around corners as well as in traditional spectral anamorphous shapes. Ellen Rimbauer’s ghost has been glimpsed flitting around the halls and corridors or standing in thought just out of eyeshot. However, her personality and behavior remains bipolar. To the people she considers as guests, she can be kind and endearing to the point of leaving gifts. To all others, she can be frightening and merciless. Members of Max Burnsteim’s investigative team felt they were in critical danger as things fell close to causing major harm and presences seemed to chase them through the house. One observer remarked she seems determined to control everything in the house, and by all terms and purposes, that seems to be what is occurring. Another source practically describes her as possessed.
Other members of Max Burnstheim’s team remarked they thought they saw a ghostly little girl wandering the upstairs with a deformed left arm pulled up close to her chest. Sometimes accompanied by temperatures of extreme cold, she is believed to be April Rimbauer, but she is much more distant than her mother’s spirit and refuses to be acknowledged or confronted. Much more active is the presence of Sukeena, Ellen’s best friend and companion. During the short times tours were conducted through the place, a woman of slender build and African descent believed to be the housekeeper has met a few people at the front entrance. Often conducting informal tours beyond the knowledge of the Seattle Historical Society, Sukeena has described to visitors the most intimate details of Rose Red that only a person who lived there would know. Often appearing as a normal living persons to those who have seen her, Sukeena has surprised and received scoffs from visitors refusing to believe she is one of the ghosts. Others who have encountered her, mostly men, are quite the opposite by reporting have been put off by an indefinable aura of danger as she tries to lure them into parts of the house and grounds.
One of Burnstheim’s researchers noted the odd moving around of a female statue seen on the grounds from an upstairs bedroom window. Over the course of a few nights, he reported that it seemed to be closer to the house on some occasions and nearly obscured by a tree on others. Noting its placements by time, day and circumstance, he made note that it seemed to circle the pool it overlooked and even turned from facing it. One night, it actually seemed to turn its head up to him in what was most likely an optical illusion.
Visitors detected the sound of hammering from far away. Individuals within whole tour groups claimed they heard hammering despite the fact no one else heard anything. Others reported the scent of wood being cut or the vibration of activity from deserted parts of the house. Despite the fact that all work had been ceased from some time before, guides and witnesses would find tools in innocuous places or a fine layer of saw dust over a surface of floor or furniture in locations lacking any physical change. As the placement of furniture and the known layout of the mansion began conflicting with the memories of the guides, it was rumored that the ghost of Ellen Rimbauer had found a way to alter the physical shape and layout of Rose Red from the afterlife.
In 2002, Dr. Joyce Rearden found the diary of Ellen Rimbauer in a trunk, which she had bought in an estate auction. Reading it, she became entranced by its accounts of early Twentieth Century life but much more by Ellen’s documentation of the hauntings and disappearances. She published it to fund a brand new investigation of the house under the eyes of Steven Rimbauer, the last known member of the Rimbauer family. Her investigation confirmed and paralleled many attributes of the investigation by her mentor, Dr. Max Burnstheim. Experiencing the house first hand though, she remarked that even when she was by herself taking tactile readings that she never felt quite alone in the place. In her mind, she felt that the house was teeming with ghosts.
History: John P. Rimbauer, founder of Omicron Oil with Douglas Posey, built Rose Red in 1906. The grand structure was reportedly built on cursed Indian ground and according to records, numerous Native American bones and remains were being hauled away by the cartload during the building and laying of the foundation. So many were being found that Rimbauer stopped having them hauled off and began burning them. Several Chinese workers became spooked as odd occurrences started happening already. Teamster Harry Corbin killed a co-worker for no apparent reason and fled to the tavern where the police caught him. Three more deaths eventually occurred. One man was decapitated by falling glass, another person broke his neck in a fall and another choked on an apple.
John and Ellen Rimbauer decided to take their honeymoon by traveling to get away from the “bad luck” and ended up traveling the world collecting the curios that would illuminate and decorate the place. Ellen, however, caught fever in Africa where she met an African woman named Sukeena who became her closest friend and confidant even before her own husband. She and John returned with her to Rose Red on January 15, 1909. Nine months later, Adam Rimbauer was born. His sister, April, was born in 1911; she was born with a genetic defect in the form of a withered left arm.
1909 was also the year that Rose Red started showing her sinister side. One of Ellen’s guests, Constance “Connie” Fauxmanteur vanished from the West Hall. Servants and police searched the entire house suspecting she had become lost or disoriented in a hallway or trapped in a closet, but no trace of her was ever found.
Ellen began to suspect John was entertaining young ladies behind her back. He also ended up buying Posey’s share of Omicron Oil and bankrupting him. Posey returned later to Rose Red after a four-year period of seclusion during one of John’s absences. Dressed as a cowboy, he started to hang himself in one of the rooms in full view of the children. He tossed his hat to Adam and a Rose to April and then kicked the chair out from under him.
Ellen began seeing a psychic named Cora Frye for advice. Billing herself as Madame Stravinski, Frye would be visited Rose Red once to never return again, but she did instruct Ellen to constantly build and add to Rose Red. If she did, Frye claimed, Ellen would live forever.
Eight-year-old April Rimbauer vanished on the estate in 1919 to be never seen again. Her brother was away in school as fifty men searched for her and the police took Sukeena for questioning in her involvement. In her interrogation, she was badly beaten and left the police station with a broken nose, broken arm and three teeth knocked out. April was never found, but months later someone recalled the ice being broken on nearby Lasky Pond. Though it was postulated she had wandered over the lake and fell through, no one ever bothered to check the lake.
Sukeena’s treatment completely estranged Ellen and John’s marriage and he reportedly committed suicide from the tower in 1921 although there was no indication to the contrary. Ellen mourned for a while before she started throwing her lavish parties. The highest socialites from Seattle’s High Elite were always invited. During a party in 1946, actress Donna Petrie, a star of several musicals and comedies vanished while wearing her favorite cocktail dress. She had been one of Ellen’s favorite guests. Her disappearance made Rose Red’s reputation. No trace of her was ever found except for her earrings. That was the last party Ellen ever had.
After John’s suicide, Ellen began the majority of the building that is seen today. The carriage house ended up partially razed and added to the house as it was converted to more rooms. They style and layout of the house became creatively more eclectic as anything and everything that Ellen or Sukeena could dream up was incorporated. Workmen and contractors were often frustrated as Ellen changed plans or dropped ideas in mid-status. Part of the basement was inadvertently closed off never to be seen again and plans were rarely consulted as hidden rooms, secret passageways and more architectural curiosities were being created.
In February of 1928, Sukeena herself vanished and Ellen Rimbauer was heart-struck. She describes in her diary how after her vanishing the plants in the greenhouse started coming to life. She had them ripped out, but as soon as she did so, they grew back in just as prosperous as before. She also described in her diary the sound of the house laughing at her.
In 1950, Omicron Oil was sold and Ellen Rimbauer vanished shortly thereafter on January 15. The last person to see her was a maid who later testified that she had seen Ellen seem to walk in a trance-like state toward the Perspective Hallway. The servants carried on for a while unaware of their mistress’s absence and gradually began to leave the house. Rose Red’s legend had now officially begun.
Investigations began in the Sixties as scientists and geologists converged on the house trying to solve the riddle of the house. Some of them thought the noises in the house were caused by sounds amplified by old water pipes. In the Seventies, parapsychologist Max Burnstheim vanished during a visit in the house. The Seattle Historical Society had been leading tours in the house since Ellen Rimbauer’s disappearance, but they all stopped in 1972 when a guest named Liz Albert broke away from the tour and vanished somewhere in the house. The most recent investigation occurred in Autumn of 2001 by Dr. Joyce Reardon from nearby Beaumont College. Steven Rimbauer oversaw it as the last exploration of Rose Red because he had been offered a lot of money for the land. The demolition of the house and grounds, however, has been halted and postponed because of the local historical significance to the area. Scholars not so fascinated by the hauntings desire to preserve the house in order to research the land for the Native American remains buried under it.
Identity of Ghosts: Unknown. While it is plainly obvious that Ellen Rimbauer and Sukeena haunt the structure, there are some suggestions Native American spirits haunted the area before them. Before her disappearance, Ellen Rimbauer herself spoke of a curse that had followed her from Africa. Some critics of Ellen Rimbauer’s diary blame the sounds and experiences she had as signs of her dwindling health, but those who knew her swear she was just as strong and vibrant as she ever was until just before her death.
Comments: Rose Red (2002/2003). Loosely based on the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California and Summerwind in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin. Rose Red itself was based on Thornewood Hall.
This information was taken from :
http://www.geocities.com/aesgaard41/rosered.html
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