OG Nightmare on Elm Street: The True Story of Eliakim Phelps’ Ghostly Fuckery
You already know 1984’s creepy Halloween classic Nightmare on Elm Street, but you probably have no idea how scary the ORIGINAL “Fuckery on Elm Street” tale actually is. It happened in the mid-19th century and does not feature a diabolical dude in need of microneedling, but it’s still a cinematic story so packed with scares people have been sharing the tale for two centuries.
In 1848 a widower and prominent reverend named Eliakim Phelps had just remarried, adding a lovely young widow her three children to his family. Looking for a country home to enjoy with his new brood, Rev. Eli purchased 1738 Elm Street in Stratford, Connecticut. Previously owned by a sea captain named George R. Dowell, complete with a stately double staircase just like on a ship, the large estate seemed the perfect place to continue on their good Christian path. The Phelpses settled in, and briefly enjoyed a period of domestic bliss.
But on March 10, 1850, Rev. Phelps, his new wife, and the children returned home from church to find their big, beautiful house trashed. The front door was wide open, furniture knocked over, papers all over the floor. There are a few different versions of the little details — some lore claims the furniture was curiously rearranged, with items stacked on each other, others simply say “ransacked” — but newspapers from the time confirmed that
a.) nothing was stolen, and
b.) the Phelps family was frightened doubly by a dramatic display waiting upstairs
There, in Rev. Eli’s own bed, was a woman’s nightgown carefully laid out flat, arms crossed across the chest. Some retellings mention makeshift hands, like Mrs. Phelps’ gloves or carrots, placed at the wrists of the nightgown. All narrators seem to agree stockings were laid out as well, so that it very much looked like an effigy of Mrs. Phelps had been laid to rest in bed.
Hoping the whole thing was a prank, Reverend Phelps first put the house back in order, then commanded his family out of the home while he conducted a thorough attic-to-cellar search of the residence. It was during this process that things allegedly got even freakier.
While Phelps was upstairs trying to figure out what the hell was going on, something — or someone — set up a tableau of epically creepy proportions in a downstairs chamber room. His wife’s clothing was again stuffed and assembled, this time in the form of eleven figures positioned to look like they were praying. The family’s bibles were drawn into the scene, open as if being read from. Upon hearing strange noises downstairs, Phelps rushed to the chamber to find this bizarre staging laid out like a high-end Halloween display.
Assuming he was being, to use a professional historian term, fucked with, Phelps grabbed one of the figures…and was horrified to find it was just pillows wearing his wife’s clothing. To the best of his knowledge, he was completely alone in the house. The doors were still locked behind him.
And the appearance of strange effigies didn’t stop that day. A letter published in The New Haven Journal said of the happenings at the Phelps residence that it happened more than once, and:
“Some of the figures were kneeling beside the beds, and some bending their faces to the floor in attitudes of deep humility. In the center of [one] group was a dwarf, most grotesquely arrayed; and above was a figure so suspended as to seem flying through the air. These manifestations occurred sometimes when the room was locked, and sometimes when it was known that no person had been there. Measures were taken to have a special scrutiny in regard to every person who entered the room that day, and it is known with the most perfect certainty that many of these figures were constructed when there were no persons in the room, and no visible power by which they could have been produced.”
EFFIGY. DWARVES. READING. BIBLES.
For whatever batshit reason, this wasn’t enough to drive Phelps and family from the building forever.
Instead of turning tail and running, The Phelps family stuck around and got to know their ghosts, which were apparently divided into two categories: creepy assholes, and benign roommates.
Friendly, and Unfriendly, Ghosts
The spiritual roommates did what roommates do, moving random items (fireplace equipment, a potato, fabric, books, etc.) from room to room, and occasionally staging religious tableaus out of Mrs. Phelps’ clothing. Sometimes they would communicate through a series of knocks from “within” impossible places like doors, alerting family members to approaching visitors or helping them locate misplaced items. They left strange markings on blank pages in Reverend Eli’s notebooks, and once drew “hieroglyphs” (they were not, really, but that’s what the newspapers called them) on a turnip on the kitchen.
The creepy assholes were…yeah. That. They threw things, screamed in the middle of the night, and made messes, and did so with regularity. They seemed particularly drawn to — or perhaps produced by — Phelps’ younger children. According to more of the letters published in the local paper, one allegedly tried to smother daughter Anna with her pillow while she was alone in her room, and would slap her audibly. Red welts and handprints would even appear on Anna’s skin, even though no one had been around to touch her. Another set fire first to Reverend Phelps’ desk, and later his son Harry’s bed….while Harry was in it. Items were also picked up and flung at Harry by invisible hands. In one genuinely terrifying anecdote, visiting clergymen watched in horror as Harry’s clothes were torn apart by unseen hands as he sat quietly across the room. No one had been anywhere near the child.
(Unsurprisingly, Anna reportedly developed “a nervous condition,” and Harry became a sullen and anxious kid.)
Some of these stories were shared by the family directly, via letters and interviews. Others were documented by neighbors and the spiritualists who visited the home to “see” for themselves. Despite the protestations of other clergymen, Phelps held seances in this home for skeptics, allowing them to experience what became known as “The Stratford Knockings” firsthand. Over the course of several months, around a dozen people confirmed they had seen or heard what was happening on Elm Street with their own eyes and ears.
“I witnessed them hundreds and hundreds of times,” Rev. Phelps said of the happenings, “and I know that in hundreds of instances they took place when there was no visible power by which the motion could have been produced.”
The Most (Un)Popular House in Town
A prominent reverend and his family being plagued by ghosts wasn’t something Stratfordians ignored. It didn’t take long for locals, as well as “Spiritualists” around the country, to start weighing in on what could be happening.
If you’re to believe Andrew Jackson Davis, famed medium who visited the Phelps home to offer his assessment, the whole haunting was a classic poltergeist occurrence. Distressed at the death of his father and his mother’s subsequent remarriage to Reverend Phelps, Davis claimed Harry’s pre-teen rage and depression were manifesting as powerful paranormal events — and perhaps triggering similar events in his sisters. Harry had, Davis noted, been the only family member to experience strange noises, mysteriously torn clothing, and destroyed items even when he left Stratford to attend boarding school. And when he left the Stratford home, the odd occurrences did seem to decrease in frequency.
“Young Harry frequently failed to discriminate during certain moments of mental agitation between the sounds and effects which he himself made, and those sounds which were produced by spiritual presence,” Davis wrote.
Others theorized that the hauntings were the enraged spirit of Goody Bassett, a local woman seeking revenge after being erroneously executed for “witchcraft” on the Elm Street property in 1651. (Her “black magic,” according to records, had been speaking out against hypocritical town elders.)
And of course some, including Eli’s colleague Reverend John Mitchell, believed the Stratford Knockings were a hoax. Citing how the paranormal activity slowed when Harry was away from home, they theorized the boy and his siblings had staged everything as a way to keep busy in boring Stratford, as well as torment their parents for blending families. But that theory took a hit when Reverend Mitchell saw shit go flying across the room even when Harry wasn’t home.
Rev. Mitchell ended up speaking on the record about what he had seen, and apologizing to Harry.
Phelps’ adult son, Austin, even traveled from Philadelphia to Stratford to try and prove his young step-siblings were the cause of the events, which were drawing unwanted attention to him at seminary school. He brought his uncle, a prestigious doctor of medicine in Boston and well-known skeptic. But after several days of attempted debunking both men were utterly baffled. They themselves encountered knocking from INSIDE doors, wood panels, and walls, places no human in the house could possibly reach. They saw the strange, invisible attacks on the children. And they left convinced something “unexplainable” was happening.
So how did all of this effect the Phelpses of Elm Street? Not well, as you can imagine. The whole family ended up abandoning ship and moving back to Philadelphia within the year. Harry did not return to school, finishing his education at home.
As a random epilogue: Skeptical Austin ended up becoming a prolific pastor like his father, going on to serve as a professor at Andover Theological Seminary. His devotional book The Still Hour: Communion with God, published in 1859, is still in publication today.
His experiences at the Elm Street house eventually became fodder for his own daughter, who later published three “spiritualist” novels under the name Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. She was also an early feminist who encouraged women to set their corsets on fire, married a hot guy 17 years her junior, and advocated for the ethical treatment of animals about 100 years before it was cool to be vegan, but…more on her another time. Point is the Phelps family was interesting y’all.
Anyway, once the Phelps Family left the fuckery on Elm Street ended. The house was eventually turned into a convalescent home for a while and, apparently, occasional ghost encounters were rumored to continue.
But nothing on the scale of what Reverend Phelps and his children endured was ever reported again. Which is a shame, because those stuffed clothing tableaus did sound pretty cool.
This story was researched and written in conjunction with Human Fuckery Podcast, which you can find at: www.patreon.com/humanfuckery
