OLD JUDGES NEVER DIE

Built in 1887, the house on Holter Street in Helena, Montana, was bought by Bob and Dorothy Card. It had been turned into four apartments before they had purchased it in 1969 and the Cards planned on renovating it.

It wasn't until 1973 that they finally were able to start the remodeling. They replaced the stairway with a spiral staircase and that's when the problems started. "You could almost feel the unrest in the house," Dorrothy Card said. "Now maybe there had been funny goings-on that we had passed over without even thinking about them. When we started remodeling that's when things started to get worse

Dorothy was alone in the house when she heard the outside door open and then slam shut. "I thought somebody had come home," she said, and then called the names of her family members. "Debbie! Bert! Bob! No response. I went downstairs, down the main staircase, and I actually heard somebody coming up the stairs, but there wasn't a soul there."

This became a regular occurance and she wasn't the only that it happened to.
"The kids would say the same thing if my husband and I were out for an evening. They would hear the front door close and then the footsteps. My older son was scared to death to stay in that house by himself."

It was always the same. Footsteps would be heard going up the stairway, once in awhile other doors would open by themselves. Dorothy said it was like somebody had come home and was checking to see if everything was all right.

Dorothy would be wakened by noises from the attic which had been sealed off. "They were definite footsteps. Somebody pacing back and forth. My husband heard them too, but he said they were probably mice." According to Dorothy they would have had to been mice wearing cowboy boots.

They never did figure out how to get into that hidden area in the attic. Bob found a false wall in a closet downstairs and he figured that a stairway had been there at one time. Dorothy talked her husband into not removing the wall, she didn't want to disturb whatever was still in the house.

Dorothy found out that Judge Theodore Brantly, the original owner, always returned home late at night after everyone else had retired for the night. He would go to the third-floor office and go over cases that he was working on until the early morning hours.

His hard work payed off in stature but it came at great cost. Being engrossed in his work he had no time for his wife and children. His two sons grew up not knowing their father. His daughter left home to attend school in the east.

His health started to go downhill in 1919 and three years later he died at the age of seventy. His descendents owned the house until 1963 and six years later the Cards bought it.

Dorothy said that just as they were getting used to the footsteps, other oddities started. One evening the family went out for a drive, as they usually did during the summer. Before leaving the house, she told the boys to turn off a TV in their room. "When we got home the TV was blaring and the lights were on in the boys' room. This happened several more times, but the boys always insisted they had nothing to do with it," Dorothy said. The house had been rewired so defective wiring was probably not the cause.

A tenant in the basement apartment, Barb, also had her problems. "Have you been eating my candy?" Barb asked Dorothy one afternoon. "I had a whole bowl of M&Ms and I haven't eaten any. Now they're all gone."
"Oh, those dirty little poltergeists are after us again." Dorothy laughed.

Barb knew nothing of poltergeists or the Cards' problems, but after Dorothy explained to her about the strange footsteps she admitted that this wasn't the first time candy had vanished. The women finally just dismissed it as a "funny little thing."

The Cards sold the mansion in 1977, not because of ghostly footsteps or missing candy, but because the family had gotten smaller and Dorothy said "We just had too much room, I told Bob it had gotten to the point where all I was doing was cleaning. It was way too much house for us. The remodeling of our apartment had been finished, but the rest of the house wasn't. And besides, my husband wasn't feeling well."

A physician bought the house as an investment. She traveled alot and rented the apartments, with a resident manager and his wife in charge.

One morning the manager called Dorothy and told her that a package had come for her at the old house. He asked if she could come and pick it up. Dorothy noted an uneasiness in his voice and asked if there was problem. After some hesitation, he asked her is she noticed any "funny happenings" in the house when she lived there.

Dorothy told him about the footsteps on the staircase, doors opening and closing, and the television incident. The man said that he and his wife had experienced all those things—and more!

"He said they were going to move out because his wife was a nervous wreck," Dorothy said. "One day he came home from work and was talking to his wife in the middle of the living room. All of a sudden the large rhododendron plant that I'd left there rose three feet off the floor and just hung suspended in the air. Then it [the plant] started to shake, fell over and died. The pot was smashed. While they stood while they stood there, the vacuum cleaner cleaner in the kitchen turned itself on and started to move across the floor."

The resident manager and his wife moved. He told the new landlady about the ghosts, and she said, "Yes, and they're my ghosts and I'm going to hang on to them."

Bob Card died not long after the couple sold the house. Dorothy moved to another part of Helena. When friends asked why she lived for eight years in a haunted house, she had a ready reply.
"The poltergeist, or whatever they were, really weren't that disturbing. We kind of laughed it off and as long as they weren't destroying things and making life completely miserable for us, we knew we could live alongside them."

Dorothy dismissed all questions about the sealed attic. "I don't ever...ever...want to know what's up there!"