Helen Freeman-Sturgeon is no stranger to things that go bump in the night. Over the years she has confronted strange noises, ephemeral figures, the reoccurring smell of freshly lit cigarettes in empty rooms and movie theaters, and other unexplainable occurrences. Helen says that she is comfortable with the spirit world, and only once during the narrative of her experiences did she seem frightened.

Sturgeon lives in rural Cullman, Alabama. She also has an office in a historic house thought to have been built at the turn of the century, maybe 1907-1910. Her real estate agency now occupies this house, which is where the story takes place.

For years now there have been rumors about the house. It is thought by some Civil War buffs to be the repository of gold bullion, hidden by Confederate soldiers who never lived to return for it. Others believe that there is a secret tunnel leading from the office/house to the rental house across the street, also owned by Sturgeon.

“There is a unique shower stall in the basement that has an oddly configured rock wall,” Helen pointed out. “There is a place in the rental house across the street that looks like it might have been walled up.” It is possible that these are the points in both houses for entry to the tunnel.

A elderly neighbor who investigated the areas surrounding both houses with a metal detector and a dowsing rod says that he believes there is something there. He has talked to other men and they have all studied Civil War era maps of the Cullman route that was taken by Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest. “There is a big old oak three across from the office/house,” he pointed out. “According to some information contained in records we have seen, soldiers built a camp under that tree,” said Howard Kent. “There are ten maps and some of them indicate where the soldiers buried gold bars or some kind of treasure to keep from being caught with it. The U.S. map of this era shows that they went all the way from here down to the coast.”

“A lot of people don’t want to believe that the Confederates would leave something like that behind, but you must consider that they might have been on the run and intended to return, but were captured or killed,” he hypothesized.

“The house on the south side of the street has something in it that could be a false well, but there are rumors that it’s a tunnel connecting the two houses,” said Kent.

The device Kent uses can detect gold and silver. “Every time I go over that area with it, it takes me back to the same spot,” he said.

He has also heard that there was a tunnel there which was used to store liquor during prohibition years. He has seen the rock wall in the shower of the office/house, but so far has not gained admission to the other house to do any research on the area which appears to have been walled up.

When Sturgeon bought the office/house in 2003, she heard the rumor that a prostitute had been murdered in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

“I’ve never found out if that was true,” she said. “And I’ve never known any of the history of the house, including who the original owners were.

“However, soon after I bought the house someone came in and left a scrapbook of old photographs with one of the agents. They were taken with the house in the background. The man didn’t leave a name and he never returned.”

The photos are a treasure trove of visual information, although they are sadly lacking in practical details, like names, dates or occasions depicted in them. There are also some interesting “details” about some of them. One photo in particular shows what is thought by most who have seen it to be a sinister face.

One windy, wintery night, Helen was in the kitchen re-papering the shelves. She was in the office alone at the time, putting down the sticky shelf paper.

“I heard three distinct footsteps in the room over the kitchen,” said Sturgeon. “There is a fire escape on the top floor and I gathered my courage and went up to make sure the door to it was locked — but there was nothing there.”

A few weeks later one of the real estate agents was in the same upstairs room. “I went up there and mentioned that the door needed to be left opened to help heat the adjoining bathroom,” said Helen. No sooner had she returned to her downstairs office than the agent upstairs yelled for Helen to come back upstairs. The agent was sitting at her desk in a frozen state and said that the bathroom door had mysteriously closed and when Helen checked it, it was locked…

A few days later the same agent’s mother was sitting at her desk in the same office. Helen went up and spoke to her, and playfully told her that she was keeping too many lights on, while turning them off as she walked by the switches. “The room was designed in an ‘L’ shape,” Helen described. “No sooner had I walked from one end of it to the other than the lights had somehow turned back on as I was heading to the door. The agent and I kind of froze and just looked at each other with a shocked look on our faces.”

This was the room where the unfortunate “lady of the night” was supposedly murdered. There were a multitude of similar occurrences in the room, such as printers whirring to life without anyone touching them, and other minor incidences.

But it was at night that things really got exciting in the old house. “I went through a period of working late and I often fell asleep on a leather sofa in my office,” Helen explained.

Her office, a conference room and kitchen line up in this area. As she walked through from the kitchen heading back to her office, she caught her breath — something was there, she was sure of it. “The feeling was so strong that I ran back to my office and locked the door.”

At one point, Helen was checking the monitor on her security system when she noticed a strange movement. She bent closer to the monitor for a better look. “I saw the figure of a woman floating down the hall stairway. I could see her hand on the rail. She was dressed in period clothing,” she said. “But when I went out of my office through the conference room to reach the stairway, whatever image I saw on the monitor was gone.”

She says that incident scared her more than anything else that happened before or since. It literally took her breath for a few moments.

Even with all the strange noises, Helen felt somehow “connected” with these spirits and is not afraid.

In addition to the noises and other phenomenon that occurred in her office, there were others in her home on the lake. Helen and her husband moved there in 1998.

A man died there in a hospital bed in the dining room so he would have a view of the lake.

A couple of friends were helping to paint the interior of the house. Helen and her husband had to run some errands. When they returned the lady was terrified and said she had seen “three dark shadowy figures in the basement” Helen said. “I don’t know what happened, but she left and she has never come back again and never finished the paint job.”

One night, shortly after moving in, Helen fell asleep on the couch and awoke to see distinctly the tall figure of a man in the foyer. The TV was glaring in her eyes and she was trying to get focused to see who it was. She called out thinking it was her son, “Russell, is that you?” but, the figure faded away. Several times as she watched TV in the living room, she has seen the figure of a man come up the stairs out of the corner of her eye, then turn and go down the hall. A short while later while her son was home alone and she was on the phone with him while sitting in the same chair in the living room, her son spoke up and said “Oh, my gosh, I just saw a man come up the stairs and turn and go down the hall!”

“Well, thank goodness someone else saw it besides me,” she told him.

Helen’s husband passed away during all this turmoil. She was devastated by the loss. She reacted by working harder, often into the wee hours of the morning.

“I was alone in my house upstairs working on my computer, which faces a blank wall,” said Helen. “All of a sudden I smelled a freshly lit cigarette.” Her husband had been a heavy smoker…

“I actually expected to turn and see someone there, but instead, there was nothing,” she said. That happened to her time after time, at home and in restaurants, in a “no smoking” theater, and even on vacation.

Back at her house, Helen was again working on the computer in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, maybe close to 3 a.m. The house was totally quiet when suddenly, she heard noises coming from a closet. “It sounded as if someone were trapped in there and was trying to get out,” she described the commotion. “About 20 minutes later, I heard it again. I would hear it in one end of the house and I would go towards it. When I got there the commotion would sound off in the other end of the house.”

Finally, Helen walked out into the hall and said aloud, “Okay, this is what you do at night, so you do your thing and I’ll continue to do what I’m doing!”

After her outburst, she never heard those sounds again…

Helen sold a house to a group of people who investigate paranormal activity (Professional Paranormal Investigators) and they picked up on the activity there while they were closing up. They asked to come and stay overnight in the office/house this weekend. She is, understandably curious about what is going on there. When strange occurrences happen, she continues to tell them to carry on with whatever it is they do and she’ll do the same. She has become so used to this that nothing bothers her any more.

She knows the seriousness of what she has experienced, but sees the fun side of it, too. For Halloween she often stands a figure of “Mrs. Bates” from the famous Hitchcock movie, “Psycho” in that mysterious upstairs window, placing a fan on it’s hair. Maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of her standing there this year…

If anyone has any additional information about the house, the original owners or any history connected to either house, Helen would appreciate hearing about it.