House Of Mystery

Is it haunted or is it not?

Some say Tom and Pat Petiet's home along Packard Road is haunted. Well, Pat and her children say so, but husband Tom does not believe it. Pat Petiet, below, says she has seen and heard things that make her believe there is a ghost living upstairs.

HOUSE OF MYSTERY

Family members report ghostly noises, eerie events

By JO COLLINS MATHIS

News Staff Reporter

This is not a scary story, but it is spooky. And it might make you wonder.

Is the old Darling farmhouse at 3211 Packard Road haunted? Or are all those people just imagining those things?

At least six people have heard unexplained noises in the 99-year-old white framed farmhouse set back off a busy stretch of Packard Road in the southeast corner of Ann Arbor. And one of them says he saw a large figure enter the closed door and escape through the wall.

"I think it's fun," said Pat Petiet, who lives with her husband, Tom, in the white house across the street from a commercial strip three blocks east of Platt. "It means that somebody has loved the house enough to stay."

She said the experienced tend to happen to people who are new to the house, and then die down when people have been in the house a while.

"It's almost like I get this feeling whatever's there is checking you out," said Petiet, a teacher of science and math at Emerson School. "Once a person is checked out, it disappears."

It all started several years ago when a man working for Tom Petiet's in-home design business stayed at the house when the family went away on vacation.

When they returned, he said he was not going to stay at the house at night anymore. It seems he'd been sitting in an office on the third floor when he heard footsteps on the steps. There was nobody there.

In addition, the answering machine kept going on and off when he left the room --- even when it was turned off.

When he heard the child crying, he left the house.

"I was very unnerved," asked the man, who did not want to be identified. "It gave me the creeps."

The Petiets weren't sure whether to believe him, because until then, they'd heard nothing strange. But their two sons -- now 18 and 22 -- would later say that they often heard heard steps on the third floor and knocks on the bedroom door, with no one there. Their live-in nanny said she often heard footsteps, as well.

A teen-ager living in the home on weekdays said on his first night in the guestroom, a large presence entered the room and faded into the wall.

He never slept in the room again.

Pat Petiet said she was alone in the house one night and sensed the presence of someone and heard footsteps on the narrow, creaky steps leading to the third floor. When she turned her back to use the copy machine, she heard the distinctive sound of the Macintosh computer turning on. Nobody was there. The computer was turned off.

"The hairs on the back of my neck stood up," she said. "It's nothing overt. It's nothing scary or constant. Once in a while, these weird things will happen."

Even Tasha the dog will sometimes howl unexpectedly at seemingly nothing.

in 1986, the Petiets moved into the old farmhouse built by Ulysses D. Darling in 1900. His youngest daughter, Jessie, who was born and raised in the eight-bedroom house, visited the Petiets, showed them pictured and told some of its history.

The room in which most noises have been heard was frequently used by Jessie as a playroom. The Petiets have converted the house to include a commercial arts studio on the third floor, and four bedrooms instead of the original eight.

 Marcello Truzzi, a professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University who has studied the paranormal phenomena extensively, said he hears from time to time about haunted houses in the Ann Arbor area.

Truzzi said that most research has debunked claims of haunted houses as either a mistake, fraud, or something caused by the residents' psyche.

Ghosts are real because they're in the minds of people, he said, but there's no good evidence that they are anything else.

He said the success of the movie "Sixth Sense" will cause a resurgence of interests in ghosts.

"Ghosts are hot," he said. "Two years ago it was angels. This year, ghosts."

The thought of having a ghost in the house can be exciting, he said, and sometimes cause the price of the house to rise.

While he doesn't dismiss the possibility of some kind of unexplained presence in the house, Tom Petiet hasn't witnessed them. 

"I spend all day up here and haven't seen a thing," he said, standing in his third-floor office.

He said he loves the big old house, and hopes to live there a long time --- haunted or not. "I'm not terribly concerned about it," he said.

But if wife likes the idea that someone -- possibly a child -- is watching over the house. 

"it's almost like there's a curious child up there pushing buttons," she said. "it's not a threatening thing. Somebody enjoyed the house is still here, enjoying the house."

Reporter Jo Collins Mathis can be reached at (734) 994-6849