WHO HAUNTS TED BUNDY'S CHILDHOOD HOME?
In 2016, the home where serial killer Ted Bundy grew up was being remodeled. The contractor completing the work, scrawled Bible verses on the walls and called in the clergy.
The house located in Tacoma's North End was built in 1946. The Bundys moved there in 1955, when Ted Bundy was nine years old.
He lived there with his mother, stepfather and three siblings.
Bundy was born Theodore Cowell to Eleanor Louise Cowell, 20, in a home for unwed mothers in Vermont. His grandfather Sam Cowell decided the baby should be part of the family, but initially his mother was slated into the role of being his sister.
There were other unusual aspects to the Cowell family. Eleanor's mother, suffered from depression and agoraphobia. Her father was known for his raging temper that spared no one. Some have theorized that Bundy was a product of incest between his mother and her father, even though she claimed she was seduced by a war veteran that abandoned her.
Three years after Bundy’s birth, Louise left Philadelphia with her son and moved to Tacoma. She changed the child’s surname to Nelson to hide the fact he was illegitimate. After this move Louise met and married Johnnie Bundy an Army hospital cook in 1951.
The family moved to the house on Skyline Drive in 1955. Johnnie Bundy adopted his stepson, and the couple had four of their own children.
The house was sold in April 2016, and slated for renovation. Six months later Casey Clopton was hired to do the work. It wasn't long before strange things started to occur.
“I’m not one to believe a lot of this stuff, but this house made me a believer. Periodically, throughout the course of the job, we had weird things keep happening. Everything in that house fought us, and I was kind of weird about it. But I go to church and I have God with me,” Clopton said, claiming that cellphones and other electronic devices would occasionally get unplugged or immediately die without explanation.
On at least two occasions, the words “Leave” and “Help me” were found written inside the house — in sheetrock dust on a bedroom floor and on a basement window, respectively.
Furniture would fall over, and drawers pulled open when the doors were locked and no one was there.
At the beginning he tried to dismiss the occurrences as pranks, but eventually that explanation failed to quiet the doubts he felt that something was amiss.
Clopton penciled in Bible verses on the walls and ended up by calling in reinforcements, in the form of two pastors. They went from room to room reading scripture and blessing the house.
The contractor brought his 11-year-old daughter to the house, something he customarily does on all his jobs. He described where she started crying, and said it felt weird, and she didn't like it there.
While there is no evidence that Bundy actually committed any crimes in the house, some believe his first kill was Ann Marie Burr who disappeared in 1961, from her North End Tacoma home under mysterious circumstances. She has never been found. He denied the allegation when Burr's mother sent him a letter while he was sitting in prison.
In 2011, evidence from the Burr crime scene was compared to DNA samples taken from Bundy, but the results failed to link him to the place the girl was taken from.
Eleanor Louise Bundy died in 2012, and her husband Johnnie in 2007. By the time Ted Bundy was executed in 1989 they no longer lived in the house in the North End.
Did something disturbing occur in the house before the Bundys moved there, or after they moved away that could be the cause of the eerie occurrences? Perhaps, or could it even be Bundy visiting the last place he lived at before he gave in to his urge to take human life.
The newly redone house with its bright yellow front door was sold for $335,000 to an anonymous buyer in 2017. Did they know who once called this abode, Home Sweet Home?
I live three miles away from Lake Sammamish state park where he abducted two women. Good article. I also am the creator and caretaker of Ghost Gardens. Heavily haunted.
Quite the interesting story