The Victorian cottage at the corner of 24th Street and Avenue L - long believed to be a Nicholas Clayton design - is full of charm.
Its mariner’s-wheel balustrade, original stained-glass windows, and ornate front doors draw admiration. So do its resident ghosts.
The home is named for two prominent families who lived there. James Moreau Brown, owner of Ashton Villa, built the house in 1885 as a wedding gift for his youngest daughter, Matilda Ella (1865-1926), and her husband, Thomas H. Sweeney (1850-1905). The couple lived there with their three children, though the marriage was reportedly troubled due to Thomas’s abusive nature.
The longest occupants were Judge Martin “Mart” Henry Royston Jr. (1871-1948) and his sisters Maude (1866-1954) and Elizabeth “Bettie” (1867-1951), who purchased the home in 1911.
Royston served as special guardian to Moreau Brown Sweeney (1885-1918), Matilda’s eldest son, helping him remove financial restrictions placed by his father before he turned twenty-one. Both Mart and Maude died in the home.
Current owners Chris and Denise Hendrix moved into the home in 2019, and Chris’s mother, Wynell S. Fendley, joined them in 2022. Their introduction to the “spirited” inhabitants of the house began almost immediately.
“When we first moved in, before much furniture was even here,” Denise recalls, “we were showing our family the house right after we bought it in 2018. We were all upstairs, and one of our nephews reached to open a window at the top of the stair landing.”
“His Apple Watch suddenly went off and said, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’ There were five of us in the room who heard it.”
The entire group turned and ran down the stairs. “That was probably our first experience in the house,” she says.
Chris recalls, “The only thing the people we bought the house from really told us was that they wanted to make sure we’d take care of it - and not to move the bridle hanging in the basement. They didn’t offer any explanation beyond saying that was what they had been told.”
The large basement was never filled in during the grade-raising after the 1900 Storm and still sits three feet below street level. Once used as rooms for servants and storage, it retains a wine-cellar alcove.
The antique horse’s bridle the previous owners warned them not to disturb hangs on a column, covering an eerie graphite drawing on the wall: a sad face with its eyes scratched out and a noose around its neck. No one knows who created the unsettling sketch, and no resident has dared paint over it.
Wynell avoids the wine-cellar alcove entirely and won’t step inside, though the rest of the household seems unfazed.
Denise, however, refuses to go into the basement between 3:30 and 4:30pm. She feels a sudden sense of dread during that hour. “It just gives me the heebie-jeebies,” she says.
“I can walk down there any other time of the night or day - my art studio is down there - but in that one hour it’s like I’ve hit a weird wall.” As she describes it, she rubs her forearms to calm the goosebumps.
Footsteps are occasionally heard on the narrow main stairway between the first and second floors - sometimes walking, sometimes running, and sometimes sounding distinctly childlike.
“A few times we’ve heard the sound of running down the stairs,” Chris says, “and then it sounds like someone jumped off the last one, just like a kid.” Other times, they’ve mistaken the footsteps for each other coming down the stairs, only to find no one there.
The couple attributes the more rambunctious sounds to the Sweeney children, the only youngsters who lived in the home full time.
Even the 1885 piano - the same age as the house - seems to be enjoyed by the home’s unseen inhabitants. The instrument, which the couple brought from Arkansas, occasionally plays a few notes as if to get attention.
Several family members have heard it. And at the time of this interview, the owners didn’t yet know that Matilda played piano and both Royston sisters were piano teachers.
There’s one unsettling experience every member of the household has had at one time or another. “At night, when we’re lying in bed asleep or just about asleep, it feels like somebody sits down on the bed,” Denise says.
“You can feel the mattress go down. That’s happened both upstairs and downstairs. Some guests won’t stay the night.”
When Chris and Denise are away, Wynell sleeps downstairs in their room to keep the dogs company. “There’s a little blue dresser sitting at the front door,” she recalls, “and when I’d get up in the morning, the drawers would be slightly pulled open.”
“The first time it happened, I thought they had just been left that way, so I pushed them closed. But it happened again the next night. Now, every time they’re away, I make sure to close the drawers before bed - and they’re open again in the morning.”
Denise confirms the phenomenon and adds that other drawers in the house do the same, and the tall pocket doors to the dining room also partially open by themselves. They’ve witnessed it more than once.
“Chris’s closet won’t shut all the way,” Denise continues. “It stays open about four inches. One night when I was in bed and looked over toward the closet, I saw it slowly open several more inches by itself.”
She notes that the air-conditioning vents are in the floor and nowhere near the closet, ruling out drafts as the cause.
“Sometimes we sit in the living room tossing our dogs’ toys so they’ll run to get them and bring them back,” Denise says. “One night Jack - one of the dogs - didn’t come back, and I found him lying in front of that same closet door.”
“He had put his toy in the space where the door was ajar and was staring inside, as if waiting for someone to throw the toy for him.”
The couple has seen those same pet toys roll across the living-room floor - a mix of carpet and wood - completely on their own.
“Sometimes the dogs bark toward the basement stairs, and the hair on their back is standing up, and they bark or growl,” she adds. “It gives me chills.” The dogs stay focused unless someone walks directly in front of them and breaks their line of sight.
The Hendrix family spends quite a lot of time in the large dining room, where they do paperwork, work puzzles, and play games. But they are not always alone.
Chris’s sister was sitting at the table eating breakfast alone one morning when she suddenly called out for her mother and brother. A painting hanging on the wall behind her, beneath a stained-glass window, flew off and landed face-up several feet away.
“That’s just not normal,” her mother Wynell says. “If it had just fallen, it would have landed face-down and not gone that far.”
Denise and her friend Christine were getting ready to play a game at the dining-room table when Denise stepped into the kitchen. Moments later, she heard Christine cry out.
When she returned, Christine was sitting in the same chair Chris’s sister refuses to use, and the stacks of paperwork that had been at the far end of the table were scattered across the floor.
Christine said the stacks had been forcefully shoved the full length of the eight-foot table while she was watching. The windows were closed, the fans were off, and no explanation could be found for the dramatic incident.
Wynell notes that before living in the house, she was “on the fence” about the existence of ghosts. “Now I definitely believe. We can’t be making this all up.”
Occasionally, the residents smell a waft of cigar smoke, though none of them are smokers.
“Every once in a while, you’ll smell a poof of cigar smoke go right over your shoulder, as if someone is blowing it from right behind you,” Denise says. She has experienced the scent in the former gentleman’s parlor at the front of the house.
Denise first heard faint music shortly after they moved into the home, while she was lying in bed. Each time she heard it, she checked for passing cars, turned off the electric fan, and looked for any possible explanation - but none was found. Chris thought she was imagining it until he heard it himself.
“It’s muffled, but it sounds like old Victorian jazz type music,” Chris explains. “Almost like you’d hear if a Victrola was playing - not a modern radio. But it has a definite rhythm, lasts a few minutes, and then it’s gone.”
About a month later, Denise’s sister visited and slept in the room above theirs. “The next morning,” Denise recalls, “she asked if we had some sort of piped-in music in the house, like an intercom. We just looked at each other, and then told her what we had been hearing.”
“The music seems to come back whenever there are tropical storms,” Chris adds. “During Beryl, it started the night before. It’s always been around, but it’s more active then.”
Certain experiences are more unnerving than others, Denise admits. “Like when we heard a little girl’s voice say ‘Daddy’ one night while we were watching TV.”
“We looked at each other and turned off the TV to see if we heard it again - and we did. But the second time, it sounded more needy than the first.”
Chris confirms the moment. “It was definitely a high-pitched female child’s voice, and it sounded like it was coming from the hall.”
Strange events also happen outside the house. While the couple was away traveling, an older woman came to the door and handed their son Christopher an old photograph of the home, saying she wanted his parents to have it since it was theirs now.
He asked for her address so his parents could send their thanks, and wrote it down twice to make sure he had it correct. She even pointed out the direction of her home.
“When I got home, I went to her address, and there’s nothing there. No house… nothing. It’s an empty lot,” Denise says, shaking her head. They still don’t know who the mystery woman was.
A workman recently discovered the surprise hidden room every haunted house seems destined to have. While on a ladder, he peered through a third-floor window and spotted a small room that had been completely closed off.
The owners had no idea it existed, but believe the roughly 80-square-foot space once housed the original cistern that serviced the master bathroom below. For now, it remains enclosed, though the couple is considering reopening it for storage.
The list of experiences in the house is long. They’ve seen a transparent shadow figure cross from one side of the hallway to the other. A hamper has been mysteriously “kicked” away from a wall.
Work crews have reported their equipment batteries draining without explanation. Some workers say they’ve been chased by orbs.
A mysterious red liquid has seeped up through the concrete floor of the basement. And shuffling footsteps are often heard below.
“It’s kind of like we’re sharing the space with somebody, but you don’t know who or where they are,” Chris reflects.
Denise adds, “We sometimes just walk through the house and say out loud that we love the house and we’re going to take care of it. I think that’s important for them to know.”
In a home layered with history, memory, and more than a few mysteries, the Hendrix family has learned to live not just in the house, but with it.