Friday, September 7, 2007

Murdered Woman Haunts Montana Residence

Doreen Lemire points to a hole under her bathroom where she and her husband found several bones

Great Falls, Montana - Kristafer Lock has tried to forget seeing a translucent-like woman in a white nightgown walking the hallways of his mom’s house.

But he’s not ruling anything out at this point.

On Monday, his mom Doreen Lemire and her husband Allen discovered what could possibly be the bones of a woman beneath their bathroom at 1305 7th Ave. N. The woman may have been killed by her husband 32 years ago.

Police have not determined if they are animal bones or human bones. But Leslee Reynolds Larson went missing in 1975, her husband Dennis Larson lived on the same lot, he was later convicted in Maine of killing his third wife, and he admitted in 2000 to killing Leslee.

That has 18-year-old Lock thinking seriously about what he saw.

He described the ghost as a woman in a white dress with a rose print. She would appear in the hallway between the living room and kitchen, where the bathroom is located, too. Sometimes he would see her outside.

“I try not to pay too much attention to her,” Lock said. “I don’t believe in spirits; I don’t believe in ghosts.”

But he’s not the only one that has supposedly seen a female ghost hovering in the house.

For years, people have described the house at 1305 7th Ave. N., as well as the duplex at 1301-1303 7th Ave. N., as haunted.

According to city directories, Dennis Larson lived in the 1301 duplex until sometime in 1979 or 1980.

Jody McCurdy lived in the Lemire’s house from 1998 to 2002. Her son Malachi Dusek was just 5 years old around that time and often told her of seeing a woman in a white nightgown walking through the house, holding a purse.

When on Wednesday, she read the news of human bones possibly being discovered in her old rental home, McCurdy said she “went numb.”

“We had so many problems in that house,” McCurdy said.

Malachi Dusek, right, sits on the porch of his Black Eagle home with his mother Jody McCurdy and brother Micah Brady and recounts a ghost sighting he had while his family lived at 1305 7th Ave. N.

She had a mice problem and at one point in time believed there was carbon monoxide poisoning in the house as well. She also had two miscarriages while living in the house and one premature baby died.

“I just figured it was like a curse,” she said.

The mice, she said, used to come from a hole underneath the sink in the bathroom – the same place the Lemires found the bones on Monday when remodeling their bathroom.

“The smell just was like decaying wood,” McCurdy said.

Malachi, now 11, said he once followed the woman who appeared in a night gown from one of the bedrooms toward the living room, thinking it was his mom.

When he yelled for his mom, Malachi said she responded that she was in the bathroom.

“I was 100 percent sure I’d seen something,” Malachi said. “I thought my mind was playing tricks on me.”

After Dennis Larson was arrested and charged with murdering his wife in Maine in 1988, police in Great Falls once again opened the investigation into Leslee’s death and searched the duplex where the Larsons had lived.

Pat Goodover owned the duplex for a few years in the 1980s when that investigation was initiated.

He said at that time, some of the tenants reported seeing a ghost and that those tenants who had dogs would never go near the dirt-floor basement.

“This was your classic haunted house,” Goodover said. “Whether you believed in ghosts or not – something was there.”

He described the duplex as two separate townhouses with a main floor, second floor and a basement that was shared between the two. It may have been a single-family residence at one point.

The duplex was razed in 2005 and is now one big corner lot owned by the Lemires, according to city records.

Goodover said the house that is now 1305 7th Ave. N was a garage at the time and was owned by a different person.

In the west-facing unit, there was once a fireplace where Goodover said police searched for clues. On the east-facing unit, he said there was a door that led to nowhere, but had scratch marks like someone was trying to get inside the house.

It was like déjà vu to Goodover when he heard news of bones being found – even though the bones haven’t been identified and Goodover tries not to believe in ghosts.

“I don’t have an opinion on that,” he said. “There are things out there we don’t know.”