People love a good ghost story, especially this time of year. But, this is a bit of an unconventional ghost story. You see, history, like ghosts, lingers in the air, in the soil, on the streets and ultimately, in the collective consciousness of a town. The Norris House, long gone as a physical structure, continues to haunt Apex to this day, but in a good way. This is a story about the house, a few of its inhabitants and what remains instead of what was lost.
The Norris House was located on South Elm, between Chatham and Moore Streets. It was built in the 1860s by John McC. Ellington and sold in 1880 to Jessie A. Norris, a local businessman who owned a lumber and turpentine company and wanted to be near the railroad. Norris added a dramatic tower to the front section, turning a small, simple farmhouse into a two-story gothic mansion. This was just the beginning.
Several generations of Norrises lived there including the eccentric sister duo of Maude and Maybelle Norris. These sisters would eventually become caretakers to their niece (the most famous inhabitant of the house), Julia Montgomery Street, an award-winning author of children’s books.
Maude was born in 1881 and her sister Maybelle in 1884. They lived the entirety of their lives in that house. I spoke with Julia Fallon and Carole Lewis, Montgomery Street’s granddaughters, about their experience visiting the house and their eccentric great-aunts. Carole, who is 13 months older than Julia, said their infrequent visits to the house with Wuwu (i.e., their term of endearment for their grandmother) were isolated to the mid-1960s.
“It was scary. We were in second and third grade; I felt like I was in a ghost story. At the time, I was reading Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie and the novel, Psycho,” Lewis said. “Aunt Maude and Maybelle were weird. In my memory, I see them wearing old Victorian dresses in this strange old house. It was like being in the Twilight Zone. This place was scary. It was gray and distressed. It was like being in a black and white movie,” Lewis continued.
Fallon noted that the aunts were neither friendly nor pleasant. They sold milk and eggs locally which suggests they had some interest in community involvement. But, as you might imagine, over time a reputation, whether fair or not, was established. The gothic mansion facade combined with the eccentricities of the spinster sisters resulted in rumors and innuendos aplenty.
Lewis said she remembers the sisters as tall and slim with straight hair and maybe one of them wore glasses. Neither Fallon nor Lewis could remember if their aunts attended church, but they suspected so. They both agreed that kids would be scared to death. In a small town like Apex, word travelled fast.
“I went into the employee lounge at Belks one day and mentioned to the employees gathered there that my grandmother grew up in Apex. I told them that my great-aunts were Ms. Maude and Ms. Maybelle. They knew exactly who I was talking about,” Fallon shared.
Both Lewis and Fallon remember a large, dark house with high ceilings, dark wood walls and ceilings, sparsely furnished rooms with a rug here or there. The bedrooms were upstairs, accessible from a dark, wide hallway. To get there, you had to traverse a creaky, foreboding set of stairs. They did note that the yard was large and inviting and you can rest assured they tried to spend most of their time there playing in the yard. Overall, though, their consensus opinion: the house was creepy.
“I lived in Los Angeles and saw the Psycho house on the studio lot and immediately thought of that house [in Apex]. It was definitely scary. You can understand why people write stories about houses like this,” she finished.
But the stories about the Norris House weren’t restricted to family members. Tommy Morgan, a long-time resident of Apex who grew up about three blocks from the Norris House, shared a story about Maude and Maybelle hiring a World War II veteran to paint the picket fence that surrounded the property. After completing the job, he supposedly disappeared and was never seen or heard from again. To be sure, this is Norris House mythology, but you get the idea.
Another story Morgan shared comes via another long-time resident of Apex who remembers the Norris House sisters as strange but for another reason. This source shared that when it was cold outside, Maude and Maybelle would bring the cows into the house. So, if there were ghosts, perhaps they were of the bovine variety.
And then there is the story of former Apex resident and Apex historian Warren Holleman, who told of the time when his mother set up a date with his cub scout troop and the Norris sisters to try to dispel the local gossip about them. True to form, the eccentric sisters served hot tea to a group of boys ages 7-12, and then ushered them up the creaky, dark staircase toward who-knows-what. According to Holleman, this had the opposite effect.
Lewis and Fallon’s grandmother was born in 1898. Tragic circumstances resulted in her having to live with her eccentric aunts while she was a child. Fallon and Lewis noted that because their spinster aunts were so restrictive, Montgomery Street spent a lot of time reading, alone, in the corners of the house, clearly looking to escape. In Pluck, Perseverance and Paint, the book by Warren and Toby Holleman about Apex history, Montgomery Street talked about the joys of climbing her favorite tree in the front yard and watching the trains go by, recounting one particular time when the circus stopped on the way through Apex and unloaded some of the animals, including giraffes and elephants. She eventually graduated from Apex High School and in 1923 married a doctor from Winston-Salem at which point she left Apex, for good. Her award-winning career as a writer of children’s fiction didn’t really get going until 1957. However, she continued right up to her death in 1993.
“The house affected my grandmother in ways that we probably don’t understand and there are some things we found out about the family that are curious to me. I think the house affected her,” Fallon shared.
“You are by yourself, and you are a kid, and your parents are gone, and you don’t have anybody your age, and you have these mean aunts. Of course you are sitting in a corner reading to escape,” Lewis noted. Both Fallon and Lewis agreed that it was quite possible that her childhood experiences at the house solidified for their grandmother the kind of life she didn’t want to live.
Maybelle died in 1966 and Maude in 1971. Maude was moved by her brother, Garland, to a nursing home ahead of her death. At this point, the Norris house was empty.
When Morgan was around 13 years old, he and his good friend Nelson would go to the empty Norris house and rummage through what remained and poke around. “We went into the empty house and climbed to the very top of that tower—there was a ladder. And you could see all over Apex. We would paint our initials about girlfriends inside. You know, someone plus someone,” Morgan shared.
One time, he and Nelson were at the house and suddenly, Nelson called out, “Police are coming!”
Morgan said he came out on the front porch and saw police cars converging on the house from both directions. He met up with Nelson and they ran around the back. At that time, there was a cornfield right behind the house.
“We went through the cornfield, then the Methodist church, and then over to Hughes Street. We started to walk home. But we paused and started thinking about it and went back to see what was going on. Sure enough, every police office in Apex was there—three police cars (that was the whole force back then). We went up and talked to the police. They said they received a report that a hippie was living there and messing around, living in there,” Morgan recalled. Morgan asked the police if they caught the suspects. Of course, the hippies in question were Tommy and Nelson. Ghosts indeed.
But were there ghosts?
Fallon and Lewis reflected on the fact that their great-grandfather, Jessie A. Norris, had a lot of children, some of whom died as babies. “A lot of baby ghosts? We felt it. We were imagining it…so many empty rooms,” Fallon said.
Though the house was burned to the ground by the Apex Fire Department in March of 1976, the history of the Norris House lingers like ghosts in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, with revelations sublime, unexpected, eccentric and inspiring. At the Halle Cultural Arts Center on Salem Street, for instance, you can find several pieces of preserved Norris House furniture including a settee, three sitting chairs and a side table.
In 1973, which was Apex’s centennial year, Montgomery Street reached out to Ruth and Carl Holleman as she wanted to give them some important town documents she’d been holding for over 50 years. According to Pluck, Perseverance and Paint, after the historic Apex fire of 1911, a badly burned safe was found among the rubble and salvaged by Jessie A. Norris just before it hit the scrap heap. The safe was opened and Norris took the documents found inside to his home for safe keeping while the town focused on the aftermath of the fire. Norris died five years after the fire. In the midst of disposing of her grandfather’s personal effects, Montgomery Street took possession of these documents which included the original Apex town charter. As much as Montgomery Street wanted to leave Apex and her eccentric aunts behind, Apex had no intention of leaving her.
At the end of our conversation, Fallon revealed that she is in possession of approximately 36 boxes of her grandmother’s unpublished manuscripts. One of them is about the Norris House. Some things never die.
