Georgetown Part Three: Houses and Buildings
Georgetown has lots of interesting buildings, both businesses and homes!
The 'Jackson' has a neat mural with a cowboy.
The drum school has interesting colors!
This building looks covered with orangey rust!
This building has a nice highlighter yellow stripe!
This delightful house has lovely, colorful scalloped-shingles!
.....and this house is......haunted!!!! I found this out after I took this picture. I wish I found out because I saw a ghost's face in this picture, but alas, there are no ghost faces. I was thinking to myself 'Georgetown's buildings have an eerie haunted feeling to them.' This thought inspired me to do a google search and low-and-behold...this house came up as being haunted!!!
This house's spooky history all started in the early 1900's when Georgetown wasn't a thriving community of blue-collar artists, but instead was a seedy haven for the depraved or the lonely. This very house was once a brothel where hollow-eyed ladies-of-the-night withered away under the decay of their collapsed dreams as they tried to make ends meet in a time where women had little means toward self sufficiency. The owner of the brothel, Peter Gessner, met a grizzly fate. Maybe he was haunted by his role in oppressing so many young and hopeful women into the life of sexual servitude. Maybe he looked into the eyes of one of his newest prostitutes and was suddenly reminded of his little sister, and looking into the young woman's eyes he could see her future rolled out in front of her, and it wasn't a pretty future at all, and he thought to himself, there's got to be something better out their in the world for them and me! But he couldn't just figure out how to get there. Maybe it was this, or maybe this isn't how he felt at all, we can't know for sure. But something led him to take his own life by drinking carbolic acid. Or...was he murdered!?!
Maybe Peter Gessner had a very fulfilling life as a brothel owner. Maybe the prostitutes were vivacious and empowered by the freedom to indulge in delights in such oppressive times. Maybe the women new the strength of their own sexuality and felt utterly in control of their own existence in a way women seldom did back then. And maybe Peter Gessner saw his contribution to this and felt content and proud. But maybe his wife didn't feel the same way. Some think she murdered him to be rid of him and to pursue a relationship with her secret lover, a chicken farmer. She probably saw the way her boyfriend doted and gently nurtured his chickens and liked this life better than living with a husband who doted on the prostitutes who worked at his brothel.
Does Peter Gessner's ghost roam the corridors of this haunted house? If so, he might not be the only one. One story claims a baby was thrown out of one of the windows and was then buried underneath a porch. Do the current residents wake up to the shaky cry of an infant, even though know infants live in the house? The newly painted orange and yellow adorning the house makes it seem more cheerful, but it still feels haunted just looking at it. The house doesn't seem like it belongs here in this time of boxy apartments and boxy computers and boxed up lives. But there it stands in Georgetown, proud and bold and full of stories!