Missouri Bed & Breakfast

Indicative of the many home in Carthage, the Grand Avenue Bed and Breakfast is a late-Victorian style mansion. The land was acquired in 1893 and the house build sometime after that for $6,000 by S. H. Houser. Shortly after completion Houser declared bankruptcy and the home was purchased by Albert and Belle Carmean. Alber, a mine owner, circuit court clerk, hardware store owner and bank chairman passed away on July 12, 1933 after a two month illness. He was survived by his son Carl and his wife, Belle. His funeral service was held two days later, inside the house. The house was put into Carthage Loan and Investments holdings while it sat empty for 10 years during the great depression. It was then sold to the Oexman's.

Legend hold that Albert Carmean still resides at the Grand Avenue. On weekends in the fall his trademark cigar smoke can be detected within the house. According to owners, this is the only ghostly manifestation within the old home.

We arrived in Carthage, Missouri on Friday, August 23, 2002. A full fledged investigation was planned, however, it didn't turn out that way. When we arrived we spent some time speaking with the owner of the B & B and he had not had any paranormal experiences of his own to share. He said his wife has had a few - one of which was the odor of cigar smoke that had no known source.

We decided without many witnesses to interview and not sure of how much activity we would get, we would do a informal investigation and just hang out. The B & B was not expecting any guests when we booked our rooms and we anticipated having the house to ourselves, however the house was full of guests and there wasn't an empty room in the place once we got there. This also interfered with our full investigation as the meters and other sounds of an investigation would have awaken the other guests. Therefore, we did not get any EMF readings and we did not experience any drastic, out of the norm, temperature changes while quietly sitting in the parlor area in anticipation of such. All conditionals for this site are unavailable.

We went out to eat and returned to just hang out and talk in the parlor areas. We were unable to obtain any positive photo or video data and did not have any paranormal experiences this night. Teri did get two photos with unexplainables in them, but we were unable to determine, after analysis, if they were worth posting so we opted to not post them.

We feel this could possibly be residual energy and not intelligent since most reports of the cigar smoke occur in the fall. The husband owner thinks his wife smelled burning leaves and thus the reason for the odor. She swears it was cigar smoke and that she had seen a ghost. Our visit to the beautiful B & B did not provide anything in way of impressions, feelings or data to substantiate the claims of paranormal activity. This does not mean that it doesn't have activity, it means that we didn't feel or witness it when we stayed there.