Finger in the Door

A house in Helena’s southeast neighborhood was long home to Annabelle Richards and her family. Annabelle loved the spirits that lived there, but others were not so tolerant. When the Richards moved to Washington, D.C., for a period of years, a series of tenants lived in the house.

Annabelle never learned exactly what the spirits did to frighten her tenants. Long after Annabelle moved out of the house, however, one of them related this incident. A mother and her five-year-old daughter briefly lived in the house. The mother was afraid the lock on her daughter’s bedroom door might malfunction, so she took the doorknob off the door leaving a hole where it had been. The child always slept with her cat curled up by her side. One night she awoke, and the cat wasn’t there. She searched the room and finally saw him at the foot of her bed staring at something. She saw that his eyes were fixed on something. The cat’s eyes got bigger and bigger, and her fright grew. She knew she would have to see what her cat was staring at so intently. So she gathered up all the courage she could and followed her cat’s gaze. What she saw gave her nightmares for years to come. The cat’s eyes rested upon the place where the doorknob used to be. Sticking through the hole was a finger, and it was pointing directly at her.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go