Old Print Article: “A House With A Hoodoo,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1890)

September 26, 2010 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

Very spooky house. (Image by PollyC.)

A “hoodoo” is a word which dates back to 1875. It means something that brings bad luck, and a Long Island house in the late nineteenth-century apparently had a whole lot of it. An article I found about this forerunner to Amityville originally appeared in the July 20, 1890 of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. It had the ominous subheading, “Its History is a Record of Eccentricity, Avarice, Disappointment and Death–A Grim Hempstead Dwelling.” There is also watermelon involved. An excerpt:

“It is not often in these degenerate days that one runs across a genuine hoodoo or a Jonah, as the term is more popularly expressed. It is much less often that this peculiar characteristic is embodied in a house. Such a house seems to be standing, however, almost in the center of one of Long Island’s most thrifty villages–Hempstead. Of course the house hasn’t really had anything to do with it. But that is a fact which would require a great deal of argument to establish with any certainty among the residents of that respectable locality. One after the other of the occupants of the house have become the victims of accident, disease, insanity or of the suicidal mania. Avarice, eccentricity, sadness, disappointment have had full sway under the weather-beaten shingles. The shadow of the house seems never to have fallen upon anyone but to leave some of its blackness behind.

This hoodoo house is on the south side of Front street, in Hempstead, within two blocks of the business portion of town. Strange as it may seem, the house was built on honor, stanch and substantial enough to last three centuries. Cannan Doolan was the builder, in 1844. Doolan and his wife Margaret lived in the house for a few years and then died within a few months of each other. This was the first unfriendly act on the part of the house.

A son, Valentine, survived the pair, and took up his home in the house where his father and mother died. He was a stone mason as the father before him had been. Valentine had not lived here very long in solitary state before he became peculiar–‘queer’ as the townspeople said. He worked at his trade, but aside from that came to have little to do with humanity. Extreme avarice was his leading characteristic. He became the miser of Hempstead. While he would wear his clothes till there was not a thread of the original material left, he yet had a weakness which he gratified to the utmost. This was a taste for watermelons in winter. Watermelons were his hobby. Several other varieties of rare fruits he also had in abundance and a choice assortment of old wines. Doonan was a large man weighing about two hundred and twenty-five pounds.

(Image by Johann Jaritz.)

The house made its first real conquest early in 1884, when Valentine Doolan walked out of his back door one night, proceeded to the rear of his lot among the clump of trees, and there and then, with malice aforethought, stuck his face in a foot depth of water and drowned. The events which led to this rash deed were trivial in character, but were enough, as it appeared, to finally upset the unbalanced mind. Valentine had let a house to Levi Mottler, to be occupied by the latter on April 1. It turned out that the then occupants of the house concluded to stay. Yalentine asked Mottler to release him from the bargain, but Mottler would not do it unless Valentine would pay him $50. So Valentine, with much weeping and wailing and perturbation of spirit, went a few days before the 1st of April and paid the sum specified. Doolan returned to his home a mental wreck, all on account of the $50. He took sick abed with grief, escaped from his watchers at midnight and committed suicide.”

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