Optometrist - I see dead people 1920 Business Card

Colourized photo from 1920 Original Title: Eye doctor, Wilmer, Home Interior Location: Washington DC This was a true story! This is an unusual story about an ophthalmologist named William H Wilmer. He was an eye doctor that treated a number of famous patients. But what made him different was that he was the only one to successfully publish a real life ghost story in an ophthalmology journal. It all started in 1912, when he and his family moved into their house. It was an old home, it had no electricity at the time. After a while of living there, everyone in the house felt sick. They always had the feeling that someone was watching them, always a presence. The kids would never want to play on the third floor. They all felt a sense of doom, they had headaches almost all the time. As time passed, the doctor would start to hear things. The sound of footsteps from upstairs alarmed him. He ran upstairs, thinking it was thieves, only to find that no one was there at all. He even ran downstairs, and no one was there either (except for his servants). Then he started hearing a ringing in his ears, a bell coming from some place. Other people in the house also had events going on. His wife would hear a person stomping down the stairs behind her bedroom, only thing was, there were no stairs. One night the doctor heard a firetruck, it got closer and closer until it was just outside his window. Running over to see what the commotion was about he looked out the window only to find nothing. Just a quiet dark street. At one point the children got bad colds, and felt sick all the time. His wife and the kids left the house for a while, and went on vacation and they felt a lot better after leaving the house. But as soon as they came back, that sense of doom and illness came back pretty fast. Some time in January, 1913, they started actually seeing things. The doctor was walking by the parlour, only to see a woman, dressed in black, dark hair, coming towards him. He went over to meet her, and she vanished! This happened three other times. Another night one of the servants woke up in their bed, only to find an old man and a child sitting at the end of her bed, staring at her. She couldn't move a bit, totally paralysed. She then felt an unseen hand tap her on the shoulder, and she was able to sit up, and they vanished. It was also during this time all the plants in the house died. The doctor started to research the goings on about this house. He spoke to his patients and past tenants, and they all had similar, though not exact, experiences. When he spoke to his brother about this, the brother said - maybe its a carbon monoxide leak. You should leave the house at once, call a plumber and have them look at it. Sure enough the flue all this time was leaking into the house. When they fixed that and returned - there were no more ghosts! Everything was normal as it could be. No one felt ill, no more ringing, or hallucinations!