Doris Lane

Edna Crawford Champion’s wealthy husband, Albert, invented the spark plug. Champion was a Frenchman with a French wife in Detroit, when he met young Edna while on a business trip to New York. She was there from St. Louis looking for a rich husband and she found Albert. He paid his wife a million dollars to divorce him, married Edna, and took her to live in Detroit.

The blonde and beautiful Edna did not take to the Motor City. World War I was over, the 1920s on the horizon, and Edna married Albert’s money to have fun. Well, good, New York here we come! Albert adored Edna and indulged her in anything she wanted, almost. He would buy her jewels, furs, and dresses. He would live in New York. He just wouldn’t give her any money of her own. And he was extremely jealous of any interest she showed in men nearer her age.

It was on a trip to join Albert, who was in Paris on business, that Edna met Charles Brazelle. Albert wasn’t able to meet his wife at the railroad station and sent an old friend named Barney Oldfield, an automobile racer, to pick up Edna. Barney had with him a younger friend—handsome, suave, Sorbonne-educated, half American and half French—Charlie Brazelle, who had a definite way with women.

Charlie and Edna began a hot love affair that very day. They met secretly at first, but once Albert Champion found them out, they started going out together in public. They were together at the Crillon Bar one day when Albert barged in, demanding that Edna either come home and be a good wife, or he would cut her off without a cent. Brazelle beat Albert to a pulp there in the Crillon. Poor old Albert was found dead in his hotel room a few hours later.

Edna told the police her elderly husband had a bad heart and, after an apparent bribe, they took her word for it. Edna now had a tidy, pre income tax era fortune of $12 million to spend on a handsome new husband. Unfortunately, Brazelle had a wife whom he did not intend leaving. He did agree to go to New York and live with Edna.

The post-war population boom had caused one of the city’s periodic housing shortages. New deluxe apartment buildings were going up everywhere, along with high rise office buildings, designed to attract wealthy and professional tenants. The architectural rage of the moment was the penthouse, built on the rooftops of both residential and commercial buildings.

Edna was bent on fulfilling Charlie’s every wish and Charlie wanted to live in a penthouse. They found a delightful place on West 57th Street at the top of the new Medical Arts Building. The penthouse was not for rent; however, this did not stop Edna. She put $1,300,000 in cash on the table and bought the entire building.

Edna and Charlie took the top two floors, one for him and one for her, and built a secret stairway to connect them. They repaneled walls and added false ceilings. The penthouse proper they turned into a playground with fountains lit by artificial moonlight, silver and gold wallpaper decorated with peacocks and monkeys, and hung with rare tapestries. They had marble floors and mantels installed. Over Edna’s Russian sleigh bed, they hung a cloth of gold that cost $30,000 alone and commissioned a 40-foot mural of the happy couple at a Venetian carnival. Edna was in the nude except for a mask and high heeled shoes.

Charlie handled the affairs of the building, collecting rents and managing accounts. For a time he ran a nightclub out of the basement. For upstairs he hired French servants who reported directly to him. Edna rarely went out and most of her money was spent on drink and drugs. They quarreled during drunken binges and Charlie would hit her. Friends and family were not aware of Edna’s entire circumstances, because she was not allowed to see or speak with anyone outside the penthouse. Edna spent several years up there as Charlie’s prisoner.

Then came a terrible fight during which Charlie threw a telephone at Edna, hitting her so hard, she was near death. Somehow, as she lay dying, word reached her family. They had Charlie thrown out and hired bodyguards to watch over Edna. Charlie kept trying to return to the penthouse, often hiding at night in doctors’ suites throughout the building.

He almost reached her the night she died. Her bodyguards caught and beat him severely, and threw him out her bedroom window. His fall was broken by a lower terrace, but he died of his injuries soon after.

Edna’s estate was a shambles. The woman who had inherited $12 million only five years earlier was flat broke. Audits revealed that huge amounts of money were unaccounted for, even given the money they spent buying the building and lavishly decorating the penthouse. With both of them dead, nobody would ever know what became of the money. A legend grew that Charlie had been pilfering cash and secreting it behind the false walls. Edna’s relatives made several attempts to locate it, but the money was never found.

The penthouse stood vacant for a long time before it was rented by Carlton Alsop and his new wife, the former Princess Melikov de Somethie, the American widow of a Russian nobleman. The Alsops were very social and hosted parties for New York’s café society. But instead of joy, the newlyweds began to suffer a sense of gloom hanging over their glamorous premises.

Mrs. Alsop, who was independently wealthy, began worrying obsessively over money for the first time in her pampered life. She insisted on petty cost-cutting and eating in the butler’s pantry instead of in the breakfast room. She demanded her husband not leave her alone, even in the house full of servants. The beautiful young woman sat for hours in front of her mirror crying over her lost youth and beauty. One time she was found wandering the 15th floor of the office building below in complete hysterics.

Gradually, the Alsops learned that Mrs. Alsop’s behavior mimicked that of the penthouse’s former tenant, Edna Champion. They heard stories from other tenants, but their best source was their housekeeper, who was left over from the days of Edna and Charlie. The woman still had Edna’s dog, an old chow, who stood for hours in the middle of a room, just whimpering.

Alsop called a psychiatrist in to attend his distraught wife. The doctor advised they redecorate and restructure their home to take away any resemblance it had to the painful past. Alsop decided to do it. He closed off the lower floor that had been Charlie’s quarters, sealing off the secret stairway. He ripped out all the fancy trimmings and had the lines of the place, as well as the furnishings, completely modernized.

It didn’t help.

The Alsops’ four great Danes slept in their bedroom. In the middle of the night they would whine loudly, standing rigidly four abreast, hackles up, just staring through the terrace doors at the night. Two of the dogs suffered nervous breakdowns and had to be moved to kennels. The two remaining dogs would hide underneath the bed and refuse to come out.

The Alsops understood the animals’ fear. They, too, heard the clicking of high heels across the tile floor of the empty apartment below and the hateful arguing that drifted up the stairs. Before a year was up, Alsop’s wife walked out and never came back. On his own, Alsop began again hosting parties, but they were not successful. One night a guest went upstairs to the bathroom and returned pale and shaken, unable to explain what was wrong. On a separate occasion, a woman swore someone had followed her down the stairs.

One time Alsop went down to Charlie’s old apartment to try and pin down the mysterious footsteps heard in the night. He had one of his great Danes with him at the top of the stairs, but the dog refused absolutely to go below. Alsop went down alone–the sounds stopped abruptly. They started up almost immediately, only now they were coming from his own bedroom upstairs.

Alsop was hospitalized for nervous collapse, and moved out of the haunted penthouse as soon as he recovered. He visited the place of unhappiness some years later. The current tenants had been spared any trouble from Edna and Charlie; the spell somehow broken. The only reminder was the 40-foot mural squeezed into a storeroom, the mural of the unhappy couple posed against the background of a Venetian carnival, Edna wearing only a mask and high heeled shoes.