Twenty-three years ago, Donnalyn Kahn noticed something peculiar about her daughter’s family portraits. In the corner of the drawing, 4-year-old Julielle Kahn always scrawled an unfamiliar floating woman in a long dress with a bun.
“She said, ‘This is my family,’” Donnalyn said. “Then she would draw this lady with this long dress, and she’d scribble through her, and she said, ‘That’s Mrs. Woodman.’”
Now that Julielle is an adult, she doesn’t have any more supposedly ghostly encounters with the apparition called “Mrs. Woodman.”
“I’m also probably not little enough to be the recipient of such an experience anymore,” Julielle said.
But Julielle was shaped by that experience. As a child psychologist, she believes that her experience with an entity she thinks is a real 19th-century woman named Jane Woodman primed her for open-mindedness to kids and their stories.
“What makes me good in [my profession] is not being discriminatory or judgmental if somebody tells you something that might not align with your belief,” Julielle said. “Who are you to sort of just say, ‘Oh, that’s not real, because I’ve never experienced it.’”
In 2002, when the Kahns had moved into their home—which was undergoing renovations at the time—Julielle would spend extended periods of time on the house’s unfinished third floor.
“Throughout that year, she kept going up—and the house was kind of dangerous—but she kept going up to the third floor anyway,” Donnalyn said. “It’s a big house, and so like spooky stuff.”
Finally, after lots of probing and questioning, Julielle revealed her secret to her mom.
“She would say to me, ‘I’m up there visiting the lady,’” Donnalyn said.
Donnalyn decided to start digging into her property’s records, on the off chance that these records could provide her with some answers to her daughter’s bizarre attic stories.
“And then I thought, ‘Maybe, I should look into who owned this house?’” Donnalyn said. “I get to the original owner in 1877: Dr. Woodman and Mrs. Woodman.”
George Sullivan Woodman was born in 1851, according to Family Search. A 1906 newspaper obituary for Dr. Woodman confirmed that he had practiced in Newtonville at the end of the 19th century. That same obituary noted that he was survived by his wife, Jane Lawrence Gridley, and seven children.
But Julielle somehow already knew that.
At this point, Donnalyn started to believe her daughter. This presented Donnalyn with a new question: what were the spirit’s intentions?
“‘Does she like me?’” Donnalyn recalled asking her daughter. “‘Is she gonna kill me?’”
“No, no, she likes the house,” her daughter replied. “The house is good. She wants you to know about the poetry lady.”
The poetry lady, Donnalyn found, was Emily Dickinson. Going through old letters in the archives, Dickinson mentioned Jane Lawrence Gridley as one of her friends at Amherst Academy.
“We find out that Mrs. Woodman, whose name was Jane Gridley—a very famous name in Amherst, Massachusetts—is mentioned in Emily Dickinson’s papers as her friend from [school],” Donnalyn said.
According to a blog post reporting from NECN—a New England regional cable news network that interviewed the Kahns in 2012 and brought in historians for the story—another piece of writing confirmed Jane Woodman’s existence.
In William Gardner Hammond’s “Remembrance of Amherst: An undergraduate’s diary,” written in 1846-48, he described Jane Lawrence Gridley as a girl he was interested in. The piece noted that Jane later married Dr. George Sullivan Woodman in 1849.
The NECN story is no longer traceable, possibly due to a transfer of affiliation from WHDH to NBC Boston, causing the story to get lost in the shuffle of television stations.
Mrs. Woodman’s presence became known not just through Julielle’s interactions with her but also through curious happenings with their house’s appliances.
“Our electronics, everything electronic, would go off at night—the dishwashers, the washing machines, the TV, just going off,” Julielle said. “We had people come in and check it out, of course. And then nothing was wrong with any of the appliances.”
While the whole family experienced the strangeness of the wonky electricity, Julielle was the only one who ever had contact with Mrs. Woodman. Julielle believed, through ghost expert research, that her older sister and non-children would be less open to the connection due to their age.
“Apparently, little kids who are very innocent are more susceptible to these things because your brain doesn’t make excuses for it,” Julielle said.
Julielle and Donnalyn also thought that she and Mrs. Woodman shared a special, birthday-related connection.
“We share the same birthdays,” Julielle said. “I feel like there must be some strange connection there.”
When NECN eventually came to report on the haunting while Julielle was in high school, they encountered problems. For some reason, they could not film or audio record Julielle, she said.
“[NECN wanted to film] in one area of the home that is unfinished and still has more original wood and with a furnace,” Julielle said. “It’s the attic, basically. So they brought me up there to film a little piece … and they miked me up, and the mic was just completely static. They switched the mics, and whichever mic was on me continued to not work despite, you know, changing batteries.”
These challenges were so unexplainable and odd that the original sound director did not come in for a second day of filming, according to Julielle.
“He didn’t come back,” Julielle said. “He said, ‘There’s nothing wrong, but there is weirdness about this whole thing.’”
The family later discovered that Julielle wasn’t the only one who had an experience with Mrs. Woodman.
“We also had a guy knock at the door,” Donnalyn said. “He was deaf, and he asked for a pen and paper, and he said to us, ‘I used to live here.’ And then he writes, ‘Has anyone seen the lady on the third floor?’”
Donnalyn and her husband still live in the same house to this day—despite its apparent haunting. The appliances continue to go on and off, but they work around it by not putting soap in the dishwasher at night and unplugging the TV, the Khans said.
Julielle can no longer interact with Mrs. Woodman and believes her interactions with the spirit stopped when she was around seven years old. Julielle, however, remained faithful to Mrs. Woodman and would leave her invitations to birthday parties in the attic.
“I tried to keep the connection positive because obviously we knew she was still there,” Julielle said. “Stuff was still happening. I always tried to still go up and include her and make her feel she was still part of the house and welcome there.”
Julielle can’t remember many of her interactions with Mrs. Woodman, but recalls that she enjoyed it when Julielle and her sister would play music in the house. Additionally, Julielle said that Mrs. Woodman would make comments about her clothing.
“She didn’t dig the pants,” Julielle said. “She would encourage me to wear dresses.”
Despite the ending of Mrs. Woodman’s interactions, Julielle and Donnalyn emphasized that their family is routinely susceptible to eccentric occurrences.
“In our family, and this is a well-known fact, weird things happen to us,” Donnalyn said. “We attract lots of different weird energy, and sometimes it results in really cool random things happening.”
While they acknowledge that some people might dismiss Mrs. Woodman as another ghost story, Julielle and Donnalyn believe the facts speak for themselves.
“Some people will see this story, and probably think it’s totally not true,” Julielle said. “I mean, the facts are true, right? … What you make of it is your own.”
