Ask Any Falmouth Resident and They’ll Tell You This House is Wicked Haunted

It's all the old painting's fault.

Driving kids to and from the Falmouth schools for whatever sport they were doing, every time we'd pass this house, I'd hear a tale of how it was haunted. It doesn't seem like a haunted house. It seems like a typical nice Falmouth, Maine home. But inside lurks the tales of a portrait that is bad luck!

It had me curious as it seemed that everyone knew about this house and the famous portrait. I did some digging and found a great article in The Forecaster. Colin Ellis interviewed Kurt and Elizabeth Klebe back in 2015. They had been in the home since 2004. They loved the history of the house. It's a 1738 home, before the Revolutionary War.

When they bought the house, it came with a condition. You had to keep a portrait in the house. A 19th-century painting of a woman named Mary Jane Merrill. That's the portrait with all the bad luck and haunting.

This painting has survived a fire and flood. Some say that the eyes follow you too. Bad luck seems to follow when the painting is moved. That was the explanation for the fire and flood. So, the spot inside the house is where it stayed. The Klebes did not move it. Kurt Klebe told the Forecaster,

I don’t feel like anything’s watching you. That being said, we’ve been here 11 years, and haven’t taken it down.

What I can't find is if the Klebes are still in the house. If they did move, they didn't take the portrait with them.  A condition was attached to the sale of the house: the portrait had to remain and they planned to keep that a condition if they ever sold the home. Elizabeth Klebe said,

If we leave, (the portrait) stays.

I'm thinking that people didn't like the portrait because it looks like it has a bullet hole in the head. There was also a hole in the wall that had been patched. But it still lives. Back when the Klebes lived there, people would stop by their house just to ask about the portrait.