SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Although DeLong Plumbing is known for providing plumbing, heating and air services to the community, their employees can’t seem to shake the chill of a spirit that roams one of their buildings.
DeLong Plumbing’s Headquarters
After a tornado wiped out his office located in Battlefield, Garry DeLong, founder of DeLong Plumbing, purchased a house on 1309 S Scenic Avenue in Springfield.
“It was a nice property and it was big enough,” said DeLong. “We got it cleaned up.”
The house was built in 1939 and has a hand-dug basement.
The previous landowner had a home and a greenhouse on the property, which DeLong used to create an office and eventually the headquarters for the business.
DeLong used the office for about 12 years before moving across the street to expand the property.
“We used to have it packed full, you know, two offices upstairs and four or five downstairs,” said DeLong.
Is DeLong Plumbing haunted?
While signing the papers with the previous owner, she told DeLong there were spirits in the house.
“I thought, well, you’ve had a little too much in the 60s,” laughed DeLong. “But it didn’t take me long to start believing.”
DeLong said he was cooking one day in the kitchen using a large pot with a lid. He left the room for a moment and when he returned the lid was on the other side of the kitchen.
He said he noticed the lights and the copy machine would turn on by itself.
He said he didn’t have to tell his family about what the previous owner said because they would experience paranormal activity themselves. DeLong’s two granddaughters were visiting in the first week of the office’s opening and one of them asked who the little girl on the stairs was.
“We hadn’t told them anything,” said DeLong. “It wasn’t long until everybody got to thinking that [the house was haunted].”
“I’ve been out here [and would hear] footsteps back and forth to the office. I’ve gone to lock up at night and somebody would run up the stairs and I was the only one in the building,” said Jennifer Warner, Garry’s daughter and secretary of the company.
Warner said flowers and vases would be placed on one side of the office at night and then the following morning they would be moved across the room.
DeLong said his grandson came running out of the upstairs offices and said he didn’t want to play with the girl anymore. The two would fight over his train set.
Warner said her kids could be heard talking with someone, but when she would check on who it was, the kids would be alone.
DeLong has a video of the basement in which he believes you can see a little girl glowing in complete darkness. After suspecting someone was stealing tools in the basement, a security cam was installed to catch the culprit. In the video, you can see an employee changing out the VHS tape for the security cam, in which the camera turns back on with the timestamp continuing to count when suddenly out of the bottom right corner something begins to move in the darkness. Keep in mind, the basement has no windows and the door is very well sealed. The only source of light in the basement is when the overheads are turned on.
Here is the video.
The DeLong family has tried to recreate the video but determined it was impossible because for it to look exactly correct, the little girl would have to be floating in the air and halfway inside a concrete wall as well as creating her own light source.
Who is the ghost girl?
After watching the video—which the family said they have rewatched hundreds of times to the point the tape quality had diminished and the features on the girl are harder to see—the family determined that she appears to be wearing a jumper with a Peter Pan collar. A former resident of the house used to wear an exact outfit like the spirit in the video, Shirley Jane Rose—a murdered nine-year-old girl who was found months after she went missing.
According to the Springfield Police’s website on cold cases:
On October 17, 1975, 9-year-old Shirley Jane Rose was abducted while walking from her grandparent’s home at 865 S. West. Shirley was walking to her home at 1309 S. Scenic between the times of 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Witnesses reported seeing Shirley walking on Scenic and reported seeing Shirley talking to a male subject in a blue Chevy car. Shirley never made it home and her mother contacted the Springfield Police Department. An intensive search of the area was conducted by police, family and citizens but Shirley was not found.
Almost two months later, on December 13, 1975, Shirley’s body was found in a shallow grave near McDaniel Lake. Springfield Police Department Detectives identified several persons of interest and numerous interviews were conducted but no charges were filed. This case remains unsolved.
Frightly News Investigates
OzarksFirst teamed up with Nancy Simpson, the host of the true-crime podcast “The Toll” to investigate DeLong’s office and basement.
In “The Toll,” Simpson talks about feeling a kinship with Shirley Jane Rose as they share a lot of similarities including a birthday. However, in the investigation, Simpson appeared to have a different spirit visiting her that night. The dowsing rod session yielded many answers to who was there with Simpson.
As for OzarksFirst Digital Reporter and Frightly News Producer Tony Nguyen, after documenting the investigation and shutting off the camera, Nguyen spotted smoke forming in front of one of the Southwest Ghost Finders. There was no one smoking or vaping and the team was not able to recreate the event.
Check out the video above to see our ghost hunt with the Southwest Ghost Finders.
Other Frightly News Investigations:
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