Happy Halloween!

In honor of this spooky holiday, let’s take a look at the large Victorian home at 161 Preble St. (formerly known as 84 Broadway) in South Portland. Known as “Hillside House” today, the building has long been rumored by college students and others to be haunted and some local storytellers have claimed it was used for a time as a brothel.

For most of its history, the building was used as congregate housing: Hillside Rest and Nursing Home operated there for over 40 years, from 1946-1988, and it was a dormitory for students at Southern Maine Community College in the 1990s and 2000s. Especially during its years as a college dorm, stories of ghosts and bumps in the night abounded.

The impressive three-story home is located on the corner of Broadway and Preble Street. The lot had been vacant when it was purchased by Fred G. Hamilton in September, 1894. Hamilton immediately had the home constructed and moved in with his wife, Evelyn.

Fred and Evelyn had four children while living in the home – Philip, Leona, Marguerite and Frederick. Their daughter Leona is perhaps the first person to have died in the home; she was only a toddler when she died in 1898 from tuberculous meningitis.

For 32 years, Fred Hamilton was employed by C.M. Rice Paper Company. In 1920, he decided to strike off on his own and founded the Hamilton Paper Company, based in Portland. By 1925, however, things weren’t going well and Hamilton voluntarily filed for bankruptcy. The company closed and, by summer, the inventory was liquidated.

This business failure led to Hamilton losing his home on the corner of Broadway and Preble. He had put up the house as collateral for a loan from Thomas DeWolfe. Hamilton moved out in 1926 and DeWolfe sold the home in June, 1927, to Oscar Foster. Foster simply flipped the home, selling it in August, 1927, to Dr. Moses L. Stilphen.

Stilphen was a naturopathic doctor with his practice located in Portland. When he purchased the home for his personal residence, he obtained a mortgage for $6,000 from Gorham Savings Bank, but he defaulted on his loan and the bank foreclosed in 1929. He took a job as the manager of the Maine Physiotherapy Sanitarium at 166 Pleasant Ave. in Portland. He and his wife, Lillian, moved into living quarters at the Sanitarium.

Meanwhile, Gorham Savings Bank owned the home here as the country entered the Depression years. The house was mostly vacant through roughly 1933 (we found just one tenant, for a brief period, in those years). By 1934, however, the bank was leasing the home as a multi-family, and Moses and Lillian Stilphen came back to live there as tenants. There were normally two or three families living in the home through the 1930s.

Moses Stilphen suffered a heart attack and died in the home in 1942. About two months later, the bank sold the home to Estella B. Cyr, a widow, who listed the home as a “lodging house.”

I believe this may be where the local legends came from about the brothel. This was during World War II, however, and with the Liberty shipyards located just a short walk down the street, and a huge housing shortage in South Portland, it seems much more likely that the home was simply used as housing for shipyard workers. It might be more a commentary on the times when perhaps a single woman owning a home and leasing rooms to shipyard workers might have been looked upon differently.

Cyr married in 1945, but a year later she filed for divorce saying, “My husband drank all the time and often struck me.” She also sold the house in January 1946 to Sarah Marston who was operating a nursing home in West Falmouth.

By May, 1946, Marston had moved her Hillside Rest Home into the home at 84 Broadway. She was granted a divorce that October and she remarried in July, 1947, to Stanley MacDuffie.

MacDuffie was the proprietor of Hillside Rest and Nursing Home, which operated from the home from 1946 to 1988. In the late 1950s, Sarah’s daughter, Betty, joined her in the business. According to Betty’s obituary, “She earned her certification as a licensed practical nurse and wore many hats in the business. She was a cook, nurse, administrator and bookkeeper.”

There was also a description of Hillside Rest and Nursing Home: “The nursing home was a small business of about 30 beds. [Betty] managed a handful of employees and took time to visit with patients. Many people at the nursing home had no family and nowhere to go … She enjoyed working with the patients and helping to make their last days as pleasant and peaceful as they could be.”

There is no telling how many patients died in the home during the roughly 42 years that the nursing home was located there. We found nine obituaries that specifically identified Hillside Rest Home, but obituaries are more commonly written as “died in a local nursing home.” The nursing home was closed in 1988 and sold to Gorham Manor. Patients were transferred to facilities in Gorham and the building was sold to the Maine Technical College System in 1990. The community college turned the former nursing home into a dormitory. It’s easy to see why college students might be susceptible to the thought of a haunting. Undoubtedly, there were students pulling pranks over the roughly 14 years that it was used as a dorm. But could there be any truth to the haunted sightings?

The current owner of the building, Mark Aliquo, bought the home in July of 2009. Mark and his family had no idea of the haunted history of the home when they bought it from the college. The home was in sorry shape after many years of use as a dormitory and then several years of being left vacant. They moved in and began renovating the neglected home as a bed-and-breakfast. They soon realized that something was off about the home. They began to keep a journal of the sights, sounds and happenings.

Mark shared the family journal with me. It spanned the early years, from 2009 to 2011, while they were renovating the home: “Footsteps in the attic woke us up, bathroom area, I walk up stairs, at top of stairs footsteps stop, kids both asleep in bed. Dog on first floor.”

Other entries show how the kids were sleeping on the third floor at first, but after hearing sounds like knocking on the walls, a cat hissing, and having covers pulled off of them, they soon began sleeping on the second floor. Family members would feel someone stroking their hand, hear footsteps through the house, marbles or balls falling down a few steps and stopping, or someone sighing. They heard a child’s voice saying, “Hi there, Billy” or “Hi there, Buddy.” Mark also mentioned that the thermostat kept turning up on its own, so often that he finally had to lock it, and then he switched it over to a digital control version that finally worked.

According to Mark, once the renovations were completed, the activity in the house seemed to quiet down considerably. Almost as though the house were happy with the work that has been done to return it to its former beautiful setting. Guests now stay in the rooms in the spring through fall, renting through Airbnb. To look at the house from the outside today, it is clear to see the care that has been given to this lovely old home.

South Portland Historical Society offers a free Online Museum with over 16,000 images available for viewing with a keyword search. You can find it at https://sphistory.pastperfectonline.com and, if you appreciate what we do, feel free to make a donation by using the donation button on the home page. If you have photographs or other information to share about South Portland’s past, we would love to hear from you. South Portland Historical Society can be reached at 207-767-7299, by email at sphistory04106@gmail.com, or by mail at 55 Bug Light Park, South Portland, ME 04106.

Kathryn Onos DiPhilippo is executive director of the South Portland Historical Society. She can be reached at sphistory04106@gmail.com.

Copy the Story Link

Comments are not available on this story.