THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609250039
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 89 lines
OLD HOUSES could all tell stories if they talked. But few can tell a tale like this house on the shores of the Pasquotank River in Elizabeth City, N.C.
The beautiful Nell Cropsey lived here on Riverside Avenue.
Here is the porch where her beau, Jim Wilcox, stood on the last night he came to call. Here is the doorbell he twisted to ring for her attention. Here is the parlor the 19-year-old was sitting in, the vestibule she crossed, the door she opened to go out in the dark the November night she disappeared in 1901.
Too spooky? Not for the Caruso family. They live here now. Bought the house last April. They watch TV in the parlor.
``I keep a picture of Nell right here,'' says Robin Caruso, touching its filigree frame. ``That way she's always here in the last place she was seen alive.''
What's it like to live in a house with gingerbread trim and a tragic, hair-raising history? A house that makes strangers seek it out, stand on the lawn, take pictures, point and whisper? A house that Elizabeth City schoolchildren tour each year as part of their local history lesson? A house that made it last weekend onto the first ever Historic Elizabeth City Tours?
Great, say the Carusos.
The day they moved in, a man walked down the sidewalk between the pecan trees, poked around the yard and finally sidled up and said his grandmother used to be the Cropseys' cook.
He was one of many curious people who've stopped by since. They ask where the dock was from which Nell may have been pushed. They whisper as they ask if Nell was sexually assaulted before she died.
Come in, says Frank Caruso, go up the stairs, into the attic, and stand in the cupola with its odd, pyramid-shaped roof where, for 37 days, Nell's mother sobbed and paced and held vigil until the detectives, the bloodhounds and the divers had left and her daughter's body was found floating face down in the river across the street.
Pat the hair on your arms back down and then come this way. See the kitchen out back where the autopsy was performed once she was found and fished from the water. She was still beautiful, fueling speculation about what really happened.
In this former lumber town, 95 years later, there is still gossip about what did Nell in. Some think she killed herself. Some say Jim Wilcox killed her, because he was angry that she didn't like him anymore. Some say her father did it. Some think Nell's brother did the deed to put her up for ransom to pay his gambling debts.
``I think they hid her in the ice house,'' Robin Caruso says, pointing out the cement slab on her property where she thinks it stood.
Macabre enough to make the Carusos think twice about buying?
``No, in fact, I think it enhanced it,'' Robin says.
The Carusos say they were always meant to buy this white clapboard house. Robin knocked on the door last March and told the previous owners that if they ever wanted to sell, she'd buy. Two weeks later, the Carusos got their chance.
Their old house, right around the corner, sold in the next 24 hours. It had once before been on the market for six months without a nibble. Frank Caruso, a Navy lieutenant commander, is from New York, as were the Cropseys. As a kid, he used to buy vegetables from Cropsey Farms.
The Carusos' children, Ryan, Randi and Norman, think it's OK to live here - even though Ryan, 13, swears that the house has a ghost.
During the move, he tripped for no reason while going into what was to become his room.
``I thought it was a log or something,'' he says. Then, days later, he was coming out of the shower and heard someone call his name. ``It was a harsh whisper, a woman's voice, saying, ``Ryan, Ryan.'
Nell Cropsey's spurned lover was tried for her murder, sentenced to hang, retried and convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. In 1918, he received a pardon from North Carolina's governor. Years later he killed himself. Nell's brother committed suicide, too. A newspaperman who may have been told the truth firsthand by Wilcox himself, carried it to his grave in a car accident in the Great Dismal Swamp.
Kids at school are fascinated when the Caruso children tell them which house is theirs.
``They say, `You actually live there?' '' Ryan says.
And that's before he mentions that next door to him lives a direct descendant of Lizzie Borden. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
HUY NGUYEN/The Virginian-Pilot
Speculation still surrounds the mysterious death of Nell Cropsey,
19, who was last seen alive at her Elizabeth City home in 1901.
Photo
KRYS STEFANSKY/The Virginian-Pilot
Frank and Robin Caruso and children Ryan, Randi and Norman moved
into the Cropsey house in April. by CNB