A night at a spirited Cary mansion full of bumps, phantom piano and a very bitter ghost

As a haunted mansion, the Matthews House checks all of the usual spooky boxes: a piano that tinkles when the room is empty, cabinet doors that open at random, a mysterious portrait that repeatedly falls off the wall.

In downtown Cary, the 1915 Greek revival built by a tee-totaling lumber magnate has developed a reputation for spirit activity wide enough that a bride preparing for her wedding there last October glimpsed someone else’s face in her own mirror and promptly ditched the premises sans-husband — or so the story goes.

But on Thursday night, when a crew of paranormal investigators led a tour of 30 amateur ghost-hunters up the winding staircase carpeted in red, a single spirit dominated the night — still bearing a decades-old grudge.

“We think we get a lot of Bob,” says Katherine Loflin, leading the night’s investigation, name-checking her most-active specter. “Bob seems to have stuff he wants to tell us.”

Loflin’s acquaintance with the late Bob Strother stems from her growing sideline as offbeat tour guide. Her group, The City Doctor Productions, leads the ghost-curious around Cary’s most haunted locales, but also delves into the city’s grittier past on tours like “History of Hooch,” which explores the mild-mannered suburb’s era of moonshine battles.

“We had bootleggers,” she said excitedly. “We had shootouts. One of the things that makes you fall in love with a city quickest is falling in love with its history.”

But ghost tours draw the most eager patrons, and Loflin’s crew came armed with pendulums, spirit boxes and tarot cards — all for parlaying with the Matthews House dead.

Upstairs in the master bedroom, Al Parker had volunteers try out the spirit box, which involves wearing headphones tuned to a rapidly changing AM/FM receiver flicking through stations every half-second.

Bob, are you here with us tonight?

For this otherworldly exchange, Parker fired off questions while the volunteers, headphones on, barked out whatever words arrived through the airwaves — radio or spectral.

Is anybody here with us right now?

Robert

Is that Bob Strother? Bob, are you here with us tonight?

Escape

How many people are here with you?

51

Does it bother you that we’re here?

That’s all right.

Later on that night, Loflin revealed chapters from the life story of Bob Strother, a prominent florist in Cary who bought and renovated a historic house on Chatham Street in the 1960s for displaying his horticulture talents. Though trained in the floral arts at N.C. State University, Strother let it be known he had studied under the elites in Manhattan, and he often quipped that Americans lagged 25 years behind Europe when it came to bouquets.

Newspaper accounts abound in those days about his Christmas decoration displays, which made the Cary garden club set swoon. Consider this rave from The News & Observer in 1963:

“As esteem for the work of the personable young man grew among the viewers,” the N&O wrote in a drooling review, “remarks were heard throughout the room that this area is fortunate to have a native son leave the excitement of New York City.”

A flamboyant party host

But Strother, who died in 2019, was also known as a flamboyant party host, flanked by his beloved wife Lois, who played the piano, Loflin explained. The couple vacationed in Las Vegas in the early 1970s and presented Debbie Reynolds with a lei of orchids when she came to their table after her performance. When she sang in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium in 1985, they returned and brought a dozen long-stemmed roses.

Loflin and Parker started their paranormal investigations at Matthews House last year, and a spirit named Bob beat an insistent path into their spectral probing. When their group tried out the spirit box technique, a string of angry words flew into their headphones:

Smoke. Fire. Powers that be. Rip-off ...

So Loflin did some digging.

It turned out that in 1971, Strother had planned to buy and renovate the historic Page House nearby, a gesture aimed at celebrating Cary’s 100th anniversary that year. But one month before the special date, the house burned to the ground.

In an N&O account at the time, a caretaker said a spark ignited a small fire, which he errantly tried to extinguish with a rag that he accidentally dropped on a can of gasoline that happened to be sitting nearby.

A ghost with some bitterness?

Decades later, Loflin further learned, Strother agreed to an oral history interview with the Cary Historical Society and called the whole affair a set-up. Some unnamed, influential people didn’t want him controlling the historic heart of Cary, and they set the blaze on purpose.

He no doubt spoke from bitterness even while alive, considering BB&T took over The Matthews House property in the late 1980s, so it makes sense the floral artiste would kick about in the hereafter.

“Until somebody acknowledges that Bob got a little screwed,” Loflin said, “that might be why Bob’s sticking around.”

For me, encounters with the great beyond reach their most vivid levels not so much via pendulum waving or pentacle cards, but through good old fashioned ghost stories like Bob’s.

Nothing conjures up spirits more powerfully than our own imaginations, and the idea that the dead are stalking eternity consumed by the same anger, frustration and white-hot passions makes them frighteningly real.

Like our hosts Thursday, I thank and ask pardon those from who lie beneath the Earth, who once walked the paths we walk today, and I wish them peace in whatever form they seek it, knowing we’ll see each other soon.