THE BELLAIRE HOUSE
THE HISTORY BENEATH THE HAUNTING
There are haunted houses.
And then there are places where history seems to have refused to leave.
The Bellaire House is one of those places.
From the outside, it can appear almost ordinary: an old house resting quietly above an Ohio Valley landscape shaped by coal, river traffic, industry, war, migration, grief, faith, and generations of human lives.
But I learned very quickly that there is nothing ordinary about the Bellaire House.
Inside, the atmosphere can change without warning. A room can feel peaceful one moment and almost unbearably charged the next. There have been times when the house felt less like a building and more like a place where the past somehow remained close enough to touch.
After years of living there, researching it, investigating it, studying the people connected to it, listening to mediums and researchers, and digging through historical records, I came to believe something that changed the way I understood the entire property:
The haunting of the Bellaire House did not begin with the house.
It began with the land.
BEFORE BELLAIRE WAS BELLAIRE
Long before there was a Bellaire House, there was the Ohio Valley.
The Ohio River was not simply scenery. It was one of the great highways of early America.
People crossed it by ferry. Flatboats and later steamboats carried coal, livestock, supplies, families, workers, and dreams between places such as Wheeling, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and New Orleans.
Taverns became gathering places where travelers exchanged news, workers found employment, businessmen negotiated deals, and strangers passed briefly through one another’s lives.
The early history and narratives connected to this region introduce people such as Jacob Heatherington, Eliza Armstrong, John Fink, H. B. Cunningham, Kelsey, and many others whose stories became intertwined with the growth of the settlement that would eventually become Bellaire.
The world described in those early accounts was still being built.
There were cabins.
Coal banks.
Rough roads.
Ferries.
Community springs.
Timber being cut by hand.
Planks being milled.
Warehouses appearing near the river.
Coal chutes being constructed so men could move black rock from the hillsides to vessels waiting below.
This was not yet the Bellaire we recognize today.
It was becoming Bellaire.
And Jacob Heatherington was part of that becoming.
JACOB HEATHERINGTON AND THE COAL BENEATH THE VALLEY
The Jacob described in the early accounts was not initially a wealthy industrialist sitting comfortably above the Ohio River.
He was young.
Ambitious.
Isolated.
And working brutally hard.
The story places him near the coal workings, enduring cold, rain, mud, hunger, and exhausting physical labor.
He studied the land.
And he understood what lay beneath it.
Coal.
Coal meant heat.
Industry.
Transportation.
Money.
Possibility.
Jacob began thinking beyond simply digging it from the earth. He calculated what could be mined, transported, sold, and shipped. He considered labor, timber, transportation, boats, chutes, and access to the river.
The coal beneath these hills would eventually help transform the Ohio Valley.
But before there were companies and fortunes, there were men standing in mud with shovels.
Before there were numbered mines, there were openings cut into hillsides.
Before there were corporate contracts, there were handshakes.
And before Jacob Heatherington became part of local history, he was simply a man trying to survive long enough to build a future.
As the settlement grew, names began accumulating.
George Wheatley. Dick Dickson. Jacob Davis. Hiram McMeechen. Bob Torbet. Bill Hawkins. Hank Sullivan. James Massuil. The Wallace brothers. Bill Frazier. James Dunlap. James Martin. Reverend Campbell.
Some of these people can be followed through historical records.
Others remain research questions.
And that distinction matters to me.
I do not want to turn legend into fact simply because it makes a better ghost story.
I want to know who these people really were.
Where they lived.
What they owned.
Where they worked.
Where they were buried.
And whether fragments of their lives still somehow intersect with what happens at the Bellaire House today.
ELIZA ARMSTRONG AND THE FALLING STAR
Then there is Eliza.
One of the most fascinating early stories takes place on November 13, 1832.
According to the narrative, Eliza Armstrong saw something moving through the night sky.
A brilliant light.
A falling star.
Whatever she witnessed affected her deeply enough that she wanted to find where she believed it had fallen.
She told people about it.
She searched for it.
Some interpreted what she saw through religion.
Others through superstition.
Some probably dismissed her entirely.
But Eliza believed she had witnessed something real.
That story has never left me.
Because if you stand behind the Bellaire House on a clear night and look upward, the sky can be extraordinary.
The Ohio Valley can feel enclosed by hills during the day.
At night, the sky opens.
Constellations stretch over the property.
At the right time of year, bright planets can be seen with the naked eye.
And I cannot stand behind that house looking upward without imagining Eliza doing exactly the same thing almost two centuries ago.
Looking.
Wondering.
Searching.
Trying to understand something she had experienced that the people around her could not explain.
Nearly two hundred years later, people still travel to this same piece of land and do essentially the same thing.
They see something.
They hear something.
They experience something.
And then they spend years asking:
What was that?
Maybe that is one of the oldest questions attached to this land.
THE LAND BEFORE THE HOUSE
But Jacob and Eliza were not the beginning.
They were newcomers.
Long before Victorian homes, coal chutes, taverns, ferries, and factories, Indigenous peoples had histories throughout this Ohio Valley landscape.
Local oral traditions and accounts associated with the land describe ceremonial activity in this area during the eighteenth century, including around the era of the French and Indian War beginning in 1754.
Behind what would eventually become the Bellaire House are heavily overgrown caves long associated in local accounts with Indigenous burial and ceremonial traditions.
Stories connected to those caves speak of important members of Indigenous communities being buried there, including leaders and spiritual or ceremonial figures.
Today, nature has nearly reclaimed those places.
But they are still there.
And I want to be very clear about something.
If human beings are buried there, they are not paranormal props.
They are graves.
They are ancestors.
They are people.
Whether every story connected to those caves can ultimately be confirmed through surviving documentation does not change the obligation to treat possible burial ground with dignity.
That became painfully relevant again in 2026.
Gas and oil activity threatened portions of the land behind the Bellaire House.
I made it clear that excavation could not simply tear through areas associated with those caves and possible burials.
The response I received was essentially that work could proceed around them.
But there are things human beings do not simply “work around.”
You do not treat human remains like obstacles.
You do not bulldoze through memory because machinery can.
You do not erase somebody because they died before your deed was written.
So I fought.
And I continue to fight.
Not because those people belonged to me.
They did not.
But because for a period of time, this land was entrusted to me.
And if the people buried there can no longer stand at the edge of the property and say,
Do not disturb us,
then I will say it for them.
Sometimes owning land does not make you its master.
Sometimes it simply makes you its temporary caretaker.
THE SKY ABOVE. THE RIVER BESIDE IT. THE EARTH BENEATH IT.
This is why I have never believed the Bellaire House can be understood simply by studying the building.
Look beneath it.
Coal country.
Mines.
Underground passages.
Industry.
Accidents.
Generations of labor.
Death.
Look behind it.
Old land.
Burial caves.
Indigenous history.
War-era history.
Ceremonial history.
Look beside it.
The Ohio River.
A body of water that has carried people, goods, dreams, grief, opportunity, and death through this valley for centuries.
Then look above it.
Planets.
Constellations.
The same sky Eliza once searched after seeing something fall from the heavens.
Earth.
Water.
Sky.
Coal.
Grief.
Faith.
Industry.
Ritual.
Memory.
Now add one more element:
deliberate attempts to communicate with the dead.
That brings us to Edwin and Lyde.
EDWIN AND LYDE
One of the most heartbreaking chapters in the Bellaire House story does not begin with terror.
It begins with love.
After Lyde suffered a heart attack and died, her brother Edwin desperately wanted to communicate with her.
He wanted his sister.
One more conversation.
One more message.
One more sign that she had not simply ceased to exist.
So Edwin began searching for ways to reach her.
According to the accounts connected to the house, seers, mediums, and spiritualists were brought into the Bellaire House.
They gathered in what became known as the séance room.
Again and again, they attempted communication.
Think about the emotional force of that.
A grieving brother sitting in this house, repeatedly surrounding himself with people whose sole purpose was to reach across the boundary between life and death.
Edwin was not trying to unleash something frightening.
He was trying to reach someone he loved.
And that difference matters.
Over the years, investigators, mediums, and sensitives have described what they believe may be multiple energetic portals within the Bellaire House.
I cannot scientifically tell you how many exist.
I cannot tell you precisely when they appeared.
But after everything I have experienced, researched, observed, and documented there, I have wondered many times whether Edwin’s repeated attempts to reach Lyde helped create openings that never completely closed.
He may have been calling for his sister.
But perhaps other things heard him too.
That possibility has stayed with me because the Bellaire House has never behaved like a location with one ghost and one story.
Different rooms behave differently.
Some activity appears intelligent.
Some feels residual, almost like moments from another century replaying themselves.
Other experiences are much harder to categorize.
Eventually I stopped asking:
Is the Bellaire House haunted?
The more interesting question became:
Why is so much able to come through here?
HOW THE BELLAIRE HOUSE FOUND OUR FAMILY
People often ask me how I found the Bellaire House.
The truth is harder to explain.
I do not think I did.
I think the Bellaire House found us.
Our road there began with water.
A flood changed our lives.
My boys, our dog Bella, and I learned what it was like to lose the security most people take for granted when they lock a door at night.
There is something that happens when you lose the idea of home.
Home stops meaning walls and a roof.
Home becomes safety.
It becomes the place where your children can sleep without wondering what comes tomorrow.
It becomes familiar footsteps in another room.
A toothbrush beside a sink.
A dog curled nearby.
A door you can close at night and know, at least for those few hours, where you belong.
By the time the Bellaire House entered my life, I already knew how quickly home could disappear.
I had not yet learned that sometimes a house can enter your life and become part of your family.
When I first crossed the threshold, I did not experience the Bellaire House the way I expected to experience a supposedly haunted house.
I was not thinking about television.
I was not thinking about fame.
I was not thinking about production crews or investigators traveling from around the country.
There was something simpler.
Recognition.
The house felt strangely familiar.
Not comfortable.
Not completely safe.
Familiar.
Almost as though it had been waiting for someone willing to listen.
And eventually, I listened.
WE RAISED A FAMILY THERE
The Bellaire House was never merely a paranormal location to us.
It was home.
My children knew that house before the public knew it.
They knew it without television cameras.
Without production crews.
Without investigators filling the rooms.
They knew nights when a strange sound from another room could not be blamed on equipment or visitors.
They knew rooms that felt different from other rooms.
They knew what it was like to convince yourself you imagined something—
until somebody else experienced it too.
And I learned something there that changed the way I investigated forever:
Paranormal activity sounds exciting until it happens to your child.
Then it stops being entertainment.
You listen differently.
You protect differently.
You investigate differently.
I stopped merely asking:
What is haunting this house?
I began asking:
Who lived here?
That question changed everything.
It sent me into cemeteries.
Archives.
Court records.
Property histories.
Old books.
Family histories.
Probate records.
Newspapers.
Mining records.
One name led to another.
Heatherington. Armstrong. Jacob. Eliza. Edwin. Lyde.
And slowly the Bellaire House stopped being a building filled with nameless ghosts.
It became a house filled with people.
People who loved.
People who fought.
People who built businesses.
People who lost businesses.
People who became ill.
People who buried family.
People who grieved.
People who desperately tried to communicate with those they had lost.
And once you know someone’s name, paranormal activity feels different.
A knock in the darkness can frighten you when you think it belongs to a ghost.
It becomes heartbreaking when you wonder whether it belongs to somebody whose story you now know.
JEFFREY LYNN KRIVENKO
There is another reason the Bellaire House will always be personal to me.
Jeffrey Lynn Krivenko, the father of my son, lived there with me.
We raised our family there.
We played music there.
Jeff had a tattoo studio in the attic.
He was an artist.
He played guitar.
He wrote music.
He sang.
He could take emotion and turn it into sound or ink.
But Jeff also struggled with methamphetamine addiction.
Addiction changed him.
It changed us.
It changed our family.
And eventually it took him away from us in ways long before death ever did.
For approximately twenty-two years, Jeff and I barely knew how to speak to one another without conflict.
We fought so bitterly at times that it felt like our own private Hatfields and McCoys.
Twenty-two years of anger.
Distance.
Old wounds.
Unfinished conversations.
Then life did something neither of us expected.
It gave us one final chance.
The day I learned that Jeff had wrecked his motorcycle, none of the old anger mattered anymore.
I went to him.
And I stayed.
The accident left him a quadriplegic.
The man who once held a tattoo machine could no longer pick one up.
The man who played guitar could no longer wrap his fingers around the strings.
The man who wrote music could no longer write it.
The man who sang could no longer use his body the way he once had.
And for months, we sat together.
There was nowhere left for either of us to hide.
No guitars.
No tattoo machines.
No slammed doors.
No twenty-two-year argument powerful enough to make time stop running out.
So we talked.
About everything.
Our children.
Addiction.
Our failures.
Our anger.
Our memories.
The Bellaire House.
The years we had lost.
And slowly, something happened that I still consider one of the greatest miracles of my life.
We forgave each other.
Not by pretending the painful things never happened.
We forgave each other by finally admitting that they did.
We stopped trying to win an argument that had already cost us twenty-two years.
And somewhere during those months, a small part of us fell in love again.
Not the love of two young people planning a future.
Something quieter.
Older.
A love stripped of expectation.
The kind of love that says:
I know exactly who you have been.
You know exactly who I have been.
And before this ends, I want you to know that I forgive you.
And when Jeff took his last breath, I was there.
After twenty-two years of distance—
I was there at the end.
THE PROMISE
Before Jeff died, I made him a promise.
I promised him I would never go back inside the Bellaire House.
And I have honored it.
People sometimes ask how someone who spent years investigating the paranormal could simply stop walking through one of the most active locations she had ever known.
The answer is simple.
There are promises people make casually.
And there are promises made to someone you once shared a life with while they are dying.
Those promises are different.
I do not need another EVP.
I do not need another apparition.
I do not need another photograph.
I do not need another investigator to tell me consciousness survives death.
I spent years searching for proof.
Jeff gave me something more important.
Peace.
And Jeff taught me one of the greatest lessons of my life:
You do not have to wait until someone becomes a spirit to make peace with them.
Forgive while there is still a hand you can hold.
Apologize while somebody can still hear you.
Say “I love you” while their ears can still receive the words.
Because eventually every human relationship becomes a memory.
Jeff and I were given the extraordinary gift of saying what needed to be said.
The anger.
The regret.
The forgiveness.
The love.
The goodbye.
Some things in life do not require a paranormal explanation.
They are sacred enough exactly as they are.
THE DAY I DIED
Then death came for me.
On [INSERT YOUR CORRECT HEART-ATTACK DATE], I had a heart attack.
I died.
And I was brought back.
There are moments in a person’s life that divide everything into before and after.
That was mine.
Before that day, I spent too much time worrying about whether telling the truth would upset somebody.
After that day, I stopped.
Death has a remarkable way of stripping away bullshit.
When you cross that line—even briefly—and somehow get another chance to open your eyes, breathe, speak, laugh, work, love your children, pet your dogs, write, and exist in this world again, you become painfully aware that there is not enough time left to live somebody else’s version of your life.
So I do not.
I speak the truth as I know and experience it.
Sometimes that truth is beautiful.
Sometimes it is uncomfortable.
Sometimes people would prefer silence because silence makes their lives easier.
That is no longer my responsibility.
I am not here to make dishonesty comfortable.
I am here to live whatever time I have left with integrity.
MY WORK HAS CHANGED
I spent years investigating houses.
Now I want to help people.
I spent years documenting the dead.
Now I want to spend the rest of my life serving the living.
That does not mean I am abandoning the paranormal.
It means I finally understand what I believe it was teaching me all along.
Grief matters.
Trauma matters.
Addiction matters.
Mental health matters.
Forgiveness matters.
Families matter.
The stories people carry matter.
My future is writing.
Counseling.
Teaching.
Helping people understand grief, trauma, addiction, loss, spirituality, neurodivergence, and the strange ways human beings survive.
It is continuing the work I have done as a psychic medium, but with a different purpose.
Not spectacle.
Not fear.
Not proving I can perceive something somebody else cannot.
Comfort.
Understanding.
Healing.
If something I survived can help another person feel less alone, then it has meaning.
If something I write allows someone to recognize themselves in a story they believed belonged only to them, then it has meaning.
If my counseling helps somebody survive a year they thought would destroy them, then it has meaning.
That is where I want the rest of my life to go.
THE BELLAIRE HOUSE TAUGHT ME ABOUT THE DEAD.
LIFE TAUGHT ME ABOUT THE LIVING.
I used to believe the Bellaire House story was primarily about ghosts.
I do not anymore.
Ghosts are only part of it.
The Bellaire House is about memory.
It is about what human beings leave behind.
It is about Eliza staring into the night sky after seeing something fall from the heavens.
It is about Jacob trying to build a future from coal, mud, river water, and determination.
It is about Indigenous histories connected to this land long before the Bellaire House existed.
It is about miners going underground.
Ferries crossing the Ohio.
Settlements becoming towns.
Families arriving.
Children growing.
People dying.
People grieving.
It is about Edwin sitting inside a room asking the universe to let him speak with his sister one more time.
It is about Jeffrey Lynn Krivenko and a woman who spent twenty-two years angry with him finding forgiveness before death made another conversation impossible.
It is about my sons.
My family.
Our flood.
Our losses.
Our survival.
And eventually it became about me.
A woman who spent years trying to prove that life continues after death—
who eventually died herself—
and came back asking a completely different question.
Not:
What happens when we die?
But:
What am I going to do with the life I still have?
THIS IS MY RECORD
I know some people will disagree with parts of my story.
That is fine.
Some people will question the paranormal.
That is fine too.
Some will dislike the boundaries I have drawn.
They are welcome to dislike them.
I did not survive everything I have survived merely to spend whatever years remain asking permission to describe my own life.
These are my experiences.
These are my beliefs.
These are my memories.
These are the conclusions I have reached after decades of living inside this story.
No one else gets to rewrite them for me.
I am no longer interested in becoming famous because I lived inside a haunted house.
I want to leave something behind that mattered.
Books that help.
Counseling that changes someone’s direction.
Stories that preserve people history forgot.
Research that separates what can be documented from what remains mystery and legend.
And a record for my children and grandchildren showing that their family survived things that could have destroyed them.
I will probably always reach toward someone who tells me they are drowning.
I will just make sure I do not drown with them anymore.
I spent much of my life searching for the dead.
Now I intend to spend whatever time I have left living.
Maybe that is the final lesson the Bellaire House was trying to teach me all along:
We spend so much time wondering whether there is life after death that sometimes we forget there is life before it.
And I am not wasting mine.
WORDS I LIVE BY
“I’ve been knocked down enough times to know the floor ain’t where I belong.” — Kristin Lee
“I’ve talked to enough dead people to know I’d better make something worthwhile out of being alive.” — Kristin Lee
“I spent half my life looking for proof that the dead still live. Now I’m spending the rest of it proving that I do.” — Kristin Lee