| The Laughing Lady (Haunted America) Speedway Boulevard is one of the Tucson�s busiest thoroughfares. Restaurants, shopping centers, and a few homes share the long avenue with various other small businesses and incessant daily traffic. Until 1970 there was a house at 1017 East Speedway Boulevard that sheltered an ethereal young lady with a raucous laugh and a propensity for harmless pranks. No one knows who it might have been, or what became of her after the house was razed nearly three decades ago. Her story, however, is a reminder that even in the midst of urban development there can be places of deep puzzlement. A former television news director and publicist for the Tucson Chamber of commerce, Chris Helms, was the first to reveal the presence of the �speedway Ghost�. Helms was a university of Arizona student in 1963, living in the house with another university student, Dave Sonenschien, when the mysterious lady first came around. It had been a mild early summer in 1963 and the young men were accustomed to sleeping with the windows open. Early one morning, Helms later said, the clear, unmistakeble laugh of a young women drifted in through a window. It seemed to come from just outside, and below, a bedroom window. Helms, and later Sonenschien, both searched the yard but came up empty-handed. The said the voice was absolutely that of a woman, yet it had a hollow, almost unnatural quality about it. Another roommate, who had also hear the voice, later asked if someone had had his girlfriend over the night before. The young men�s pet German shepherd, Beaumont, had a difficult time sleeping through the night. He always slept in a front room, but would often sit up suddenly, alert to something in a distant room at the other end of a long hallway. His neck hair stood up and he growled, yet nothing discernible seemed to cause his anxiety. Soom after Chris Helms married and moved out of the Speedway Avenue address in 1964, the lilting laughter took on a maniacal character. Whether �she was upset at Helms�s departure, or annoyed at the light-hearted way the young men treated her occasional apperances, the ghost soon changed her behavior. Sonenschien was awakened one night by the plinking of what sounded like coins being dropped on the wood floor and then rolling around. He turned on the light to find his collection of military medals scattered about the floor, apparently having fallen somehow from atop his dresser. He told a newspaper reporter at the time that he couldn�t figure out how all of the medals could have wound up on the floor. Sonenschien attributed the mischief to their distaff specter. An especially disturbing incident led Sonenschien to think that the young ghost was becoming a bit too brazen. He lay in bed late at night with the sensation of being caressed by invisible human hands. He was so terrorstricken that he couldn�t scream, although he very much wanted to. It was a �cold fear� that he had never experienced before, he said. A University of Arizona professor of folklore, to whom Sonenschien had detailed the peculiar events, helped exorcise the spirit. The professor told Sonenschien that according to folklore, a ghost could be removed by placing a single candle in a darkened room. Sonenschien did so and waited. Nothing happened for about an hour, and then the candle flickered. A black, elbow-length woman�s glove with pearl buttons suddenly appeared, skimming a few inches above the flame. It vanished, and with it the last trace of the ghost of Speedway Boulevard. Nothing more has been heard from her, although current residents and business owners on that street might be well advised to pay attention and listen for a woman�s laughter, especially if it�s late at night and no living being seems to be around. |