Let’s see, where did I leave off two weeks ago in this space … Oh yes, I was just getting into the tale of “the place that became famous (as) the Sargents Avenue Haunted House.”

As its title implies, this particular house, said to be built around 1880 somewhere along the North End avenue named for two prominent Nashua men named Sargent–hence the “s” on Sargents–did in fact draw plenty of interest among a generation of local folk born in the post-Civil War era and before World War I.

Now I’m all about accuracy and transparency, but now and then, I make an “executive decision,” as they say, to forego details that I feel may cause more aggravation than they’re worth.

This is one of those cases: In the interest of not wanting to subject the current residents to any unwanted attention, I chose to omit the house number.

Who knows, maybe they’re quite aware of their home’s rich history and have been celebrating it with each Halloween. But … just in case.

So two weeks ago, I left off with a promise to “tell the rest of the story” about the supposed haunting of the large colonial on Sargents Avenue.

I cited a November 1880 The Telegraph account of the alleged goings-on at the house, which “few persons in Nashua have not heard about,” according to the writer.

The story seems to attribute the “strange noises,” “sensations as though someone breathing hard … passed ‘the lady of the house’ on a stairway … crowded her against he wall,” the “labored breathing of a dying person” and “coughing of a sick person,” to the recent deaths in the house of a mother and son.

All that stuff started happening the very same day the new owners moved in, the story states. They lasted a full three days before they “left the house in disgust.”

Now for “the rest of the story” — which I’m sure you’ll agree is the best part.

In a December 1896 edition of The Telegraph, there appeared an item titled “Over Our Coffee,” a part-column, part-editorial piece whose author, regrettably, is not identified. But the sub-headline washed away my disappointment: “The Fall of the Sargents Avenue Ghost,” it reads. Whomever the author is, he claims to be one of the “ghosts” who “haunted” the home, which, he boasted, “kept it empty for years.”

The house was “the best, and one of the first, houses built” on Sargents Avenue,” the former “ghost” wrote, adding, without any specifics, “where the city made promises at the sale of the land, and did not keep them.”

He went on to describe the house as having a “French roof,” which is a gambrel-style hip roof commonly known as a mansard roof. That feature, he and his fellow “ghosts” discovered, made it fairly easy to climb unseen onto the roof by placing a ladder at the rear of the house.

Once on the roof, he said the boys, “and I know, for I was one of them … ran some wires down the chimney, where we could operate them while lying on the roof without being seen.”

What guy out there wouldn’t have enjoyed having this unidentified, but obviously fun-loving, “ghost” as a pal?

They apparently tied the wires to different objects in the house, for “when we pulled on them it made a deuce of a noise,” which means “a whole lot of racket.”

They typically operated as a team of four — two climbed onto the roof, and two were assigned ladder duty, responsible for fetching the ladder from its hiding place in a nearby wooded area.

Once their partners in crime were on the roof, the “ladder boys” whisked the ladder back into the woods, our mystery man wrote. Then, “when all was quiet again,” they hustled the ladder back into place so the two “roof boys” could descend to safety.

Soon, thanks to the boys’ dedication to their prank, the Sargents Avenue house had become “famous,” the writer tells us, having “attracted more attention than anything else in the city.”

It was also “quoted far and wide as evidence that spiritualism” was real. “Nobody had lived in it and hundreds swore they saw ghosts there,” he wrote, probably with a guffaw.

“All those months, we boys were having great sport,” he added.

But as do all good things — “good” meaning “clever” and “innovative” in this context — the boys’ fun came to an end, when “all of a sudden, there came a change that stopped the walking of the ghosts … .”

It seems that one night, two local men “conceived an idea” that involved bringing their own ladder to the house to conduct a top-to-bottom investigation into whether there really was anything to all this ghost talk.

Unbeknownst to the two boys who were on ladder duty that night, the men set up their ladder and began to climb to the roof.

Eventually, perhaps while maneuvering their wires, the two “roof boys” heard the two men step onto the flat roof.

“They became frightened at the prospect of being discovered,” the writer recalled, noting that he happened to be on the ground that night.

The boys “made for the opposite edge of the roof … one of them jumped,” he wrote. He was “terribly hurt … but it was dark and the (men) couldn’t see him.”

But they did hear the young man hit the ground. A bit edgy by then, the men thought the crash they heard was a ghost.

As the men took off, the injured boy’s friends managed “to get him into the woods.”

“And that,” our mystery writer tells us, “was the last visit of the ghost to Sargents Avenue.”

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Sundays in The Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256, or at dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.