Laura Wright 
Haunted Houses of Yesteryear
In 1779, Sarah and Samuel Higgins lived with their three young children in Killingworth, Connecticut. Their family would become the center of a terrible tragedy, followed by a haunting remembered for generations.
Some versions of the story place the events in the 1870s rather than the 1770s. Others identify Sarah’s husband as Horace rather than Samuel. The actual tragedy occurred in 1779.
What happened inside the Higgins home was horrifying.
Whether it was murder, insanity, or something altogether different is a question that remains far more difficult to answer.
The Strange Higgins House
Even before the tragedy, the Higgins family reportedly lived in an unusual house.
Stories about the home’s strangeness survived well into the 1880s, although precisely what made the house unusual was never adequately explained.
Whatever peculiarities surrounded the Higgins home, no one could have anticipated what would happen after Samuel Higgins decided to abandon his wife and children.
For a woman with three young children in the eighteenth century, abandonment could have been catastrophic. Without a husband or another means of financial support, Sarah faced the possibility of poverty and starvation for herself and her children.
On the final day, husband and wife argued.
History did not preserve the subject of their argument or precisely what drove Sarah to what happened next.
The Murder of the Higgins Children
As Samuel prepared to leave, Sarah took a dull knife.
She called her seven-year-old son to her and told him that she needed to fix his collar.
Instead, she cut his throat.
Sarah then did the same to her five-year-old daughter.
Finally, she killed her two-month-old baby daughter.
After murdering all three children, Sarah turned the knife upon herself and began cutting her own throat.
Samuel discovered her before she could complete the act and wrestled the knife away.
His three children were dead.
Sarah survived.
Murder or Insanity?
Newspapers described Sarah’s actions as having been committed in a “fit of rage.”
Yet the circumstances raise an obvious question.
Was rage really responsible?
Sarah had used a dull knife to kill all three of her children before attempting to take her own life with the same weapon. Whatever had happened during the argument with her husband, her actions went far beyond an ordinary moment of anger.
Sarah was eventually judged insane.
She was permanently confined to a room where she could look out upon the graves of the three children she had killed.
For the remainder of her life, she wore a black ribbon around her neck to conceal the scars left by her suicide attempt.
The Clock That Never Reached Midnight
Across from Sarah’s room and the cemetery stood a clock tower.
Its hands were stationary.
Sarah nevertheless became convinced that one day the clock would move.
She told others that when its hands finally reached midnight, she would be “forgiven of her sins.”
Then Samuel would return to her with open arms.
And somehow, Sarah believed, they would once again have their three children.
But the hands of the clock did not move.
Midnight never came.
Sarah remained in that state of mind until 1810.
Three Graves Without Grass
The three Higgins children were buried together on October 13, 1779, in Union District Cemetery, known today as Emmanuel Church Cemetery.
None of the children’s graves has a headstone.
According to local tradition, something peculiar happened after their burial.
Grass refused to grow over their graves.
At the time, there was a popular belief that grass would not grow upon the grave of an unavenged murder victim. To those who knew the superstition, three barren graves would have carried an ominous meaning.
Samuel Higgins eventually remarried.
He died in Vermont in 1811.
Sarah had died the previous year, still waiting for the impossible midnight she believed would restore everything she had lost.
Could Sarah Have Suffered From Postpartum Depression?
For more than a century, the tragedy was described as an act committed in a simple “fit of rage.”
But that explanation leaves questions.
Sarah’s youngest child was only two months old when the murders occurred. Her husband was apparently abandoning the family, leaving Sarah facing an uncertain and potentially desperate future with three children.
Her attempt to kill herself immediately after killing them also complicates the picture.
We are left to wonder whether Sarah’s actions were entirely willful and intentional, as newspapers maintained for generations, or whether she was suffering from some form of severe mental illness.
Could Sarah Higgins have been suffering from postpartum depression?
Whatever her mental state, the tragedy permanently changed the reputation of the Higgins home.
The House That Didn’t Sleep
After the murders, the house where the Higgins children died was said to become haunted.
No one lived there.
Yet according to local stories, the empty house was hardly quiet.
Bizarre noises filled the building at night.
Then witnesses began reporting an apparition.
A strange woman dressed in white was seen wandering through the deserted halls.
The abandoned Higgins home eventually acquired an appropriate nickname.
It became known as “the house that didn’t sleep.”
Was Sarah Higgins the Woman in White?
If the stories of the haunting were true, the identity of the mysterious woman in white was never established.
But Sarah Higgins provides an obvious possibility.
During the final decades of her life, Sarah waited for a clock whose hands never moved. She believed that when midnight finally arrived, her sins would be forgiven, Samuel would return, and her three murdered children would somehow be restored to her.
She died in 1810 without seeing that promise fulfilled.
Perhaps the strange noises in the Higgins house were merely the ordinary sounds of an abandoned eighteenth-century building.
Perhaps stories of a woman in white emerged because local residents already knew the terrible history of the family who had once lived there.
Or perhaps Sarah returned to the place where everything had gone wrong.
If so, perhaps she was still waiting.
Waiting for Samuel.
Waiting for her children.
And waiting for a clock that would never strike midnight.
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