For nearly a decade, tenants of a Buffalo, New York boarding house disappeared at a rate roughly four times higher than comparable establishments nearby. Those who remained sometimes heard breathing in the walls. When police finally tore the building apart in May 1894, they found a family of four who had been living inside the walls for nine years — watching, listening, and killing. The family was the Randles.
Silas Randle, born in 1841 in Cattaraugus County, had farmed before his wife Margarite pushed him to move the family to Buffalo in 1881. He took a bookkeeping job on the waterfront. Their son Ambrose apprenticed with a printer, and their daughter Cordelia attended a girls’ academy. On paper, they had the respectable city life Margarite had wanted.
That changed in the winter of 1884, when Silas was accused of embezzling roughly $900 from his employer. The company did not press charges, but he was dismissed, and word spread through Buffalo’s business community. He could not find another position. By the fall of 1885, the family was evicted from their townhouse.
Witnesses later placed them on the streets during a Christmas snowstorm. Then the Randles simply disappeared from every public record in New York State — no death certificates, no arrests, no asylum admissions. They were gone from the world for nine years. But they were not gone from Buffalo.
Worthing House, on Delaware Avenue, had been built in 1871 by lumber baron Elias Worththing. The original architect, a Prussian named Kreman, designed interior walls nearly three times as thick as necessary and included a hidden interior stairway running from the cellar to the attic, with ventilation slats, viewing gaps, and small hatches opening directly into guest rooms. No one documented why Kreman built it. By 1886, everyone who might have known was dead.
The Randles entered through a forgotten coal chute on the north side of the building. In the cellar’s northeast corner, they found the hidden stairway. They climbed inside and never came out. At first they stole small items — bread from the kitchen, a shawl, a pitcher of water.
In October 1887, a boarder named Josiah Ren died in his bed; the coroner ruled heart failure. A brass key missing from his neck, and a strong box later found empty, went unexamined. The coroner ruled his death natural, and Beckwith, the landlord, moved on. But by then the Randles had money — and the knowledge that a man could die quietly in that house without questions.
Over the next six years, six more tenants of Worthing House died. Every death was ruled natural. All had valuables that went missing. The police later reconstructed the method: years of watching taught the family which tenants drank, which took laudanum, which had weak hearts.
The hatches opened next to the beds. A hand in the dark with a rag or pillow. A death that looked natural to an overworked coroner. The family had a division of labor.
Silas listened on the ground floor and warned of the landlord’s movements. Margarite kept the accounts — a wooden box in the attic where stolen valuables were stored. Ambrose left the house through the coal chute on carefully spaced nights, pawning small items under false names in shops that asked few questions. Cordelia, the smallest, fit through the hatches and entered rooms after death to take what could be taken quietly.
Ambrose later confessed that in his first two years of leaving the house, he thought about running away every time. Then he stopped thinking about it. “I don’t know when I stopped,” he told police. “I only know that one night I noticed I hadn’t thought of it in months and I understood that I lived in the walls now.
”
Adelaide Voss checked into Worthing House on March 28, 1894. A 29-year-old educated woman traveling from Rochester to Cleveland for a secretarial position, she was supposed to stay three days. She kept a journal. On April 1, she wrote that she heard a person breathing behind her headboard.
The landlord laughed and told her old houses talk. She tested the wall with a thread sealed by candle wax. The next morning, the thread was broken. She rigged a dinner bell to the suspected hatch.
On the night of April 11, the bell rang. She lit her lamp and saw the hatch open about six inches — and a face looking at her. She wrote the face was a woman’s “or had been a woman’s,” with eyes that did not blink. The hatch closed.
Adelaide wrote that she intended to go to a reporter at the Buffalo Evening News named Coleman Frame. She never made it. Her last journal entry, dated April 14, noted that the breathing in the walls was no longer calm: “I believe they know that I know. I do not think they will let me leave.
”
She was found dead the next morning. The coroner ruled heart failure. She was 29 and in good health. A letter she had written to the reporter was gone — but the journal hidden in her mattress was not.
Her sister Henrietta Voss received Adelaide’s letter describing what she had heard and seen. Henrietta traveled to Buffalo, went to the Evening News, and showed the letter to Frame. He wrote a careful first article. Three former tenants came forward to say they had also heard things in the walls.
Frame found that Worthing House had a death rate roughly four times higher than comparable boarding houses. Under public pressure, police opened an official investigation. On the morning of May 19, 1894, detective Alonzo Merritt executed a search warrant. In the cellar’s northeast corner, behind a stack of unused coal, officers found the entrance to the hidden stairway.
They climbed past hollowed shelves with dried crusts of bread, empty tin cans, a chamber pot, a pile of rags used as bedding, and viewing slats that opened into guest rooms. On the second floor, next to the wall of room 2C, they found the dinner bell Adelaide Voss had rigged. Its wire had been carefully cut and tied off. The Randles were found in a small unlit chamber in the attic.
Silas was holding a kitchen knife. He did not attack — he set the knife down and said, “We didn’t mean to become this. ”
The family was taken out through the front entrance in daylight. Cordelia, who had been 13 when she entered the walls and was now 22, had to be carried because she could not walk in sunlight.
Margarite kept her one working eye covered with a rag. The Randles were a public sensation for about six days. Then the coverage stopped almost overnight. A third article by Frame, reportedly going deeper into the blueprints and the possibility that the hidden stairway was not unique, was pulled by his editor.
Frame resigned and never wrote about the case again. The Kreman blueprints were reported missing from the city records office in December 1894. No signature was recorded. Worthing House was demolished less than seven weeks after the raid.
The stated justification was public health. The landlord, Beckwith, was compensated at a rate several real estate agents called unusually generous, and moved to Cincinnati. Silas Randle died in jail of pneumonia in July 1894, aged 53. Margarite was declared insane and committed to the Buffalo State Asylum, where she died in 1897.
Ambrose stood trial for six murders, was convicted, and was hanged on March 11, 1895. Cordelia was committed to the asylum, then transferred to a private hospital in Rochester in December 1894 — and vanished from every surviving record. Days before his execution, Ambrose told a prison chaplain that the Randles had not been the first to live in the walls. In their first weeks inside the hidden stairway in 1886, he said, they found bones in the chamber at the top — “small bones and rags and a leather shoe, old but not ancient.
” His father cleared them out and never spoke of them again. Ambrose said he had not told police, because he understood “there were things about Worthing House that the people who ran Buffalo did not want said out loud. ”
The police report also describes a separate ledger Silas had kept for roughly eight years — notes on every tenant: their habits, drinking, health, valuables. That ledger was logged into evidence on May 19, 1894.
It was not present in the evidence catalog for Ambrose’s trial. It has never been found. The lot where Worthing House stood is now a small parking structure for a chain pharmacy. There is no plaque and no marker.
The Buffalo Central Library has no significant holdings on the case. The story was suppressed, a footnote in a footnote — so effectively that for over 130 years, almost no one has heard it.
