Things That Go Bump

My final offering for Creepy Tales month is a true story of a haunted house and the crazy people who lived in it:  my family.

When I was young my family spent some time sharing a quaint old house with an elderly lady. She was cantankerous at first, but turned out to be nice enough once we got acquainted. The only problem with her was that she was dead.

Throughout my childhood my family moved constantly and, like a troupe of gypsies we dragged our house around behind us. Well, actually a big truck came and dragged our house away, we drove on ahead in the family car to prepare a place for it to be set up again in the new location.

But due to a health situation with my youngest sister, we were going to be staying put for a couple of years when Dad was stationed to Chanute AFB in Illinois, and Dad decided to look for a house we could buy. Maybe a fixer-upper we could work on while we lived in it and then sell at a profit when we left.

Dad found this old Victorian style home listed at a very reasonable price. It needed some work. No, it needed a lot of work. Someone had gone in and painted over all the brass doorknobs and the hardwood woodwork, laid carpeting over the hardwood floors, and done some remodeling, but nothing that could not be undone to restore the home to its former glory. And we were quite sure that at one time, this house had been a glory.

We did a little digging around in the local library and found that the house had been built in 1868 by a wealthy local merchant. He lived there with his wife and daughter. His wife died before he did and when he passed away he left the house to his daughter. She never married and lived in that house until she too passed away. While asking about the history of the house, we noticed that people tended to give us side-long glances as they spoke in rushed whispers to one another. We had no idea what that was about at the time, so we wrote it off to our being the new folks in a small rural town.

It was summer when we moved in so Mom and the three kids who could spent our days cleaning up and clearing out the debris of who knows how many years of neglect. One of the first chores assigned to my brother, sister and I was to clean out the trash in the attic. Mom and Dad had inspected it first and removed some quaint antiques that had been left behind. The rest appeared to be just boxes and boxes of mostly meaningless papers, receipts, old books and magazines.

There was one thing, though, that caught our attention: an old brown-tone photograph of an elderly lady in a period dress standing in what was obviously the parlor of our house. We all looked at it quite closely. We showed it to Mom and Dad. Then we hauled it out to the burn-barrel at the back of the yard along with the rest of the stuff we were clearing out.

A day or two later, we came across the same photo in the attic. A duplicate? We didn’t know, but it too got tossed in the basket to be hauled out and burned.

Another couple of days and we were getting close to being done. We came across the photo in the attic again – this time the edges were singed and the photo slightly bubbled, but easily recognizable as the same lady in the same pose in the same room. This was getting creepy!

So my brother and I took the photograph, cut it into pieces, took those pieces out to the barrel, tossed them into the fire and watched them burn away completely. Feeling very proud of ourselves for having defeated the haunted photograph we finished up the attic and started cleaning out the basement. But, rather than being the end of things, it was just the beginning!

I had just started junior high school and my school was close enough I could walk to and from it. My brother and sister were in elementary school and that was far enough away that Mom had to drive them. It was getting cold out; the house was shut up tight. Dad was at work, Mom was out fetching my siblings. I’d get home, from school and hear a door slam upstairs, and floor boards creaking. Not just once or twice, but quite frequently; several times a week at least.

Things would just disappear and no one could find them, and then turn up again. I once went into the downstairs bathroom and found a paper cup in flames on the vanity. No one had been in there for a while. At night we saw eerie lights floating through our rooms. On one occasion one of these hovered over my sister’s bed and frightened her so badly she woke the whole family with her blood curdling shrieks.

Other than Laurie’s scare, no one was harmed. And taken individually, all of the occurrences could be dismissed as either freakish coincidence or a prank. But when taken all together, the mounting body of evidence grew to be undeniable. We had a ghost.

This was before The Amityville Horror and other similar movies. The walls didn’t bleed. The house did not speak to us. We did not feel threatened – generally – just spooked because things we did not understand were happening. So we decided to take an unconventional approach. My brother and I apologized – to the ghost – for having destroyed the photograph. As a family we explained that we wanted to restore her house to the beauty it once had, and would appreciate it if she’d leave us alone while we do that.

There were tales told around town about that house and its history. You never really know how much of those things to believe, but something that seemed to be generally agreed upon was that things did not get really bad in that house until the occupant started painting over everything. This, apparently infuriated The Old Lady. Since then, no owner ever lasted more than a few months. The house had sat empty for years before we came along.

One other thing; there was a small room in the basement, Dad said it had been a coal room, the doorway had been bricked up but there was a crack between he stones of the house’s foundation that let us peek in. The coal chute on the outside wall allowed just enough light into the room to barely make out what appeared to be a large steamer trunk sitting in the middle of the floor. My siblings and I wanted desperately to get in there and see what was in the trunk. It could be The Old Lady’s family fortune. One story said that The Old Lady disappeared suddenly; perhaps murdered and her desiccated corpse was in the trunk, sealed away behind the wall of brick and mortar.

The brick and mortar foundation of the house was in bad shape. While the three of us kids and Mom were scraping paint from woodwork, wire brushing door knobs and pulling up carpet, Dad was using a house jack to hold up one small section of the house at a time so he could pull out a piece of the foundation and re-mortar it. But he was working on the other side of the house and he said removing enough bricks from the load bearing wall to make even a small hole to wriggle through might damage the house. And the coal chute was too small for any of us to get through, believe me, we tried!

So the best the three of us kids could do was to sit in the basement by that bricked up door and spin yarns of what might be in there.

As it turned out, we had to move on before Dad got to the foundation around that room, so we never did find out if it was a trunk or what was in it. But for the rest of the time we lived there, we had no more frightening experiences. The Old Lady was again perfectly amiable. The only indication that she was still there was in the evenings when we’d gather in the family room to watch TV. Mom and Dad sat on the sofa, my brother, sister and I stretched out on our stomachs on the floor, and the bent-wood rocker in the corner was rocking, slowly, steadily, all by itself.

How about you? Have you ever experienced something simply unexplainable? Do you believe such things can happen, or not? Why? Feel free to join in the discussion below.