December 11, 2008

• THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  I’m wishing I hadn’t already used the headline “Ghoulies and ghosties
  and long-leggety beasties ...” for a column earlier this year about
  mountain lions, and how we seem to enjoy the idea of scary creatures
  sharing our old hills with us.
   Well,
  since then, the idea of “ghoulies and ghosties” has come a little
  closer to home than those alleged mountain lions out in the bluffs near
  the Buffalo. A LOT closer to home!
  You know we moved into our
  new-old house last week. We’re having fun getting settled. We love the
  spaciousness and the tall windows and the porches, and the big trees in
  the yard, and the old pine floors and the quirky nooks and crannies.
  But we’re not quite sure how we feel about the GHOST ...
  Through
  all my almost-53 years, I have never before encountered anything that
  made me personally believe in haunted houses. When I was a senior in
  high school, my family lived in a 1800s-era converted carriage house
  near Newport, Rhode Island, where everyone else in the family claimed
  to have heard spooky footsteps or even to have seen a ghostly figure.
  Because I never had those experiences myself, I chalked the stories up
  to my kinfolks’ vivid imaginations.
  Well, right now I’m being forced
  to change my opinion about the reality of house-hauntings. Odd things
  keep happening, almost every day, at the interesting old house that —
  just for fun — we’ve named “Squirrels’ Leap.”
  The week before we
  moved in, I was at the house by myself, painting on the second floor. I
  was perfectly comfortable, not nervous, just thinking happy thoughts
  about our new home. Right at dusk, suddenly, the house filled with a
  combination of noises that at first I attributed to squirrels in the
  walls or on the roof. Then I realized it was louder and heavier than
  little squirrel feet — it sounded like somebody RUNNING through the
  downstairs rooms, causing noise and vibrations through the second
  floor. I laughed about it later and said the old house had more than
  squirrels in the walls — maybe they were chimpanzees or wolverines,
  judging by all the noise they were making. “Ghost” just never occurred
  to me, so I kept on painting.
  A day or two later, my son Jamie and I
  were over at the empty house, looking around. The house suddenly filled
  up with a delicious aroma that reminded me of baking apples, or maybe
  apple cake. We looked at each other, puzzled.
  “Where’s that smell
  coming from?” The oven was off, and there weren’t even any pans in the
  kitchen yet. In some rooms, the sweet scent was strong — in others, not
  discernible at all.
  Several times, doors have been found open that
  we left closed, but the strange phenomenon that has puzzled me the most
  is the white noise. We have a clock radio that is also a white noise
  machine. For several years, we’ve gone to sleep with the noise set on
  “Wind,” which makes a soothing, rushing noise that drowns out other
  noises and is pleasant to fall asleep to.
  Since moving into the new
  house, every time I’ve set the machine on the wind setting and tried to
  go to sleep, I’ve heard what sounds like a faint voice speaking a
  phrase over and over and over again, under the wind noise. It’s similar
  to what it sounds like when you’re in the house and can hear someone
  talking outside, and even though you can’t understand the words, you
  know it’s unmistakably the cadence of a human voice. The strange, muted
  voice is so noticeable that I’ve had to get up and turn the noise
  machine off because it was keeping me from sleeping. As soon as I turn
  the machine off, the voice stops along with the wind noise. Once it
  sounded like a man’s voice. Another time I thought it sounded more like
  a woman, repeating the same indistinguishable phrase over and over
  again.
  Okay, here’s the incident that really gave me the creeps, and
  pretty much made me a believer. There were just me, Roscoe the cat and
  Hagrid the Great Dane in the house. Hagrid, who refuses to climb the
  steep stairs, was downstairs. Kitty was keeping me company upstairs.
  I
  was in the bathroom getting dressed. The house was perfectly quiet.
  Suddenly I heard the unmistakable sound of human footsteps. Step — step
  — step — step — step — step — across the bare pine floor in the central
  sitting area upstairs, right next to the bathroom. I called out,
  “Doyle? Jamie?” No answer. I walked out into the sitting area. Only
  Kitty was sitting there, perched on a chair, frozen, his eyes wide
  open, terrified. He was staring in the direction the footsteps had
  gone, toward Doyle’s office. No human was in the house but me.
  Not
  willing to believe it was a  ghost, I told myself, “Those footsteps
  must have been Kitty walking across the floor. Maybe this old floor
  just amplified his soft steps.”
  Nope. Right then, Roscoe jumped down
  from the chair and walked across the same section of floor the
  footsteps had come from. With a fearful certainty, I realized that his
  little white feet were perfectly silent as they padded across the floor.
  I
  don’t quite know what to think. I don’t get a feeling of evil or some
  malevolent presence — it’s all just very, very strange. All of these
  incidents are totally outside the realm of my experience, and I’m not
  sure how to process them.
  For almost 20 years in Mississippi, we
  lived in a house much older than this one. Like all old houses, it made
  noises. It popped and creaked and moaned in the wind. But I never heard
  footsteps, or smelled baking when the oven was off, or heard a voice
  murmuring through my white-noise machine.
  Could our old house truly be haunted?
  
  By Celia DeWoody
  Published Dec. 10, 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
  Copyright 2008 CPI, Inc.

  
  
  
  
  

  • 9:08 am
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