Our gang had acted out a lot of stories, each one of us taking the part of one of the characters and having what our parents called “innocent fun.” In fact, it seemed that I was pretending to be someone or something else nearly all the time. Sometimes I was a bear that growled and crawled around on the floor of our house. Once, when I was smaller, I was a fire engine and raced from one room of our house to another and up and down the stairs, making a fire-engine noise that must have sounded awful to Mom, because she stopped me and let me go outdoors.
Well, next week finally came, and the gang started out to finish playing Old Tom the Trapper. First, we stopped at the North Road bridge, and I got shot through the chest again. Then, because it would be too far for the gang to carry my dead body all the way to Old Tom’s stone house, I came to life until we got there.
Old Man Paddler had drawn a map for us so that we wouldn’t get lost, and after about an hour of walking we finally arrived. It certainly was a spooky-looking place. It was way up on a bluff above Sugar Creek and had a lot of maple and ash and elm and other kinds of trees all around it and ivy clinging to one of the walls. The heavy wooden door looked strong enough to keep out Indians or wild animals. The barn, about a hundred feet away from the house, was twisted into a very ugly shape and was half lying down. There was an old windmill near the house that didn’t have any wheel at the top. The wheel was lying twisted up and partly buried in the dirt at the bottom of the tower.
We walked all around, listening and imagining different things, and then the gang decided to bury me out under the great big maple tree, which was almost two feet thick at the base and had wide-spreading branches covered with large green heart-shaped leaves about the size of Dad’s hand when it’s spread out.
“All right,” Big Jim, who was the director of our play, said. “Lay the poor old man right there till we have his grave ready.”
I plopped my body down on the ground right where I was, made myself limp, and made the gang carry me to where they wanted me. They half dragged me to the base of the tree and left me lying alone, while they took some sticks and pretended to dig a grave. I was lying on maybe a hundred and fifty two-winged maple seeds that looked like the brass key we use to wind the eight-day clock in the kitchen. I was also lying on a root that felt awfully hard in the small of my back. So I rolled over once and then lay very quiet.
I watched what was going on out of the corner of my eye. I felt terribly foolish and wished they would hurry up and get it over with, which they did.
The gang gathered around my imaginary grave and tried to act sad. Little Jim, who had been picking wild flowers, brought a bouquet and laid them on my chest. I was really trying hard to keep a straight face when the flowers made me sneeze, and that made Little Jim giggle. Big Jim shushed us all and said in a very dignified tone, “Friends, let us pause in silence as we pay our respects to the memory of an old man who lived always a clean and respectable life …”
While everybody was quiet, I looked up through the branches of the different trees and saw a very pretty red squirrel. It was going from one branch to another, running along the top side of one, leaping across to another tree, and then following a long overhanging branch that extended out over the moss-covered roof of the house.
All of a sudden, I splintered the silence all to pieces by saying excitedly, “Hey, gang, look! There’s a squirrel!”
That broke up our funeral, which had been long enough anyway. Besides, somehow it didn’t seem right to play funeral, and we all felt better when it was over and I was alive again.
“I’ll be a ghost now,” I said, “and haunt Dragonfly.” I let out a long wail that sounded like a loon I’d heard when we’d been up North.
But Dragonfly didn’t think it was funny and said so. Then all of a sudden he got a strange, scared look on his face and said, “Hey, you guys, listen! I h–hear something. It—it’s inside the house!”
Well, that was one of the reasons we had come up there in the first place—to convince Dragonfly there wasn’t any such thing as a ghost. But he was a hard person to convince of anything. I looked at his worried forehead and noticed that he really almost believed there was a ghost. Just that second also, I saw him give his neck a quick twist, as if he was shaking his head “No.” In fact it seemed he had been doing that every few minutes.
Even though you don’t believe in any such thing as ghosts, when you have somebody in your gang who does believe in them and who actually is worried, it’s sort of like a boy having the measles and the rest of his friends catching them from him. As much as I didn’t believe in ghosts myself, a little later when we all were crowded up close to the door of that house and listening, and I heard a noise that sounded like something moving around in one of the rooms, I felt a creepy feeling go up and down my spine.
I noticed Little Jim was crowded up close to Big Jim and that he had the stick that he nearly always carried with him gripped terribly tight in his small hands.
Big Jim’s face, with its seven or eight fuzzy hairs on its upper lip, looked pretty serious as he pressed his left ear close to the old white doorknob. He listened to what we could all hear even without being any closer—a sound of something moving around over a wooden floor.
I guess we never had been so quiet in our lives as we were right those few seconds while we listened. And then it seemed I was not only hearing the mysterious sound in the house, but there was a groaning noise up in the trees above us also. The wind was blowing a little, and the leaves of the trees were rustling, and I remembered what Dad had said at the supper table not long ago: “To him who is in fear, everything rustles,” which was what some famous Greek poet had said over a thousand years ago.
Circus, who was very mischievous and didn’t believe in ghosts any more than I did, all of a sudden called out in an excited voice, “Gang, I see it! I see it! Come here, quick!”
It’s pretty shocking to your mind to have an excited voice call out like that right when you’re all tense inside anyway, so I jumped as if I was shot, and so did most of us. We all looked behind us to where Circus was, maybe about fifteen feet away, not far from the old windmill tower. He was looking up and pointing.
I looked in the direction he was looking, expecting to see something. I didn’t know what.
“Look and listen at the same time,” he said. “See it? It’s got two wooden limbs!”
“Two what?” Poetry squawked.
And in my mind’s eye I was imagining a ridiculous-looking thing or person or animal, something with two wooden legs. And then I saw it, and it made me mad that Circus had got us all excited over nothing, but there it was as plain as anything, away up high, maybe sixty feet above us. Two big limbs of two great elm trees were sort of interlocked, and as the trees swayed in the wind, they made a sound that was almost like a ghost’s groan.
Imagine that! It was one of the most letdown feelings I’d ever had and maybe was for all of us.
We all crowded up close to the house door again and listened and at the same time looked up toward the huge limbs of the elms as they swayed very slowly in the wind and rubbed against each other. Sure enough, the sounds were coming from up in the trees above the house and not from the inside as we’d thought.
Well, we’d solved the mystery of the haunted house, and right away we began to feel proud of ourselves and to talk about how silly people were to believe in ghosts. We knew we would have fun telling people about how we’d solved the mystery. It was time to go home anyway, so we all started.
“It couldn’t have been Old Tom the Trapper’s ghost anyway,” Little Jim said to us as we ran and walked and played leapfrog and hurried back up the creek toward our homes, “because my daddy told me the Bible says that, when a Christian dies, his spirit goes straight to heaven to be with Jesus. So what would he be doing hanging around an old house?”
But Dragonfly wasn’t convinced. He said with a pouting voice, “He might want to visit his buried body under the maple tree.”
“Not Old Tom, I’ll bet,” Poetry said as he puffed along in his own chubby body beside me. “Anybody as good a Christian as he was—if he came back, he’d do something more important than groan and scare people. He’d want to try to make everybody a Christian,” which made pretty good sense.
Well, that settled the haunted house idea for us until late that fall, when the hunting season on coon opened in the middle of November, and when it wasn’t against the law to hunt coon with dogs. And that’s the story I’ll get going on real quick and tell you about as fast as I can. Boy oh boy! Those dogs really led us into the middle of an exciting adventure!