JANUARY 15, 1949
COTTAGE CITY, MARYLAND
EVENING
Modern times.
It is approaching the witching hour as thirteen-year-old Ronald Hunkeler is getting ready for bed on this Saturday night. Ronald is thin, small, weighing ninety-five pounds. He is blond-haired and an only child. The boy attends Bladensburg Junior High School, where he is in the eighth grade.
The house at 3807 Fortieth Avenue is six miles from Washington, DC. Nondescript. Two stories. Ronald’s parents are out for the evening. He remains at home with his grandmother. A third influential family member is not here tonight: Ronald’s eccentric aunt Tillie. She lives in St. Louis but visits often. Tillie, who believes in an active afterlife, often uses a Ouija board to commune with the dead. Other times, she listens closely for the sound of rapping on walls, known to be a sign that the spirit world is trying to be heard.*
This practice of communicating with the departed goes back to the Old Testament. There is a warning in the Book of Deuteronomy, written centuries before the birth of Christ, calling an attempt to speak with the dead “an abomination unto the Lord.”
The Book of Leviticus, written by Moses about the same time, is even more explicit. It is from the words of Moses that the Salem witch trials derived authority: “A man or a woman that has a familiar spirit, or is a wizard, will surely be put to death.” *
None of that means anything to Aunt Tillie and young Ronald, who is certainly not a biblical scholar.
But Tillie and Ronald do have a secret. She is instructing the boy on the art of channeling the dead.
And he is an eager student.
The first sign of trouble is dripping water.
Source unknown, the sound is so powerful that Ronald and his grandmother stop listening to the radio and walk through the house looking for the leak. The water appears to be coming from the roof over an upstairs bedroom. The two enter and are overwhelmed by the dripping noise. But as they search the floors and ceiling for moisture, none is found.
Yet the sound of dripping grows louder.
A picture of Jesus hangs on the bedroom wall. Suddenly, it begins to shake, the frame banging against the plaster.
Then comes the scratching noise.
It originates from beneath the bed. Ronald gets down on his hands and knees to look. As he peers into the dark space, the sound gets louder. Standing up, he tells his grandmother it’s probably a rat or raccoon that found a way into the gap between floors. This being the middle of winter, it makes sense that an animal would seek warmth. A short time later, the scratching, dripping, and shaking of Jesus’s picture end.
Absolutely nothing to worry about.
One night later, the scratching sound resumes.
Ronald’s father, Ed Hunkeler, calls an exterminator. Floorboards are pulled up to check for signs of rodents, but nothing is found. Just in case, rat poison is placed under the floor.
The poison has no effect. Every night from 7 p.m. to midnight for the next week, the scratching sound resumes. The Hunkelers ignore it, believing the trouble will soon end.
And it does.
Then Aunt Tillie drops dead.
A lonely, intellectual boy, Ronald Hunkeler has few friends other than family members. He mourns Aunt Tillie, whose mysterious death took place after a recent return to St. Louis. She is quickly buried in a Missouri cemetery. Ronald never has a chance to say goodbye.
He channels his grief in a way that Tillie would have approved: conjuring up her spirit on the Ouija board. Every day after school, Ronald fills hours holding séances, attempting to contact the beyond. His father and mother do not pay attention, thinking it is a harmless diversion. Everyone has forgotten about the scratching under the floors, as if it had never happened.
But there is trouble at school. Ronald’s desk is moving on its own, suddenly gliding away and crashing into other students. Teachers think Ronald is propelling the desk with his feet, not believing his insistence that he has no power over what is happening. This becomes a major problem.
Back home, as Ronald lies in the darkness of his bedroom, new sounds emerge.
And they are terrifying.
At first, it’s the squeak of shoes, as if someone is walking around the room. The noises return the next night. And the night after that. After almost a week, Ronald finally admits to his mother and grandmother that he is hearing strange new sounds. Yet no one else in the house has heard anything. So both women come into Ronald’s bedroom that night and lie down with him in the dark. Soon, the noises begin—not squeaking shoes but actual footsteps marching up and down the side of the bed, growing louder as the minutes pass.
“Is that you, Tillie?” cries Ronald’s mother, Odell. “If it is, knock four times.”
All three lying on the bed hear the unmistakable sound of four slow raps on the wooden floor.
Then each feels a weight pushing down on them, making it difficult to breathe. They are pressed down into the bed, unable to sit up.
The scratching sound starts again—this time coming from inside the mattress.
The bed begins to shake, slowly at first, then violently.
The quilt atop the mattress is yanked out from under them and hangs suspended in the air. In a few moments, it falls to the floor.*
The marching footsteps continue every night for three weeks.
But, now, the terror is not just confined to bedtime. The Hunkeler family begins to see unusual occurrences throughout the day. Books and clothes suddenly fly across the room. A heavy chair in which Ronald is sitting begins to levitate. A vase hurls itself into a wall and shatters. If this is the ghost of Aunt Tillie, she is far more angry than she ever appeared in her lifetime.
Ronald can no longer attend school. His desperate parents take him to seek psychiatric help at the County Mental Hygiene Clinic. There, the doctor sees nothing unusual—only stating in his report that the teenager is “high strung.”
The Hunkelers leave the clinic distraught.
Things get worse. The family is awakened to the sound of Ronald screaming and using angry words he has never used before. Rushing to his bedside, they witness a large set of drawers slide across the room, blocking the door and preventing them from leaving.
The boy is now screaming on a nightly basis. Ronald can barely sleep, and when he does he appears to be having mumbled conversations with someone else. His appearance suffers; dark circles now ring his eyes, and his days are spent in anxious worry.
Ed and Odell Hunkeler are Protestant and believe in heaven and hell. Exasperated, they reach out to their minister, Luther Miles Schulze, the forty-three-year-old pastor at Saint Stephen’s Lutheran Evangelical Church.
The reverend visits the Hunkeler home. He witnesses the shaking bed, the flying books and clothes, furniture moving around the room. He notes that the floors are “scarred from the sliding of heavy furniture” and that a picture of Jesus shakes whenever Ronald walks past it.
Schulze is appropriately sympathetic. Yet unlike Catholics, the Lutheran faith has no belief in demonic possession. So he offers to pray for the boy. Nothing more.
The reverend thinks the events are elaborate pranks, parlor tricks contrived by the thirteen-year-old. To prove these cannot be duplicated elsewhere, he asks if the family will let Ronald spend the night at his home.
They agree.
Bedtime.
The minister’s wife says good night and retires to their bedroom. Schulze and Ronald lie down on matching twin beds in the guest room. The lights are turned off. At first, silence. Just a normal night. But shortly after midnight, Schulze awakens to the sound of Ronald’s bed vibrating loudly. “It was like one of those motel vibrator beds,” the pastor will later state. “But much faster.” *
Schulze suggests Ronald sit in a large chair in the corner of the room. The minister keeps the lights on. Within moments, the chair slowly begins to tilt. Ronald pulls his knees to his chest as he falls to the floor.
Schulze can only watch in confusion as Ronald starts sliding all around the floor, then shifts under the bed. Schulze yells at the teenager to stop.
“I can’t!” Ronald yells back.
Soon, the boy is being lifted off the ground and pressed hard against the bottom of the bed. Mattress springs cut into his face, leaving him bleeding. Reverend Schulze finally pulls the teenager from the room.
“You have to see a Catholic priest,” he tells Ronald. “The Catholics know about things like this.”