Has Anyone Else Encountered a Ghost in My Old House?
I never worry about being driven to drink; I just worry about being driven home.
—W. C. Fields
There are a couple of loose threads left dangling here, and for me they are interrelated: What happened in my childhood home, and what happened in Hawaii?
As for the Family Ghost, some readers no doubt feel certain we experienced a real spirit—a poltergeist that made its presence known in, shall we say, the ghostly way, by banging around at night. Skeptics likely consider my family victims of a collective delusion. I wanted to find out everything I could, so I wrote letters to the family who lived in the house immediately after us and also to the current owners. I’m not going to name any of them, for reasons that will become clear shortly. But I succeeded, first, in contacting the family who moved in right after we left.
My initial conversation, with the mother, was awkward. I started by writing her a letter, telling her that I was interested in her experiences in the house. I made no mention of anything paranormal because I didn’t want to risk tainting her response. But this left me at something of a disadvantage on the phone. After all, she didn’t know what I really wanted to find out. “So . . . ,” I asked her. “How did you like the house?”
“It was fine,” she said. “You know . . . nice house.”
We made more small talk, comprised mostly of painful silence, till finally she said, “Um, is that all you want?”
“Well,” I said, “I was wondering if anything . . . odd might have happened there.”
“Oh jeez,” she said. “I was wondering if you were gonna bring that up! That place was haunted!”
In the ensuing weeks, I spoke to her, her husband, and two of their daughters. I learned that the girls were supposed to sleep in my sisters’ old room but almost never did. “I hated even walking past that room,” one of the daughters told me. “If I went in there, I just got creeped out.”
The youngest daughter claimed she once saw a stack of pennies just shoot across the room. But the spookiest stuff in this story belongs to the parents. The feature I found most compelling was the father’s account: the heavy wooden door he installed in the downstairs bedroom sometimes boomed at night, like someone was pounding on it. “I’d see it coming up in the frame,” he said, “like it was gonna bust.”
He would get out of bed and open the door. But no one was there. Over time, he heard it often enough that he devised a plan to leap from the bed and fling open the door, mid-thump. And the next time it happened, he did. But again, there was no one there. Furious, he lit off through the house, looking for his kids. He admits now, they were way too small to bow the door inward so violently. But when something strange happens in a person’s house they often do look for prosaic explanations first. As this man stalked through the hall and out into the rest of the house, however, he found his kids asleep upstairs. Out cold.
Does this story mean my old house was haunted by some sort of spirit that went into hiding when we chased it away and came back when a new family arrived? That two fantasy-prone families occupied the house? Or something else, something we haven’t thought of yet?
I’m willing to let you decide. But I kept looking. By the time I’d heard from this second family, they had long since moved from my old house. And I’d written a pair of letters to the current occupants.
The first letter just indicated my interest in speaking to them about the house. In the second letter, I was more direct—explaining that we’d experienced some odd happenings there, which my family attributed to a ghost. The owner never responded—who could blame him?—and eventually I knocked on his door, figuring my request for an audience would be much harder to dismiss, face to face on the front porch.
My father came with me because he wanted to see the old house. And I wanted him to see it, too. We had departed almost twenty-five years earlier, and since then we’d lost three immediate family members and added six new babies. So there was a lot of nostalgia involved in going back.
When I knocked on the door, the owner answered—a big man, with thick forearms and broad shoulders. When I announced who I was, he immediately came out onto the porch, waving another man to follow behind him. I felt no threat at all. And once he was outside, with the door closed, he spoke.
“I got your letters,” he said, “and I didn’t answer because of my son. I don’t want to scare him.”
It is for this reason that I am not naming the current owner of the house, or the intermediate owners, and I haven’t mentioned the location of the house in this book. I suppose, for those interested in sleuthing, all of this would be easy enough to find. But I ask, in consideration of the current owner’s wishes, that you not. Besides, there was nothing to see or hear there, anyway, at least as it relates to the Family Ghost. “I think you give that kind of stuff power when you talk about it,” the man said. “So I wouldn’t talk about it with you. But, ah, nothing’s happening.”
He quickly turned away from my gaze, and I am perhaps not alone in taking this as a mixed message. My own spidey sense, built up in my years as a journalist, told me that this man had more to say. But it was also clear to me that he wasn’t going to share it. This doesn’t mean he was hiding some ghostly goings-on. He might merely have wanted to avoid scaring his children with a ghost story. But he was definitely withholding.
He told us that he was a building contractor and that he had refurbished the house himself. The man he called out with him turned out to be an employee, and he quickly seconded his boss’s statement: closing his eyes and twisting his lips into a tight grimace, he looked away, shook his head no and muttered, “Nothing’s happening.”
To say I found his conviction underwhelming would be an understatement. But again this could have meant any number of things. Maybe the employee was just a timid guy, uncomfortable with speaking to a journalist? Standing there, I wished, for a moment, that I had entered into this reporting situation as I had so many others—with some leverage. I’d like to have pressed them a bit, to make sure nothing was happening. But the truth was, I both believed and disbelieved in the Family Ghost—and they had no reason to talk to me at all.
Still, we got to see the house. The new owner brought my father and me inside for a tour. And what we saw amazed us. This new family had taken everything we remembered and refashioned it into something else entirely. They knocked down almost every wall upstairs, converting the three bedrooms—including my sisters’ old room—into two. Downstairs, the conversions were only slightly less massive. My mother’s kitchen was twice its former size, encompassing what had been a separate dining room. And they had even taken our old dark, scary basement and turned it into a cluttered workshop and weight room. The new owner’s wife followed us around, smiling tightly the whole time, as we ooahed and aahed at our now unrecognizable old home.
We left after maybe a fifteen-minute tour. The owner politely walked us to the door, and that was that. We were silent until we got in the car and started the engine. Then my father was the first to speak.
“That’s it, Steve,” he said. “Our old house is gone.”
The Family Ghost, true to its form, whatever its form—unlikely plumbing problem, unlikely ghost—had fled further inquiry.
To my surprise, however, this particular part of my story still wasn’t over. And an answer of a kind did arrive—in a most unexpected form and place.