Prelude to the Nightmare
One morning at about ten a.m. during the Christmas holidays with the kids out of school, McCartney, my mother, and I were downstairs. Mom was reading the newspaper, I was checking my email and having coffee, and McCartney was playing with his action figures on the floor. Brittany was still upstairs asleep. Twenty minutes later, we all heard knocking and banging on the walls upstairs. At first I thought it might be someone in the adjacent condo hanging a picture. But it sounded much louder than a picture-hanging venture should have, so I went upstairs to investigate. The knocking continued and got even louder. I looked in on Brittany, who was oblivious to the noise and still sound asleep. The loud banging continued as I watched her lying there sleeping. I could tell then that the banging seemed to be coming from the other side of her wall, so I figured maybe the guy next door was doing some work in his bathroom. However, after looking outside, I realized the guy next door wasn’t home. No car in his parking space. As a salesman, he was frequently gone for long periods anyway, so that wasn’t unusual.
The banging on the walls stopped, so I went back downstairs. After maybe five minutes, it started up again—much louder this time. It still seemed to be coming from the other side of Brittany’s wall. I looked in on her again, and she was still fast asleep. My mother thought there were workmen outside, maybe on the roof, so she went outside to check that out. Mima came back in and announced there were no workmen anywhere to be seen.
Now the banging started up a third time. Loud was now getting louder still. I went upstairs again to find that Britt was still asleep. I woke her up this time and asked her if she’d heard anything. The moment I woke her, the banging stopped. She said she hadn’t heard anything, but she’d been dreaming that “people were knocking on the wall.” So I went back downstairs, and Britt got up to get dressed.
Maybe five minutes later, the pounding started again—ending in a loud crashing thud. Britt called out in a weak little voice for me to come upstairs. She was standing in the hallway, looking into my bedroom with one of those “Oh, my God!” expressions on her face. The heavy, wooden bench that sits in front of my dresser had overturned. It was now next to the foot of my bed on its side. Sheets and pillows that had been piled on top of the bench in anticipation of making up my bed were crumpled on the floor leaning against it.
Brittany said she had glanced into my room on her way to the bathroom when the banging had started up that last time. She claimed the bench levitated a couple of feet above the carpeted floor, then slung itself toward the opposite wall maybe eight feet away and hurled itself to the floor. That would have been the loud thud we’d heard downstairs as a climax to the last series of pounding. Brittany was quite agitated, but I coaxed her into coming downstairs, where we all sat around the table as she explained what she had just seen for McCartney and Mima. I calmed her down, and she went back upstairs to take her shower.
I do believe such unexplained phenomena can happen, and Brittany had no reason to make this up. She was more than just a little shaken. But I had to run a few errands, and McCartney went with me. Mima was left in charge. We were gone no more than forty-five minutes.
When we got back, she met us at the door, sobbing hysterically. She had been unaware that Mac and I were leaving, and she was more than a bit upset that we had left her there even though her grandmother was still home. She said that “no more than three minutes” after she’d gotten into the shower, the pounding on the wall resumed. This time she said it sounded like someone was on the other side of the shower wall, ramming it with something heavy. She said the shower shook and then several bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and other stuff flew off the shelf inside the shower and plummeted to the fiberglass bathtub floor. One thick glass broke, shattering into several pieces as if it had been hurled with significant force—not as if it had just fallen off the shelf. Luckily, she was unharmed.
During the next couple of months, the pounding on the walls continued intermittently at inopportune times—often at night when I was at home by myself, and sometimes on the nights Brittany was staying with me. At the time, I was putting the finishing touches on my play about Shakespeare and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, A Rose by Any Other Name, to be produced by the Athens South Theatre Co. in Nashville’s historic Belcourt Theatre. I did most of my work writing late at night on the computer at my desk just beneath and to the side of the stairway.
As I’d sit at my desk working at two a.m., I’d often hear what sounded like someone humming on the stairway just above where I was sitting. It got to be a common occurrence for me to experience what sounded like a woman or a child humming just above me around one or two o’clock in the morning. All I have to do is look up, and I can see almost to the top of the stairs—and naturally, there would never be anyone there. You would think this would be an unsettling moment, but actually it wasn’t. I never felt threatened or afraid—but the humming could definitely interrupt your train of thought. Usually, I would rationalize the music someone was making by attributing it to the neighbors—even though I knew that the condo to the left of mine was empty at the time, and the one on the right housed a family with school children who went to bed early.
But life went on. As I finished my play and conducted the business of preparing for the production, Christmastime approached and the kids were let out of school for the holidays.