“To hell with facts! We need stories!”
―
I'll never forget the first time someone told me a personal ghost story. In 1967 a grad school friend and I were sitting at the table after dinner at the home of another English Department couple in The Plains, Ohio. It was winter, dark and cold out. Ann, the host, started to tell of her experiences at a house that she had rented a decade earlier in a small Midwestern town before she was married.
The house was small, with a picket fence around it and a gate out front. At first, nothing out of the ordinary happened. But then, Ann and her roommate noticed that small items were seemingly moving around the kitchen. A salt shaker would be on the counter when she went to bed; in the morning, it would be in the cupboard. At first, she thought her memory was faulty. But then, cupboard doors began opening and closing on their own. Sometimes they would all be open in the morning; sometimes a door would open and shut when she was in the room. In addition, twice during the day Ann witnessed the gate on the picket fence opening and closing when no one was near it.
These odd occurrences didn't happen every day, or even every week, but as the weeks passed, the number of incidents and the number of witnesses grew. One day when she was cooking dinner, a large bowl sailed off the kitchen counter and landed onto the floor unbroken. This got their attention. She and her roommate finally had to admit that something strange was going on in their home, and it sure seemed like a haunting.
Ann wasn't afraid. The spirit seemed friendly, even playful. She deduced that the ghost probably was that of a woman who had lived there. Ann felt that the ghost was protective, the activity only to show people that she was there. Ann didn't do any research to find out who it might be. Nor did she spend any energy trying to explain the phenomena. (If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then. . .) After a year renting the house, Ann moved away, out of state. She never experienced anything like that again, although on dark, cold winter nights such as the one of our visit, she would think back to the days when she shared her house with a ghost.
* * *
I was amused and intrigued by Ann's story, but promptly forgot about it--until September 1978, when the editor of "The
Wedge", our neighborhood newspaper in Minneapolis, asked me to do an
article on local haunted houses. At first I laughed at her request. But
when she offered to give me names and contact info, I agreed to do it.
And therein lies a tale--hundreds of tales, in fact.
After the stories of apparitions, shaking chests, levitating beds, and
spooky footsteps appeared in "The Wedge", the editor of another
newspaper called and asked me to do a story of hauntings in that
neighborhood. After that, my story-collecting quickly snowballed. I
became the local go-to person for ghost stories, either to tell or be
told to.
I've heard hundreds of stories from Minnesota and Pennsylvania, from all around the U.S., from Europe, even from Tibet. I've retold them in the classroom, in people's homes, to historical societies, business groups, neighborhood organizations--and once, on Halloween, on Minnesota Public Radio.
The more stories I tell, the more stories I hear, and over the years, I've collected many, many ghost stories. I try to take notes to keep track of details, but that's not always possible. Nevertheless, the notes to the stories I've collected over the past 43 years makes a stack of files three inches thick.
Covid has changed many aspects of our lives, including how we communicate. Three Halloweens ago, I told ghost stories at Two Loons Gallery and Boutique in Duluth. It was the perfect setting for ghost stories--the unused side of the Two Loons storefront. The owners' black cat even showed up to act as my familiar.
In the late 1970s I considered the idea of retelling ghost stories I had collected in a book. But telling the stories orally, as they were meant to be, was too much fun. The book idea was shelved, while more stories kept materializing, eventually to be put into writing via the ghost story files. This year, rummaging through this pile of notes and stories, I came to the conclusion that the best way to move ahead in this era of online communication is through a blog. Thus "Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Long-Leggity Beasties: Eldritch Tales" was born.
The stories are sitting there, waiting to be told. You have to start somewhere--and so I'm starting at the beginning with a reprint of the 1978 "Wedge" article, "Enter Ghost". (See next post.)
