The Haunted Hallway

Just for fun, on Halloween I used to tell ghost stories to my students at Normandale College, where I taught English. Inevitably, every year a student or two would share their stories with me. One of the most dramatic was from a young woman who had a very unsettling experience while waiting for her father at his office in St. Paul, Minnesota.

                                      An old photo of houses on St. Paul's Summit Avenue

The office was on the first floor of a Victorian house on historic Summit Avenue. The entire ground floor was office space; the second floor was an apartment inhabited at the time of the incident by a young couple. Emily, the student, had arrived at the office in late afternoon on a cold winter's day. Emily and her father had planned to meet there to go out to dinner together.

The last vestiges of daylight were fading as Emily let herself into the office. She sat at her father's desk in the front room and began to read. She had been reading only a few minutes when out of the corner of her eye she sensed something moving by the door to the hallway. She glanced over at the door just in time to see it swinging shut. Emily's first thought as she rose from the chair was that her father or some other tenant had entered the building and was waiting in the hallway.

Curious, Emily crossed the room, opened the door, and leaned into the hallway. To her surprise, she could hear muffled voices coming from a room down the hall. It sounded like several people were talking and laughing in the room. Yet when she opened the door to that room, it was completely still, dark--and vacant.

Emily stood by the door for a moment, puzzling over the source of the voices. But she didn't have long to ponder, for from the front end of the long hallway she heard heavy, deliberate footsteps coming toward her. Emily stared in the direction of the sound, but could see no one, just an empty hallway. The sound of the footsteps kept coming nearer--slowly, and as it seemed to her, menacingly.

Emily began to beat a hasty retreat toward the back end of the hallway. As she hotfooted it to the door at the end, she kept glancing over her shoulder. The hallway appeared to be empty, yet the footsteps continued ever closer. When she reached the rear door (which led to the basement), the terrifying episode reached a climax. The instant before she reached for the door knob, she could feel the oak floorboards underneath her feet sag slightly, as if someone's weight were pressing down on the boards right behind her.

Close to panicking, Emily pushed open the basement door, hurtled over the threshold, and slammed the door closed behind her. Fearing that the invisible visitor might pursue her, she half-tumbled down the stairs into the basement. With trembling hands she dialed her grandmother's number on the extension phone down there. She was greatly relieved to hear her grandmother's voice on the other end. Looking anxiously up the staircase, she recounted to her grandmother the series of incidents that had just occurred. Her grandmother was very reassuring and sympathetic, and Emily felt calmer simply hearing her voice. While they talked, Emily could still hear the deliberate, ominous footsteps on the wooden floor overhead, slowly crossing and recrossing the hallway and office areas. 

Emily knew that her father was due to arrive any minute, and her coat and backpack were upstairs in his office. Needless to say, under the circumstances, she was not going to venture up the stairs to retrieve them. Finally, after talking to her grandmother for about ten minutes, Emily heard the front door open upstairs and father's quick tread as he entered his office.

Emily hung up the phone and dashed up the stairs and down the hallway. Breathlessly, she poured out to her father the story of the unseen pursuer. However, unlike her grandmother, her father was not impressed. To her dismay, he just laughed and replied, "Well, the next time you run into this guy, please collect rent from him. We can't have anyone hanging around rent-free."

Like many ghost stories, this one has an epilogue. Shortly after this incident, the couple who lived upstairs in the house told Emily that during the few months they had lived there, they occasionally heard footsteps. And on one very scary night, they were awakened to find a tall shadowy figure at the foot of their bed. It vanished when they turned on the lights. 

Emily was crestfallen that her dad made light of her story, but she was heartened that her grandma and the tenants believed her. Since that day, Emily has never ventured back into that old house by herself, nor has she had the slightest inclination of trying to collect rent from the heavy-footed invisible tenant.

Does "Coke Add Life"? Inquiring Ghosts Want to Know.

 

Not all ghosts exhibit conventional ghostly behavior such as turning lights on and off, making sounds at night, or putting in translucent appearances. One such anomalous ghost inhabited the Chicago house once occupied the family of Sara, an executive secretary for a big Twin Cities corporation.

Not long after Sara and her husband moved into a 1920's bungalow with their three children, the first unexplainable event occurred. One Sunday morning the whole family left for church together, and, according to custom, they let out the cat and locked up the house. When they returned a few hours later, the house was still locked, but the cat was inside. They had thought they had left the cat outside, but perhaps they were mistaken.

The family promptly forgot about this incident, but recalled it with a jolt a couple of weeks later when it happened again: they left the house together with the cat outside. When they returned, the cat was inside. Nothing was disturbed, not even the cat, which seemed completely normal.

For a few weeks the family was left to puzzle over the cat's mysterious space transfers. Then an even more curious incident occurred. Because they don't drink much soda, they usually kept only one large bottle of Coca-Cola, from which portions could be poured into glasses. This bottle was stored capped under the kitchen sink.

                                                          A Coke print ad from 1976.

One day the parents and kids once again left the house, returning after a short while. When they entered the kitchen, lo and behold, the pop bottle stood on the table, empty. The parents accused the kids of polishing off the Coke and leaving the drained bottle, but each of the children indignantly denied doing any such thing. The more the parents pressed for a confession, the more irate the kids became. In the end, the subject was dropped, although each member of the family secretly assumed that one of them had done it as a prank.

Several weeks later an even more astounding variation of this incident took place. Again, as a group the family left the house for several hours. This time, when they came home, an empty Coke bottle sat on the coffee table in the living room--with an empty glass beside it.

                                     A 1960's ad. You can't beat the Real Thing if you're unreal. 

Recriminations flew. Someone had to be tricking the rest. But each member of the family denied it in turn. After all, one of the kids pointed out, since they had all left together at the same time, when would they have had the opportunity to drain the bottle, move it, and set out the glass? Moreover, why would they want to? Sara and her husband had to agree that the incident certainly was odd.

Unfortunately, there is no denouement to this story. Over the half dozen years they lived in this house, the strange transferences of cat and bottles happened several times each. After the first incidents, Sara and her husband started to refer to the unseen mover as their "ghost", although Sara (even though she told me this story) still hesitates to apply that label. She feels more comfortable thinking about it as an unsolved mystery. 

Sara brought up a tantalizing question: If a disembodied ghost did indeed drink the Coke, where did the liquid go? And then again, how can a ghost unlock, open, let in a cat, and relock the door?

I propose an answer to this mystery: In their 1976 ad campaign, the Coca Cola Company chose "Coke adds life" as their new advertising slogan. The ghost took this ad to heart, and consumed this presumed elixir of life. As for letting in the cat, you can puzzle that one out for yourself.

                                                        Creepy "Sprite Boy" from the 1940s.

More Balls O' Fire

 The appearance of glowing orbs or balls of fire, as in the Methodist church parsonage, are a common story among ghost hunters. A Google search will show dozens of photos and videos of orbs in allegedly haunted locations.

                 A photo of allegedly ghostly orbs from a debunker website, "American Hauntings"

I heard a story about phenomena similar to the fireballs in the parsonage from Gretchen Quie, wife of Minnesota governor Al Quie (1979-83). She said that in the upper hallway of her grandparents' Minnesota farmhouse, incandescent balls of fire would briefly appear, bounce off the walls, and then vanish. Her description of their size and the eerie glow they emanated resembled the minister's description--except the former made no noise. Mrs. Quie said that the family had no explanation for the orbs, but since they appeared infrequently and didn't disturb anyone, they were mostly a curiosity. 

Another orb-related story, a more sinister one, came from a young Twin Cities journalist. Between jobs one summer he was staying with a friend, sleeping in the attic room of a early 1900's foursquare in South Minneapolis. He slept in the sparsely furnished room only a few nights, but it was a memorable sojourn.

The first night, as he lay on the mattress on the floor in the sweltering heat, a glowing sphere about the size of a baseball suddenly appeared overhead. He watched it curiously as it circled around the room, vanishing after about a minute. The next night he saw it again, an encore performance he would have preferred to skip. The third night he awoke in the middle of the night to see a shadowy figure standing in the corner of the dimly lit room. Afraid to move or speak, the young man lay there in the darkness, watching the motionless figure. After a few moments, the form disappeared.

The journalist left his friend's house the next morning, deciding that it was time to find a place to sleep minus eerie disturbances.

As I was writing up these stories about orbs, it triggered a memory of an experience I had on a trip to Germany in the 1960s. My dad, my cousin George (who was stationed at an Army base in Germany at the time), and I were touring historical sites along the Rhine. 

One night we stayed at a B&B in an 18th-century house. Mine was a small basement room with a narrow bed set between an ancient armoire and a windowless wall.

                               An early 18th century house similar to the place where we stayed.

I climbed into bed, turned off the light via the pull chain over the bed, pulled up the duvet, and closed my eyes. I was dozing off when something prompted me to open my eyes. There, overhead, was a swarm of little glowing orbs, swirling around in a cloud over the bed. I blinked, wondering if I was seeing things. At first I thought they might be bugs, but as I watched the glowing orbs, I grew increasingly alarmed. I'd never seen anything like this weird swarm of lights. What in the world were they? 

Panicky, I sat up in bed, my hand searching in the darkness for the pull chain. It was probably only a few seconds, but it felt much longer before I found the chain and yanked on it. The "bugs" vanished. Looking around the room with the light on, I couldn't find anything that might be the source of the orbs. Fearing that they might return if I turned off the light, I slept with it on.

The next morning I said nothing to Dad and George about the orbs. In fact, I never told this story to anyone until now.

Not-So-Great Balls O' Fire

The haunted rectory in "Dead Ringer" was a grand old house that once had servants to care for the inhabitants. This story concerns a relatively new house that served as a parsonage. "John," a Methodist minister, told me this ghost story from the 1960s, when he was fresh out of seminary. 

That summer he took a position as interim pastor for a church in a small town about 100 miles west of the Twin Cities. His predecessor there had been at that church only one year; the congregation was awaiting the arrival of a permanent minister in September.

 

                                                The main street of the town in the 1940s

John had not visited the town before he pulled his car up in front of the church on a hot June afternoon. Several parishioners greeted him and showed him to the parsonage down the street from the church. Although the church was turn-of-the-century, the parsonage was a relatively recent structure, less than a decade old. The two-story house was the pride of the congregation, for it had been built by a cooperative effort of various parishioners, who had each contributed in their way--labor, skill, materials, or financing.

As a member of the welcoming committee pushed open the front door to let John enter the house, the minister felt a rush of cold air pour past him. "How wonderful," he remarked gratefully. "It's air-conditioned." The man at the door gave John a sharp look. "Why, no," he replied. "It's just well insulated, I guess."

 The parishioners helped John bring in his luggage, and he spent the rest of the day getting his books and other belongings organized. Later that evening, John wearily crawled into bed in one of the upstairs bedrooms, turned out the bedside light, and closed his eyes. He hadn't been lying there for more than a few seconds when he was startled by popping noises overhead, somewhat like someone snapping their fingers.

He opened his eyes and saw softly glowing globes about the size of ping-pong balls floating by the ceiling, and these balls were emitting the popping sounds. They circled in the air for about ten seconds before being abruptly dispatched with a loud bang similar to the sound of a balloon bursting.

Fumbling in his haste, John snapped on the light and looked around the room. He couldn't believe what he had just seen. He wasn't exactly terrified, but he certainly was unsettled. Minutes passed in the silent house. As his anxiety slowly ebbed, he turned out the light and eased his head back onto the pillow. As he lay there in the darkness, he worried that the popping fireballs would come back. But all remained quiet, and he gradually fell into a deep sleep.

In the bright light of the next morning he tried to puzzle out what he had seen over his bed--light from outside, dream, hallucination, ball lightning? The incident was certainly weird, whatever the cause.

John wasn't thinking about fireballs that night when he switched out the lamp and rolled over to sleep. But his attention snapped back to them as they suddenly reappeared over the bed, whirling and popping. After a brief display, they again disappeared with a bang. John leaped out of bed and checked the room--the windows, the doors, the lights--but couldn't find any likely source for the phenomenon.

When the fireballs visited him again the next night and the next, John began to wonder if the spooky little fireworks display was going to be a nightly occurrence. It was. Each night was the same: glowing orbs would circle over his bed for 10 seconds or so before they'd disappear with an abrupt bang.

John was beginning to come to the conclusion that some paranormal force was at work. To reinforce this conclusion, John had observed that the house always seemed cool, even downright chilly, no matter how hot and sultry it got outside. Then came the clincher. He was downstairs reading one evening when he heard footsteps overhead. He cautiously climbed the stairs, wondering who had gotten into the house without him noticing. Yet when he looked into the bedrooms, no one was there.

As the days stretched into weeks, the glowing balls continued their daily nocturnal appearances. John began to anticipate their regular performances. They became more of an annoyance than a source of alarm. When they'd arrive on cue after he turned out the bedside lamp, he'd lie resignedly in bed waiting for them to leave him in peace. The unexplained noises continued as well, although there was no set pattern for these. Sometimes he'd hear footsteps; sometimes he'd hear the floor or furniture creaking.

John wondered about the previous occupants of the house, but he was reluctant to be too specific in his questions to the parishioners. For one, the official position of the denomination at that time was decidedly anti-ghost. Such things don't exist. Period. For another, the parishioners had built the house with their own hands. How could he suggest that this labor of love was, well, haunted?

                                      A 1950's two-story house model similar to the parsonage.

John ventured to ask a couple of parishioners about "unusual" incidents associated with the parsonage, but he learned little from these inquiries. The situation was tolerable for John because it was for the summer only. He couldn't help but speculate, however, about why the previous minister stayed only one year. And what would happen when the next minister moved in? Would the balls of fire visit him as well?

In July John's sister came for a weekend visit. Not wanting to unduly alarm her, he had told her nothing about the strange occurrences at the parsonage. As it turned out, he didn't have to tell her. The minute she set foot in the house, she exclaimed, "How can you stay here! This house really gives me the creeps." She wasn't at all surprised when he told her about the spooky goings-on he'd experienced.

At the end of the summer, John moved out, breathing a sigh of relief that he didn't have to deal with the fireballs and footsteps anymore. The next summer he learned that the incoming minister hadn't even lasted the year out.

                   

The Man Who Wasn't There

                      Last night I saw upon the stair,
                      A little man who wasn't there,
                      He wasn't there again today
                      Oh, how I wish he'd go away...

                                            --from 'Antigonish' by Hughes Mearns

While visiting an historic Ohio River city on a Victorian Society architectural tour, I visited an art historian who worked for a museum there. She told me this story that she heard from the night security guard at the mansion, who related it to the administrators as it unfolded.

                                                                                                                          The house in the 1950s

A daytime visitor to the 1840's Greek Revival house would probably find nothing spooky about it--a sunny, spacious house with broad hallways and open staircases. The night watchman, however, knows a different house. His story begins several weeks after he started working there. 

                                      The original security system for the house: metal bars

The museum, which houses artifacts and objets d'art worth millions of dollars, is guarded by an electronic alarm system. In addition, sensitive microphones are placed in every room to pick up sounds of an intruder during the hours that the museum is closed. From a room in the basement, the night guard listens to the sounds received by the microphones. During training he was given instructions that if he heard anything suspicious, he was not to investigate on his own, but immediately to call the police.

                                                        The museum dining room

For a while the nights passed uneventfully for the guard. Then, one night he heard the sound of footsteps from the microphones in the second floor hallway. He listened carefully. Yes, someone definitely was walking around up there. Had someone broken into the building, somehow bypassing the alarm system? The watchman pressed the red button that automatically summoned the police.

                                        One of the lighting fixtures in the large entrance hall. 

In a matter of minutes, spotlights flooded the building and grounds; squad cars drove up and screeched to a halt outside the building. Weapons in hand, the police charged into the house. . . and found no one. The guard was flabbergasted. He had heard footsteps; he was certain. 

He took the police officers to the guard station and played back that night's recording of the sounds the microphones had picked up. Sure enough, there was the sound of footsteps, clear and distinct, from the hallway. The police were as nonplussed as the guard.. They conducted a second search of the museum complex and grounds, but found no trace of an intruder. The police unit drove off, leaving the embarrassed guard to puzzle over the mysterious sound of footfalls.

Several more weeks passed uneventfully. This time, sensors picked up a sound in a third floor storage area, the sound of a baby crying. The watchman couldn't believe his ears. How could a baby get up there? Why would a baby be up there?

Since the crying was coming from a part of the house where no valuable objects were kept, the guard decided to check it out for himself. He went up to the third floor and stealthily approached the door to the storage area. Gun drawn, the guard carefully unlocked the door, threw it open, and switched on the lights. Nothing. Silence. Dead still. He searched the area, but found nothing--no baby, no animal, no living thing.

A few weeks later, another incident occurred. Again, the sound of someone walking in the second floor hallway came from the microphones. This time the guard chose not to call the police. No exterior alarm had sounded, and the guard did not want to turn in another false alarm.

                                                                   The main staircase

Quietly, he made his way from the basement, into the house, and up the main staircase to the hallway where he had heard footsteps. Holding his breath, he stopped at the top of the staircase and listened. All was quiet. He turned and began creeping slowly down the long, pitch-black hallway. He had gotten halfway down the hallway when he suddenly heard footsteps coming towards him. He froze. At that instant, to his horror, he felt someone brush past him, gently rubbing against his right arm. Whipping out his gun with one hand and turning on his flashlight with the other, he whirled around to face the intruder. But the beam of light fell on a deserted hallway. He was stunned, knowing it would have been impossible for someone to have gotten all the way to the staircase in the instant it took him to switch on the flashlight.

Heart pounding, the guard hastily turned on the lights and searched the area. All was in order. Shaken, but nevertheless glad that he did not call the police that time, the guard reluctantly concluded that he was dealing with something paranormal.

After that incident, the guard heard the baby crying several times, and sometimes even the sounds of children playing in that attic room, which, he learned, had been a playroom for the family that built the house many decades before.

The ghostly footsteps have not sounded again. The young guard was left with the dilemma of trying to decide which is more terrifying to him alone all night in the dark, silent mansion--an intruder that is there or an intruder that isn't.

                                                A window treatment in a main floor room.
 

Note: It's been many years since the guard had these experiences in the house. The woman who related these stories swore me to secrecy regarding the exact location of the house, for an obvious reason: The story offers an opportunity for a real, live thief to get in and make off with some priceless work of art. 

But today, the house has a sophisticated security system that monitors not only sounds, but includes a video IP system, touch detection, and intrusion alarms. Night guards don't have to physically check out parts of the house in order to know what's going on.

The fascinating part of this story is the unseen person making physical contact with the guard. Many people have heard ghostly footsteps, as I have myself, but very few have actually bumped into a ghost walking down a dark hallway.

A Dead Ringer: Service, Please!

 

       The bell board in Highclere Castle, which served as Downtown Abbey in the BBC-TV series.

A minister's wife told me this story about incidents that occurred when they first moved into a large Edwardian-era church rectory in Duluth, Minnesota. When her husband took the position of minister at this venerable old church, the family moved into the rectory next door. Like many upper-class houses of its day, this one had a system of bells with which the owner could call the servants to perform some task. The bells in the rectory were wired for electricity. For example, if someone in a bedroom wanted a maid to bring up linens, they could press a button in the bedroom and a bell would ring in the kitchen. A board listing all the rooms in the house would let the maid know by an arrow indicator which room was ringing.

By the time this minister's family moved into the rectory in the late 1970s, the bell service had not been used for decades. Some of the little arrows pointing to the room numbers were broken; some dangled loose and useless. So when one day shortly after the family moved in, one of these bells rang, it startled the minister's wife, who was downstairs at the time. Since she knew nobody was upstairs, she wondered how and why the bell was ringing.

                                  A small bell box with arrows similar to the one in the rectory.

The incident turned out to be one of several. Over the next few months one or another of the bells rang on a half dozen other occasions. In each case, no one was upstairs to press a button, yet a bell rang in the kitchen.

The couple became concerned that faulty wiring might be causing the bells to go off seemingly randomly. The wiring in the house was original, and they worried that a short could start a fire. They called an electrician to check out the house's electrical service. They told him about the bells ringing when no one had pressed a button and asked him to pay special attention to the bell wiring. 

After examining the wiring, the electrician declared that it was sound--except for the bell system, where at least half the wires had been disconnected. To assuage their fears about shorts, he suggested that he cut the wires to all the bells. They readily agreed to this solution, and he severed each of the wires where it entered the box in the kitchen.

Imagine the couple's shock when, as they stood talking in the kitchen a couple of days later, one of the bells rang. They stood gaping at the cut wires as the little bell kept ringing for 15-20 seconds. 

Completely unnerved, they called back the electrician, who suggested another solution: take down the bell box. So they did. The box was removed from the house, and that at last ended the ringing. In any case, whoever had been ringing for service wasn't going to get it, and after the removal of box, they could no longer bother the living occupants of the house.

                          A Minnesota rectory of similar vintage that was converted to a B&B.