Who's That Creeping through my Window?

 In the early months of ghost story collecting, I was having lunch with friends at Tuthill's on Hennepin Avenue in the Wedge. I told a couple of the stories I'd heard recently, then said facetiously, "Of course, there's no such thing as ghosts." 

To my surprise, I heard someone at the table behind me say, "But there are!" I turned to see Larry, the local mailman, eating alone on his lunch break. I asked him how he knew. "Because of my experiences at my new house," he said somewhat defensively.

As is common with ghost story tellers, he started with some background to show that he was indeed a reliable witness: He was a Minneapolis native, a member of the choir at a Lutheran Church, and he had served the community as a letter carrier for over a decade. About a year previous, he had bought a small one-story 1950's house in an inner ring suburb. 

When he moved in, Larry decided to place his bed right up against the window in his bedroom. That night, shortly after midnight, he was awakened by the sensation of something pressing down on his chest. Terrified, he opened his eyes, but saw only a dark mist hovering over him. The pressure increased. He was immobilized, struggling to breathe. As he felt he was about to pass out, the weight suddenly lifted. Gasping for air, Larry tumbled out of bed. 

He turned on the lights. Nobody was in the room. It was summer, and the window was open, with the screen intact. He went back to bed and slept the rest of the night undisturbed. However, the next night the same thing occurred. Larry was very puzzled, but decided that the easiest fix was to move the bed, which he pushed around against the opposite wall. That night he stayed up, lying in bed, waiting to see what would happen. Then, around midnight, Larry saw a dark, filmy shape climb through the window, start across to the door, and then vanish.

As long as the shadow man didn't bother him, Larry decided he could live with him climbing through the window. And so it went for some weeks. But when Larry told the story to his cousin, the cousin scoffed. He declared he was going to push the bed up against the window and prove that Larry was imagining this nocturnal visitor. 

But instead, the cousin had the same experience as Larry: He felt a huge weight on his chest, he couldn't breathe, and he saw a dark mist on top of him. As before, the weight lifted after several moments. 

The cousin became a reluctant believer. He pushed the bed back into place against the inside wall, and Larry had been sleeping in it undisturbed ever since then. Larry had no idea who the nightly visitor was or why he was climbing into that window. But he was certain that ghosts do exist.

Hello, Anyone Home?

"Any time at all, any time at all 

Any time at all, all you gotta do is call

And I'll be there."

                                                  --Beatles song

Ghosts have various ways of communicating their presence. Sometimes they do it in scary ways; sometimes they mystify the living with strange incidents.  Sharon, who lived in an apartment in a first-ring Minneapolis suburb, told me this story.

At the time, Sharon lived on her own in an apartment building where her adult daughter also had an apartment. Another married daughter lived in a house a short drive away. Over the months that Sharon first lived in the unit, several inexplicable incidents occurred. For instance, a couple of times while she was running bath water, the taps were turned off while she was in the next room. On other occasions burners on the gas range were turned off or on while she was cooking. Since these stove knob turnings caused no damage or disruption to her cooking, Sharon ignored these incidents.

 But then something occurred that she couldn't ignore. One evening she left her apartment to visit her married daughter. From the parking lot, she waved to her other daughter who happened to be looking out from her apartment in the building.

While Sharon was en route to her married daughter's house, this daughter called Sharon's apartment to remind her to bring something with her. The phone was answered (at least it sounded like someone had picked up the receiver), and then it was dropped back on the hook immediately afterward.

Fearing that her mother might be injured or taken ill, she called her sister at the apartment building. Puzzled, her sister told her that she had seen their mother drive off only minutes before. The sister at the apartment building tried calling and got a busy signal. Concerned that someone had broken in, she called the police. Shortly thereafter, the officers arrived and used the daughter's key to get in. 

To everyone's surprise, no one was there. The apartment was deserted and untouched. All was as it had been--except that the phone receiver in the bedroom was dangling on its line over the side of the nightstand.

The police officers searched everywhere in the apartment--through the clothes closets, under furniture, in kitchen cabinets, even in the clothes dryer ("in case of Hobbit burglars")--but found nothing. The windows were shut tight and there was no sign of entry, forced or otherwise. As the search progressed, one of the officers began humming the theme from "The Twilight Zone." 

They all were dumbfounded to explain how the phone receiver could be lifted, replaced, and then lifted again and dropped over the side of the table. Sharon had to conclude that she was sharing her apartment with an unseen person--a ghost who was beginning to get miffed at being ignored all those months. Sharon decided that the phone incident was the ghost's way of saying, "Hello, I'm here. Now you know for sure."

Engineers Meet Ghosts

People have very varied reactions to encounters with the paranormal, ranging from denial to completely freaking out. Engineers, being of scientific mind, usually do not immediately jump to conclusions when they experience weird goings-on. Here are two stories told by engineers about strange, uncanny encounters with the unexplained:

The first storyteller, Paul, was an electrical engineering student at the University of Minnesota. One Thanksgiving break he decided to go to the rustic family cabin in northern Wisconsin so he could read and study, rather than stay in the city for Turkey Day. Loading his car with books and provisions for the weekend, he drove to the muddy access lane to the cabin and packed in his supplies. At the cabin, he lit a fire and settled in.

 Later that evening as he was reading on the sofa, Paul heard a noise on the front porch that sounded like muffled footsteps. Opening the front door, he walked onto the porch and looked around. He called out. but there was no response; he shone a flashlight into the trees surrounding the cabin, but could see nothing moving. The woods were still and dark. He walked around the cabin, but could see no evidence of a trespasser. The cabin was about mile from the paved road, and he knew that a visitor to the cabin in late November would be very unlikely.

Once again, Paul settled down reading by the fire. About a half hour later, he distinctly heard heavy footsteps coming up the steps to the porch.  The sound of boots hitting the porch deck came from the steps to the door. Before he could to get up and go to the door, it suddenly violently burst open, hitting the wall as it swung. To his astonishment, no one stood there in the doorway. Paul jumped up and ran out on the porch. As before, all was dark and quiet. He could hear no sound of anyone or anything moving in the pitch black woods.

 Unsettled, Paul went back inside. What to do? It was a mile hike back to the car through the woods, and after that, he'd have a five-hour drive back to the Twin Cities. Paul turned to the open door and declared, "I didn't see anything or hear anything, and I'm going back to my reading." He closed the door and returned to his place by the fire.

For the rest of the weekend, he heard nothing untoward and there were no more disturbances. On Sunday, he drove back to the Cities rested and ready to resume his engineering studies.

The second story came from an engineering professor who related his experience while housesitting over the weekend for a friend when he lived in San Francisco. On the first day he was there, he had left a couple of dirty breakfast dishes in different places in the house. Later that afternoon, he noticed these dishes in the kitchen sink, even though he could not recall putting them there.

 When this same thing occurred the next morning, he was puzzled. Being of scientific bent, he decided to experiment by deliberately placing several soiled dishes throughout the house and noting where he put them. Later that day, he found all of the dishes sitting in the kitchen sink.

That was enough to satisfy his curiosity. Yes, a tidy unseen person was apparently moving dirty dishes into the sink. Since he was there only two days, he did not experiment further. He washed the dishes and put them away, and that was that.

Sleeping with the Light On

 

                                                      Colfax Avenue in South Minneapolis

One of the first stories I collected was from two musicians that had rented the first floor of a large converted house on Colfax Avenue in Minneapolis's Wedge neighborhood. Frank had a year's lease on the apartment, and he shared it with his friend David--who stayed there for only five months. 

One night David, who worked nights, came home to find the light on in Frank's room. Frank told him that he was awakened in the middle of the night by a "presence" at the foot of his bed. This presence awakened Frank a number of times during his tenancy at the house.

From the front door to the kitchen stretched a long hallway. David said that when he walked down the hall, he sometimes experienced a "creepy, tingly feeling in the spine" when he passed by the doorway to Frank's room. After he moved out, David wondered if he was hallucinating this feeling because he knew about Frank's experiences. But when he told his wife and another friend about this sensation two years later, they both said that they also had had a creepy feeling in this hallway--although none of them mentioned it to the others.

Both roommates felt that there was a lot of unusual house noise, including a loud unexplained bang in the middle of the night. One night while Frank was in his room with the light on, David tried to lure out the ghost by playing his drum set, but nothing happened.

David asked a neighbor, Jerry Trigg, who lived down the block, about the former occupants of their apartment. Jerry told him that the owners, an elderly couple, used to live in the downstairs unit. Their bedroom had been the room that Frank was staying in, and the wife had died in that room.

Neither roommate saw anything; they only felt a ghostly presence and heard unexplained noises. When he moved out, Frank commented that "there are too many ghosts in this house."

 

The house has undergone an impressive restoration since Frank and David lived there. These incidents occurred many years ago, and it's likely that the haunting has faded or completely disappeared. Nevertheless, whenever I pass by the house, I can't help wondering if the former owner is still hanging out in the first floor apartment. I hope not.