At Home in the Afterlife

                                  “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
                                                    ― William Faulkner

For Halloween, here's one of my favorite stories. It involves a deceased owner hanging around, haunting her former home in Duluth, Minnesota. 

                                                    A street in Duluth's East End

In the late 1990s, I stopped by to visit a friend who was restoring a spacious 1905 Craftsman house in Duluth's East End. Knowing that I was collecting ghost stories, she introduced me to Marie, who lived with her family in the house across the street.

                                                            A 1910 Craftsman House

Marie had quite a story to tell. The 5,000+ square-foot house that her family occupied was built in 1911, designed by a prominent architect who had designed a number of notable houses, churches, and civic buildings, some now on the National Register. In 1917 a well-to-do young couple bought the house and moved in. The house was so large, the family had a live-in maid to help manage it for the couple, and eventually, their two children. The wife--whom we'll call Mrs. Smith--lived there until her death in the late 1960s.

At that point, Marie and her husband Paul acquired the house. On their first night in the house, Marie and Paul heard someone walking around above their second floor bedroom. Their dog heard it, too, following the sound of footsteps around with his eyes. Paul decided to check it out, but the dog was very reluctant to accompany him. Paul had to drag the dog up to the third floor with him. But no one was there. All was quiet. 

As the weeks went on, they regularly heard footsteps on the third floor. Paul and Marie learned that Mrs. Smith had had a liquor cabinet on the third floor over the master bedroom. Was it merely coincidental that the footsteps were heard in that area? They also heard someone walking around in what had been maid's room over the kitchen. Those weren't the only unexplained noises. From the kitchen they sometimes heard the crystals tinkling on the chandelier in the foyer, as if someone had opened the front door; they occasionally heard the back door open and shut. 

Three years after Paul and Marie moved in, their son was born. Marie took leave from work to care for him. One day, Marie was doing laundry in the basement. She loaded the washer and crossed to the stairs. As she walked past it, a large door with a window insert that had been propped against the wall since they moved in fell behind her with a loud crash. She had not so much as brushed against it. Terrified, Marie dashed up the stairs and scooped up the baby. Hot-footing it to the garage, she strapped him in his car seat and drove off. Marie drove around Duluth and environs for several hours, fearing to go back into the house alone. When her husband got home from work, they found the door still lying on the basement floor, and nothing else had changed.

Six years later, their son, now with his own bedroom, took to using the bathroom in the master bedroom suite at night because it was closer than the main bath. One night as he came into the darkened bedroom, he was startled to see a luminous blue form moving around his parents' bed as they slept. He ran back to his room and hid under the covers for the rest of the night. And that was the end of his visits to the master bathroom.

 

As the months passed, the odd noises continued. Sometimes a clap-on-off table lamp in one of the first floor rooms would go off, or on, when no one clapped or turned the switch. Marie and Paul had the opportunity to buy a large Persian rug that was original to the house, and they got it and installed it. Mrs. Smith--if that's who it was--calmed down somewhat after that, but paranormal activity never stopped completely.

One evening, Paul and Marie went out to attend an event. They came into the house through the back and walked through to the living room. As they came into the room, the babysitter and her friend looked up in surprise. 

"Did you just come home?" asked the teenagers--who freaked out when they heard the answer. A half an hour earlier, they had clearly heard the back door open and close and had assumed that the parents had been in the kitchen since then.

As time went by, stories about the house began circulating around town.  Sometimes when Marie was at a party, she would overhear someone relating a story about their house. It came as no surprise, as a number of people had witnessed strange goings-on there, and the family did not attempt to keep the incidents a secret.

The strangest incident of all happened one day as Mrs. Smith's son was driving down the street with a friend. As they approached the former Smith home, the friend said, "I've heard stories that your mother is haunting the family abode." 

"Rubbish!" exclaimed the son--just as the engine cut out right in front of the house.

 

                                                            Spooky black willow
 

Stories of hauntings by former occupants are among the most common ghost stories. As someone who lived for four decades in a house haunted by an owner who had died in 1942, I can relate. As Marie found, activity can be sporadic with long, quiet intervals between incidents. For the most part, the incidents were not scary, and our family learned to accept the occasional unexplained event, just as Marie's family had. 

    Halloween decorations at my old house

Dead Still

 One of the first stories I collected was from a librarian, Joan, who lived with her husband and two children in an old foursquare house on a broad avenue in South Minneapolis. 

                                                             A typical Midwest foursquare 

Because the librarian worked days and sometimes evenings and her husband worked night shift, they hired a babysitter to stay with the children until their mother got home in the evenings. As the weeks went by, Joan frequently found the kids curled up with the babysitter on the sofa instead of in bed. The babysitter said that the kids didn't want to go upstairs and be alone in their beds. When Joan asked why, the babysitter replied that there were sounds of someone moving around in the central landing hallway, but when Joan investigated, she found no one there.

At the same time, the door from the third floor onto the landing kept opening. Joan was sure they'd shut it, but they'd find it open even when no one in the family had been on the floor. As with the attorney with the opening hatch, Joan's husband got annoyed that the heat was flying up into the attic, increasing heating bills. He locked the door and assumed that would be the end of it. It wasn't. The locked door was unlocked and opened as before.

After the husband started locking the door, disturbances increased on the second floor. When Joan came home at night the kids and babysitter were always on the first floor, huddled together. Even though Joan and her husband had witnessed none of these nocturnal disruptions, the kids had, and they grew increasingly scared. It got to the point that they refused to sleep in their second floor bedrooms.

The husband decided to fix the problem for good. He nailed the door shut--not just one nail, but a dozen of them hammered all around the frame. He was reluctant to take this measure, but it was January, and the heating costs were increasing alarmingly. In addition, he and Joan thought that securing the door would perhaps stop the sounds the kids and babysitter were hearing at night.

The house was quiet for several nights. The kids returned to sleeping upstairs. But then, on one below-zero January night, Joan was preparing for bed in the master bedroom, which shared a wall with the staircase from the third floor. She turned out the light and was about to get into bed when she heard a faint scratching sound coming from one of the bedroom windows. Was she imagining it? No. Although barely audible, there was definitively a scratching noise.

Joan looked around the dark bedroom, trying to figure out the source. She went to the window to see if the wind was scraping a branch against the glass. No branches were anywhere near the window. White vapors from the chimneys of the neighboring houses rose silently into the air. All was dead still, as it is on extremely cold nights. Even the slightest sound will carry a long way. Abruptly, the scratching sound stopped. 

 Joan grew uneasy, overcome with a feeling of dread. She glanced at the clock. Almost midnight. Hesitantly, she prepared again to go to bed. But she heard another faint sound, this time coming from inside the stairwell from the attic. It sounded like fabric being brushed against the wall as someone descended the stairs. Swish, swish. Then, footsteps very slowly coming down, stopping after each step. Joan was frozen with fear as she stared at the wall, trying to imagine what was behind it.

The footsteps stopped at the door. Silence. Then. . . Crash! All hell broke loose. Joan heard the nails ripping out of the door, some rattling against the wood floor. The door burst open, slamming against the wall. And then suddenly, all was quiet again. The terrified kids and Joan ventured out of their rooms into the hallway. Joan turned on the light. The door was wide open. The nails were scattered around on the floor. No one was there.

It took a long time for Joan to calm down herself and the children. She shut the attic door, and they all went downstairs to finish the night on the sofa. When her husband got home in the morning and Joan told him what had happened, he was very upset. They obviously needed to do something different. After some discussion, they decided to call upon the elders of their church to do a cleansing ceremony. 

 Within a few days, the elders came out and did a prayer service. And here's where this story ends very differently than most similar stories: The prayers worked. There were no more weird sounds on the landing and stairway, and the door stayed shut. 

Although this story has an anticlimactic conclusion, Joan and her family were very grateful that there were no more disturbances and they all were able to sleep in their beds in peace.