When you move into a new space, do you wonder if it might be haunted? I never did until I lived in a haunted house. When I sold my parents' house in Pittsburgh, the buyer asked me if it was haunted. He explained that as a child he was visited often at night by a ghost of a man in steelworkers' overalls. When he told his parents, they scoffed and insisted he remain in that room. I told him I doubted that my parents were hanging around, but if they were, I'd come over and tell them to move on. I didn't hear from him again.
When Donna moved into her first house in a St. Paul suburb, it was after living for decades in apartments. A modest 1950's Cape Cod house, it had two bedrooms upstairs. That her new home might be haunted never crossed her mind. She quickly settled in, enjoying the luxury of a place of her own. Nothing ruffled the domestic tranquillity for several months.
Then, late one summer night as she was, as usual, sleeping in one of the two upstairs bedrooms, the double-hung window in the room slammed shut with a crash, breaking both panes of glass in the sash. Donna, rudely awakened by the sound of shattering glass, slid out of bed and groggily turned on the overhead light.
As she crossed the room to examine the window, the light went off. Unnerved, Donna anxiously groped her way back to the switch and turned it on again. She flipped the switch a few times; it worked perfectly, as before. She then went to check the window. It was roped and weighted, opening and closing smoothly as she pushed it up and down.
Having never experienced two such curious events in sequence before, Donna was perplexed. She would have been content to attribute them to a fluke, were it not for her dog's reaction. The mongrel terrier, who had been sleeping peacefully next to her bed before the window slammed shut, leaped up and tore out of the bedroom like a shot. The dog high-tailed it downstairs, ears pinned back, for the rest of the night. After this incident the dog could not be coaxed upstairs for any reason. Until the day she died, the dog spent all her time on the first floor.
These incidents were odd, but not as explicitly "ghostly" as what took place one Saturday morning around 6:30. An out-of-town friend was visiting, sleeping in the guest bedroom upstairs across from Donna's room. Donna awoke at dawn and went down to the kitchen to brew coffee. She greeted her friend as she returned to her room. He was awake, but still hadn't stirred from bed.
As they prepared to start the day, Donna and her friend, in their respective rooms, heard a man's voice downstairs say genially, as if talking to household pets, "And how are you two this morning?" Donna and her house guest were astounded, for they both knew that no one was downstairs. A quick trip down the stairs revealed to them that only the dog was on that floor.
Her friend was in fact very distressed, so much so that, after acknowledging at the time that he had heard the voice, he has since refused to discuss the incident.
