My Haunted House I : Something's Happening Here

                   "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

Steven Still's song isn't about the paranormal, but this quote quite aptly describes what many people think after they witness something that seems unexplainable.

1978 was a banner year for my family. It marked the completion of the exterior restoration of our 1885 Queen Anne house begun the previous summer and the birth of a second daughter in July. In September I interviewed several neighbors about ghostly-goings on in their homes, and then wrote them up in an article for the Wedge newspaper. (Read the article here: "Enter Ghost" "Enter Ghost" Wedge 1978.) 

These interviews led to other interviews and other articles. I talked to Eleanor Steckert, Professor of Folklore at the University of Minnesota, and read the books she suggested. The first was the 1981 classic by Jan Harald Brundvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: America's Urban Legends and their Meanings. I learned that a folklorist does not need to believe in nor try to disprove the claims in the stories they collect. The important thing is to listen, record, and document. Thus I became not a ghost hunter, but a ghost story collector.

In The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Brunvand says that the hitchhiker story is the one he's heard most often in his collecting of urban legends: 

Someone driving at night sees a girl (or guy) by the roadside in distress. They offer her a ride to her home. After they drop her off, they realize that she's left her sweater/umbrella/purse/whatever behind. They go back to the house. When her mother answers the door, she get very upset and tells them that her daughter is long dead. 

There are a number of variations on this story, but they all present the girl or guy as a solid apparition that can be touched, one that leaves physical evidence behind. In fact, I heard variations on this story from two people, one from Georgia and one from New England, stories that they had heard from other people. My daughter Ceridwen heard a Christian version of this, with the hitchhiker as Jesus.

So much for urban legends. But what about firsthand accounts of spooky encounters? These are what I was interested in. Then, in 1983, something happened at our house that intrigued and baffled me. I was in the foyer talking on the phone, and my younger daughter, whom I'll call "M," was in the back parlor, when I heard a loud, metallic "clunk" in the dining room. I immediately opened the door to the dining room and saw, to my astonishment, that the cast iron floor grate had moved from its place against the wall to the rug under the table. Our dog Tessie was standing several feet away near the kitchen doorway, staring at the grate with a "WTF?" look on her face.

How did the louvered grate move a couple of feet on its own? I asked M if she had moved the grate, and she emphatically denied it. She had been sitting on the sofa watching TV in the adjoining parlor. We moved the grate several times from the floor to the rug in an effort to determine what could have moved it. We tested how much force it took to move the nine-pound grate from the floor to the rug. There's no way Tessie could have moved the grate. The openings were big enough only to fit fingers, not large dog paws. The air from the forced-air furnace could barely lift a piece of paper, let alone move a heavy grate.

I applied Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is the best one. At that point, I had heard enough stories to recognize the elements of paranormal activity. Did a ghost move the grate? If so, who was it that wanted to get our attention? It would take a few more incidents over many months and more research to come to some sort of a conclusion.

                                                   The front parlor of our house in 1981

Months passed. Then one afternoon, my younger daughter, M, was by herself in the house, upstairs watching TV in her room over the dining room when she heard a metallic clunk from the first floor. After having witnessed the moving of the grate previously, she recognized the sound. Fearing the worst, she crept downstairs and looked into the dining room. There it was: The grate had once again moved from its place in the floor to the rug. When her father came inside shortly thereafter, he found M nearly hysterical with fear. M had heard me declare my suspicions that the movement was possibly caused by a ghost, and the grate moving again freaked her out.

Witnessing the grate moving was significant, as it was a clear physical manifestation of an unexplainable force. Hearing footsteps, seeing apparitions--these common paranormal incidents are ephemeral and hard to document. Someone wanted to get our attention--and did. The grate never moved again, but it marked the beginning of a decade of sporadic unexplained incidents in the house which I will describe in my next posts.