Through a Glass Ornament Darkly

 

 Park Avenue, Minneapolis, 1905, lined with mansions. Photo: Hennepin County Historical Society.

One of my former neighbors used to work for a graphic design firm that occupied a South Minneapolis mansion that had been converted to offices. This house was located less than a mile from the house-cum-office building haunted by the girl in the prom dress. A few people who worked on the third floor remarked that they thought the place was haunted. They told my neighbor that every once in a while they had the uncomfortable feeling that someone was watching them, even though no one else was in the room. This was during daylight hours.

Bill, an employee who frequently had to stay after hours to complete projects, complained of disruptions in the third floor work room. Several times when he was working at his desk, he'd been distracted by what looked like movement reflected in the glass and metal of the office equipment in front of him. A quick glance behind reassured him that he was indeed alone, but he was sure that he'd seen something.

 One night during the Christmas holidays Bill again saw movement behind him reflected in the chrome of a machine. Yet again, no one was there when he turned to look. A little later that evening he was standing by the office Christmas tree when he saw the blurred image of someone moving in back of him reflected in the several dozen glass ball ornaments hanging on the tree. A little unnerved and too distracted to continue working, he decided to make a quick exit. After that incident, Bill tried to complete his work during daylight hours.

This Property Protected by a Watch Ghost

 I've mentioned previously that my family and I lived in a haunted Victorian house in Minneapolis for over four decades. It's a long story, with many episodes. In the early days when we were getting the initial clues that the house was haunted, several others told their stories of spooky experiences at the house.

When we left town, we would ask someone to watch the house. During one longer trip, a friend stayed at the house.  A few days before our return, she called to let us know that someone had broken into the house, but little had been taken.

What apparently happened was this: The burglars had busted through the pine door of the summer kitchen in the back, and had gone directly upstairs to the master bedroom. They had pulled out only one drawer of the dresser, when they suddenly ran down the foyer stairs, unlocked the solid ash front door, and fled--this during broad daylight. They had grabbed the jewel box full of costume jewelry off the dresser, spilling some of its contents as they ran down the stairs. As they fled, they left the front door wide open. There was some cash and a few pieces of gold jewelry on the nightstand in the guest room that were left untouched. 

                                               The thick ash front door with brass doorknob.

What had scared the burglars off? The experience of two of our older daughter's high school friends offered a clue. We had asked the boys to care for the animals while we were away. This is how one of them described what happened:

"We went in to feed the dog. We went upstairs to feed the bird. It was really cold out. We heard the front door open. A blast of cold air came in. We thought you guys had come home early from your trip. We shouted down the staircase [that] it was us. We heard someone slowly walk up the stairs. We waited and spoke toward the sound. We crept toward the stop of the stairs. . .There was nothing there.

The door was wide open.

I am agnostic, but this was a huge event in my spiritual formation."

                                                           The front porch and door

Another couple of teenagers who came to tend to the animals heard slow, deliberate footsteps on the second floor. They fed the dog, practically throwing the food in her bowl, and beat a hasty retreat. 

I heard footsteps once when I came home one morning after walking my younger daughter to Jefferson Elementary School a block away. I came in, closed the door, and heard heavy footsteps in the upper hallway. I called out, and then went directly upstairs, but found no one. On another occasion I was in one of the bedrooms on the second floor when I heard the locked front door open and close. I looked down. The door was closed. When I searched the house for an interloper, I again found no one.

All of these incidents happened during the first years we lived in the house. They seemed to suggest that something paranormal was going on. After doing some research into previous owners, we decided that the likely ghost was that of Frank Cartwright, who had lived in the house until his death in 1942.

                                                                    Frank Cartwright
 

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.

Blast from the Past

Lynn, a Minneapolis real estate agent, related this story about a friend who works in a local hospital. One day when she was visiting the hospital, she saw her friend Paul sitting in the cafeteria with three co-workers, his left arm in a cast and sling. When she joined them, she inquired about his injury. He explained that he'd slipped and broken his arm. The conversation then turned to other topics.

Ten minutes later, however, after the other people had left the table, Paul brought up the subject of his broken arm. "Lynn," he said in a low voice, "I didn't slip on the floor. But what did happen is so bizarre, I can hardly believe it myself. You're an open-minded person, unlike some of my medical colleagues--and I've got to tell you how I really broke my arm."

Paul went on to say that the month before, he and his wife had bought a business from the estate of an eccentric old antiquarian. For a couple of weeks he had gone over to the shop, trying to complete inventory and sort through the former owner's papers. These papers, however, were in such a state of disarray that he decided to pack them into an old wooden box and bring them to his house, where he could go through them at his leisure. He brought the heavy box home and lugged it up to his study on the second floor.

He lived in a spacious bungalow with his wife and two teen-aged children. The kids slept on the second floor, and the parents slept in the master bedroom at the back of the ground floor in a hallway off the dining room--a layout common to Craftsman bungalows.

The night that he had carried the box home, Paul and his wife were asleep in their downstairs bedroom when they were awakened by the sound of someone stirring overhead in the study. Their first thought was that one of the kids had gotten up to go to the bathroom, but no, they heard the sound of footsteps coming down the upstairs hallway from the study. The tread was heavy and decisive, like that of a man's boots.

As the footsteps reached the top of the stairs, Paul and his wife sat up in bed, staring wide-eyed at each other, then toward the sound. Down the stairs the boots came, deliberately and (they felt) menacingly. No burglar could be stomping like that, Paul thought. The footfalls sounded angry.

To their horror, the steps kept coming toward their bedroom--through the dining room and down the short hallway. The couple sat bolt upright in bed, clutching the covers in terror. The footsteps reached the closed door. In the dim glow of a nightlight, they saw the doorknob turning. 

 

Then, wham! the door flew open, banging against the wall. A flood of frigid air burst into the room. At the same time, husband and wife both leaped out of bed, he to the left, she to the right. As Paul sprang up, however, he lost his balance and fell heavily against a chest of drawers.

At this point the teenagers came racing downstairs, for they, too, had heard the footsteps. To the family's relief, after the burst of cold air, all went quiet. Paul's wife drove him to the emergency room to treat his broken arm. Not eager to face skepticism and possible ridicule from his colleagues, he decided to make up the story about slipping on the floor.

In the morning Paul and his wife dragged the box with the old man's papers back to the shop. And thereafter they slept in peace.

The Guardian

Sometimes you get more than you bargained for when a friend asks you to housesit for them. That's what happened to Linda, a Minneapolis woman, who had previously lived in Iowa City, Iowa. A friend there asked Linda to watch her house, a 1920's bungalow, when she went on vacation to Florida. 

The first night Linda came to stay in the house, however, she felt unwelcome. This feeling of a hostile presence increased as she approached her friend's bedroom, where she planned to sleep. Upon entering the room, Linda felt this hostility increase to a suffocating level.

Overwhelmed by anxiety, Linda retreated to the living room, where she spent an uneasy night. The sensation of someone or something in the house that bore her malice kept interrupting her sleep. Unpleasant dreams disturbed what sleep she got.

The next night she stayed at her own apartment, but hesitantly returned to her friend's house the following night. Once again, she experienced the feeling of being decidedly unwelcome there. Not even attempting to enter the bedroom, she retired to the sofa, with all the lights on in the adjoining dining room. At four in the morning she was awakened by the uneasy feeling that someone else was in the room. 

When she opened her eyes, she saw the figure of a woman standing opposite the sofa, less than ten feet away. The lights were still on; the woman seemed solid and real. She was glowering at Linda in a manner that said, "Get out and stay there." The woman appeared to be in her mid-40s, dressed austerely, in Linda's words, "like a nun." She stood perfectly still, except for one feature: her mouth twitched on one side, like she had a nervous tic.

Although the woman appeared life-like and three-dimensional, Linda knew at once that she was seeing a ghost. Cold fear flooded through her, but despite her terror, Linda felt herself losing consciousness, as if drugged. She struggled to stay awake, but her eyelids fluttered shut and she was instantly asleep.

The next morning at eight o'clock Linda awoke to broad daylight. A vivid recollection of her vision of the scowling woman immediately seized her. She decided to call her friend that evening and tell her about the difficulties she was having in the house.

When she phoned her vacationing friend later, their conversation went something like this:

Linda: We've got to talk. I'm having a hard time sleeping at your house.

Friend: Oh, you've seen her, then.

L (surprised): I think so.

F: The woman with the twitching mouth?

L: Yes! I saw her last night.

F: It's OK. She's just a ghost. She's very protective of me, so she probably resents your staying in my house. Just tell her why you're there, and everything should be fine.

That night, Linda followed her friend's advice. She thought she'd try sleeping in the bedroom. But as she started down the hallway, the feeling of antagonism directed towards her once again overwhelmed her. She stopped short of the bedroom door and addressed the unseen hostile presence. Linda explained that she was a friend of the woman who lived there and that she had been asked to watch the place.

 

The intensity of the negative presence subsided somewhat, and Linda proceeded to the bedroom. Once inside, however, Linda felt the enmity toward her intensify. As she headed back to the sofa, Linda said aloud, "All right, I won't stay in the bedroom. Please don't be upset. Just let me sleep in peace."

For the remainder of her stay, Linda felt only faint remnants of the hostility she originally had faced. And much to her relief, she never saw the unfriendly house guardian with the twitching mouth again.

*            *            *

I've heard stories of other guardian ghosts as well, most famously, the one in the historic Alexander Ramsey House in St. Paul, MN. Frank Cartwright, our resident ghost in Minneapolis, also was protective. He terrorized both intruders and dog-sitters when the family was away. (More on these in another post.)

  I wonder why Linda's friend, knowing about her guardian ghost, even bothered to ask someone to stay at the house. The presence of the twitchy-mouthed ghost was probably enough to scare stiff anyone entering the house in her absence.

The Phantom of the Organ

 Organ music (like Bach's "D-Minor Toccata and Fugue") has been often used for spooky effect in film and on radio. One of the best known examples is the phantom playing the organ in "The Phantom of the Opera."

                  Claude Rains playing the organ in the 1943 version of "The Phantom of the Opera"

Of course, in that story, the phantom is not actually a phantom, but a live person. I've heard, however, of a real organ-playing ghost in an old Minneapolis church.

Joyce Memorial Methodist Church (cum Joyce United Methodist Church) sits on the corner of Fremont Avenue and W. 31st Street in South Minneapolis. Built in 1907, it was named after a Methodist Episcopal bishop who died in 1905. In 2020 the church, no longer used as a place of worship, was designated a local landmark. Designed by architects Harry Downs and Harold Eads, the California Mission Revival style church looks somewhat out of place in this snowy northern city.

                                                        Joyce Memorial Methodist in 1953

Back in the 1980s when the building was still being used as a church, one of my neighbors, a member of the congregation, passed on to me stories that the custodian and members of the church council had told her.

One night as the custodian was alone in the church, working in the basement, he was startled to hear  organ music burst from the sanctuary. He doubted that it could be mischievous kids because the instrument was being played with great skill and confidence.

He couldn't imagine who had gotten into the sanctuary without his knowledge, so he bounded upstairs to find out. The instant his hand touched the door to the sanctuary, the music stopped dead. The empty church was in darkness; all was still. The puzzled custodian flipped on the lights and went to check the organ console. It was closed and locked. No one could have had the time to turn it off, lock it, and leave the sanctuary in the few seconds between when he opened the door and turned on the lights. A few months later, the same thing occurred. The custodian heard similar bold, vigorous organ music pouring from the sanctuary, which was locked, dark, and deserted. 

He wasn't the only one who heard the music. Several parishioners had also reported hearing pipe organ music from the street as they were leaving the church after a meeting at night. The sanctuary was in total darkness at the time.

My neighbor and other older parishioners speculated that the phantom organist was the clergyman the church was named in honor of, Bishop Isaac Wilson Joyce. They said that Joyce was renowned as a superb organist, although music remained an avocation throughout his life. He had the hymn "No, Not One" from the 1896 Methodist hymnal translated into Chinese and Japanese in an apparent evangelical effort.
 

                                                           Isaac Wilson Joyce (1836-1905)

No one knows for sure who the ghost was who played the Joyce Church organ, but the story passed on by the church elders fits as well as any.

Click for the piano version of "No, Not One!":

Piano version, "There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus. No, not one"

Down the Hatch

 Some people are reluctant to tell their personal ghost stories, even upon request. For whatever reason, they will acknowledge that they have a story, but will refuse to tell it. Perhaps they don't want to add to their confusion or fright by trying to articulate what they experienced; perhaps they wish they hadn't experienced it and are trying to block it out of their memory.

In some cases this is probably for the best. One man complained to me about midnight disruptions to his sleep after moving into an 1890's house in my Minneapolis neighborhood. But he refused to give details, explaining that he really didn't want to think about it. Unbeknownst to him, neighbors had told me that several years previous to his moving in, a landlord had settled a rent dispute with a tenant in the house by blasting him with a shotgun, killing him instantly. Eventually, the new owner learned of the incident from the neighbors, who were initially reluctant to spook him with the story. A couple of decades later, I had my own experiences in that house after it was acquired by new owners.

                                            

The reportedly haunted historic Gibbs Farmhouse in St. Paul

Another reluctant storyteller told me his story, even though I never met him in person. One winter afternoon in early 1980s after I had posted a notice in local libraries soliciting ghost stories, my phone rang. The voice on the other end was a man's. He sounded harried and nervous. He gave his name, adding that he was an attorney who worked in downtown Minneapolis. He had seen the notice in the library during a lunchtime visit that day. As it turned out, his main concern was not, he said, telling his story, but getting some relief from the uncanny incidents occurring in the house that he and his family had moved into earlier that year.

 Their house was an old farmhouse in a far western suburb of Minneapolis. The family liked the house and everything about it--with one exception: the hatch covering to the attic kept coming open. It was a standard hatch cover which fitted over an opening just large enough for a person to climb through. During the summer months he and his wife often found the cover slightly off-kilter. They'd put it straight, only to find it askew a day or two later.

When the days grew cooler in the fall, he filled the attic with insulation in preparation for the long Minnesota winter. When the heating season started, he and his wife began to get annoyed, then upset, when they'd repeatedly find the hatch open, allowing heat to escape into the attic. It became routine for them to make sure the hatch cover was shut tight before they went to bed. Despite this precaution, in the morning, they frequently found the cover askew. They never heard a sound; they never actually saw it move. But there it was, partially open, virtually every day.

After going through this futile exercise for several weeks, the man decided to nail the cover shut. That would fix it, once and for all. He attached the cover to the molding with a series of long, sturdy nails and went to bed happily expecting never to have to deal with this cover movement again. Needless to say, he was aghast when he found the hatch in the upper hallway open, just as before.

It was then that he and his wife began to entertain the idea that the cover was being moved by something paranormal. They wondered if their house might be haunted by a ghost that didn't care a tinker's damn about big heating bills.

At this point the man's brother, who lives a great distance from Minnesota and whom he hadn't seen for ten years, phoned. His reason for calling was startling: The brother told them that he felt they had a "presence" in their attic, and that he was going to exorcise it for one year. But despite the brother's assurances, the cover to the attic refused to stay put.

Shortly thereafter, they had an unannounced visitor whose mysterious innuendoes changed their irritation to alarm. One weekend a man appeared at the front door. He appeared to be in his 30s, an unkempt and disheveled character. As they chatted on the front stoop, he told them that he had lived in the house as a child, and as he happened to be in the neighborhood, he decided to stop by. Then, with an insinuating smile, he asked if "it" was still there.

 The sly inquiry upset the attorney, who pretended not to understand. The visitor went on to say that when he lived there, a "thing" inhabiting the attic had caused his family distress. As a child, he was so impressed by this unseen thing's activities that he felt compelled to stop and ask them about it.

The attorney was shaken by the man's story, for it confirmed his suspicions that something paranormal was at work. He resolved that the "thing" had opened the hatch once too often, and that he was going to get rid of it--although he didn't know where to begin.

As if in answer to his need to banish the "thing", he had found my notice in the library. Could I help them? Reluctantly, I told him that I am a story collector, not a ghost buster. Hearing this, the man was crestfallen. He had poured out the story to a stranger who couldn't do anything but listen. He hung up.

I feel bad that I didn't try to help them. If he had called a year later, I would have been able to suggest resources to check out. When people ask me what they can do about their haunting, I tell them that the first thing to try is to talk to the ghost. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. In this case, I suspect it wouldn't because the "thing" had been around for so long and seemed malevolent.

                                                         Who you gonna call?

Firestarter: The Pyromaniac Desk

 One of the most bizarre stories I've heard (although some might deny its ghostly aspects) came from a student while I was teaching at the University of Minnesota, Duluth in the late 'Sixties. This story involving a late Victorian desk is so striking that it was picked up by the Associated Press.

                                                 A late Victorian highboy secretary desk

Adorned with turnings and carvings, the highboy desk had been acquired by the family twenty years before the incidents occurred. The family had bought a house that had originally been built as a church in Cloquet, a town about 20 miles southwest of Duluth, and the desk came with the house.

Seventeen years after the family moved in, this house was gutted by fire. Only the desk and three other pieces of furniture survived the blaze. One of the sons took the desk to his house near Duluth. A year later the son's house went up in flames, but not the desk, which sat unscathed among the ashes.

All was quiet--or should I say "cool"?--for a few years. The man then asked his brother-in-law if he would temporarily take the desk to their house. The brother-in-law agreed, and the desk was moved to the hallway of their house. Six months later, fire broke out in the hallway where the desk stood. As in the other instances, the desk suffered no marks from fire or smoke, even though the room where it stood was completely charred.

That was enough for the man's mother, who pleaded with him to get rid of the desk immediately. She was concerned that three conflagrations around the mysteriously fireproof desk had to be more than mere coincidence.

But the man found it difficult to accept any connection between the fires and the handsome old desk. So when his new house in Duluth was completed (you may recall that his other house had burned to the ground), he decided to take the desk to his new home. Less than a week after he moved in, he was awakened in the dead of night by the smell of smoke. Racing into the kitchen, he encountered a wall of flame engulfing the room only a few feet from the desk. Damage to the kitchen was extensive, but there sat the desk, untouched.

Investigators determined that the fire had been kindled from a short in the wiring. The man and his family, however, thought otherwise. The wiring was brand new, and it had been carefully inspected before they moved in. With growing alarm, they became convinced that the desk, survivor of four major house fires, in some terrible, inscrutable way, had been the incendiary.

They decided to sell the desk, but not surprisingly, no offers were forthcoming. While the idea of a desk starting fires seems preposterous, the track record of this particular piece of furniture did not encourage prospective buyers to test their luck.

At last report, the desk was being stored in a fireproof concrete structure near Duluth. This was over 50 years ago, and I sometimes wonder what eventually happened to the desk. Did it give up its incendiary tendencies? Is it still in storage or was it destroyed? We probably will never know.

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.

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.

Hauntin' around the Christmas Tree

Another personal ghost story of mine dates from the 1980s when I was a member of the choir at the Church of Gethsemane (now closed) in downtown Minneapolis.  One of the choir members, Kay, invited us all to her large 1960s house in Edina for a holiday party.  Kay knew that I collected ghost stories, and she told me privately that her house was haunted.

When she and her husband first moved in several years earlier, they noticed odd things happening: a cupboard door found open when it had just been closed, a book placed on a side table sliding off onto the floor, lights turning off and on, and a rocking chair moving on its own. After doing a little research, they learned that a young couple previously owned the house and that the wife, Barbara, had died of a virulent cancer that had spread quickly. They deduced that the woman was the one moving objects around the house. The rocking chair was Barbara's particular favorite. Kay said she often found it rocking away when she came into the living room. 

With a couple dozen people in attendance at the choir party, it was hard to tell if anything ghostly was going on. People were sometimes sitting in the rocker, sometimes not. In any case, only Kay, her husband, and I knew about the ghost. 

At one point, I decided to go down to the family room on the lower level to check out the Christmas tree. Several guys were at the bar at the end of the room opposite the tree discussing the Vikings' prospects as I went over to see the ornaments and lights on the tree. I hadn't been there more than a couple of minutes when all of the lights in the downstairs went out: the tree lights, the overhead lights, the bar back-lights, the stairwell lighting. It was pitch black. To my surprise, the men stopped talking for only a few seconds, and then went right back to sports talk, sitting there in the dark like nothing had happened. I stood there by the tree, wondering how long the blackout would last. I was afraid to move, concerned about stumbling into furniture in the dark. A few minutes went by, and the lights went back on all at once. Since the lights were on three different switches, no one person could have accomplished this.

 I went back upstairs and told Kay what had happened. She just smiled, nodded, and said, "Merry Christmas from Barbara."

God bless Us, Every One!

Haunted Apartment

With so many stories to tell, I've had a hard time deciding where to start. I suppose the best place to start is the beginning, with stories from people who contacted me right after the Wedge article was published in 1978.

In early November '78 I got a call from a woman stockbroker in her late 20s who lived in a 1910 apartment building not far from our house in the Wedge. Over the phone she told me that she feared her apartment was haunted, and she and her roommate were moving out, enough though it meant losing several hundred dollars in rents and deposits. She invited me to the scene of the alleged haunting on the third floor of the brick building. 

               The apartment where these incidents occurred has been converted into condos.

When I arrived that November evening, it was dark and dreary outside. A couple dozen boxes crowded the entrance to the apartment, as if they couldn't wait to get out. She, her roommate, and a friend gave me a tour of the apartment, showing me the corner in her room which emitted an obnoxious stench that scrubbing and painting could not erase, and pointing out the window in the air shaft where a black cat had entered on three occasions. They showed me the shaft, and I could not see any way a cat could get up to the third floor in it, let alone get into the shaft itself below. These things did not initially scare the roommates, although they later thought there might be a connection between these and the incidents that conspired to drive them out. 

         Many 19th and early 20th century buildings had ventilation shafts to allow in light and air.

The two roommates had moved into the apartment nearly three months previous to my visit. The apartment was roomy and attractive, with hardwood floors and varnished woodwork. The roommates found it a comfortable place to live--until three weeks before my visit.

The woman came home late on a Friday night. Her roommate was still out. As was her custom, she turned out all the lights in the apartment and went to bed. Exhausted from a long day at work, she immediately fell into a deep sleep.

But an hour and a half later, around 1 a.m., she was suddenly awakened by an odd feeling that someone else was in the apartment. She immediately noticed that the light in the bathroom across the hallway was on. She called out to her roommate; there was no answer. She searched the apartment. No roommate. Nothing had been disturbed. She tested the pull chain on the bathroom light. It worked as before. She sat up for a long time, racking her brain for a reasonable explanation, but could think of none.

A week later, she and her roommate were sleeping in their respective bedrooms when click, the large portable radio by her bedside came on at 1:30 a.m. Loud music blasted forth, startling her from sleep, her heart pounding. Both roommates were so shaken by this rude awakening that, even though it was in the middle of the night, they decided to go to relatives' homes to sleep.

                                       The interior of a similar apartment in the neighborhood.

The last straw came the next day, a Sunday, when the woman was in her room listening to the Vikings game on the radio. She heard the front door being unlocked, heard the doorknob creak and the door close, followed by footsteps coming down the hall toward her room. She looked up, and seeing no one, concluded that her roommate had gone into the front bedroom.

But when she called out a greeting, there was no answer. Hoping against hope, she went from room to room. No one was there. The front door was closed and locked. All was still.

Terrified, she fled the apartment, vowing to move out with all haste and never to stay there alone until the last stick of furniture was carted away. 

Her roommate wasn't eager to risk further disturbance by remaining there, either. When they gave the apartment manager notice that they would be leaving early in the month, he asked them why they didn't like the apartment. Hesitantly, they decided to tell him about the spooky incidents. He then told them that an elderly couple had lived in the unit for many years and had passed on several years previous, adding that two other sets of tenants had also moved out of that apartment before the end of their leases. Hearing of others' premature exits from the apartment made them feel better, validating their own experiences.

The next week a moving truck came and hauled their furniture and belongings to another apartment--one that they hoped would be quieter and less nerve-wracking than the one they had just evacuated.

                                                          The front entry to the building

Exactly 43 years have passed since the young woman told me that story. Judging from the experiences of others who related stories of their ghostly experiences years ago, I'd say it's very likely that the current residents are not being harassed by unseen persons. Claims on TV shows notwithstanding, active hauntings do not continue unabated for decades--at least, so I've been told.

                

Haunted

What would you think if you heard a crash in the dining room, immediately looked in and saw that the cast iron heating register had come out of the floor and was now sitting a couple of feet away on the carpet? When this happened to me, I was in the next room and my six-year-old daughter in the adjacent parlor. We were mystified. The grate weighed over three pounds and couldn't have been lifted by the furnace blower. What moved it? My husband and I didn't know what to think.

Then, several months later in the winter, my husband had gone out to the garage for something when it happened again. He came back into the house to find our daughter completely freaked out. She had been watching TV in her room over the dining room when she heard the metallic crash from below and knew exactly what had caused it: the grate crashing onto the floor.  

These incidents occurred six years after I had started collecting ghost stories, so I recognized the possibility that the cause was paranormal. Over the next thirty-some years my daughters and I, plus a number of our friends, witnessed other strange happenings in the house. Nevertheless, when these inexplicable events first occurred, we couldn't help but think that there must be a normal, not paranormal, explanation for them. But as the number of incidents grew, we had to conclude that, yes, there was a ghost afoot in the house.

These experiences and my ever-expanding collection of ghost stories inevitably spurred me to research theories of what is known as a "ghost." If you've watched any of the numerous paranormal TV shows from the past two decades, you've probably found that there is an orthodoxy involving ghosts: They are spirits, entities, or demons that have materialized. You can discern their presence or contact them via mediums, psychics, ghost boxes, EMF meters, REM pods, etc. 

Many ghost hunters say that they want to prove that ghosts are real. I don't. Nor do I care about the theories of what ghosts are. To me, the hundreds of stories from witnesses is enough proof that ghosts are "real" in some way.

In his 2012 book Ghosts: A Natural History: 500 Years of Searching for Proof , Roger Clarke gives a well-researched history of ghost hunting. "Written as grippingly as the best ghost fiction, A Natural History of Ghosts takes us on an unforgettable hunt through the most haunted places of the last five hundred years and our longing to believe."--NY Times Book Review.

This excerpt from my Goodreads review sums up why I like Clarke's approach so much:  

"Clarke covers it all, from poltergeists to séances to ESP to ghost hunters--and more. He examines the hoaxes as well as the unexplained. My personal favorite was the story of a cursed German WW I U-boat--which Clarke calls 'a mobile haunted house.' I was fascinated by the tracing of the story upon which Henry James based 'The Turn of the Screw,' my favorite literary ghost story.

There are quite a few memorable quotes, but the one I like best is by Harry Price, the first ghost hunter: 'People don't want the de-bunk, they want the bunk.' Alas, one need look no further for proof of this statement than the current spate of paranormal TV shows, such as the laughable 'Alaska Monsters'. At least the gullible viewers of these shows are not as dangerous as the 18th century 'flash mobs' of thousands that showed up, ready for action against the alleged ghost--even if it meant tearing down the allegedly haunted house. Now that's scary." 

* * *The Chauncey Griggs House on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, based on the many stories told about it, the most haunted house in Minnesota. * * *

So what can I generalize about ghosts from personal experience and the stories I've collected? Ghosts do not perform on cue. The most commonly reported experiences are physical manifestations, like hearing footsteps or doors closing, or seeing lights go off or on, or having things move. Very few people report seeing full apparitions. Rarer yet are stories about witnessing past incidents or events, such as seeing a scene from a long-ago battle. Many stories concern single incidents, although some witnesses describe hauntings that last for months or years. Ghostly activity can happen over very long periods of time, and incidents are usually few and far between. Activity often fades as the years pass. Ghosts can be hostile or protective, interactive or passive. They can haunt houses, woods, apartments, battleships, skyscrapers, whatever. And yes, they can sometimes be busted (more on this in a future post). 

Have you witnessed an explainable event? Many people do--for example, a door opening and closing when no one else is home. Some decide it's paranormal; others conclude it's an unsolvable mystery. Whatever they believe, or don't believe, these stories about uncanny events are endlessly fascinating.

             Harry Price, the first ghost hunter. "People don't want the de-bunk, they want the bunk."