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.

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 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.

More Balls O' Fire

 The appearance of glowing orbs or balls of fire, as in the Methodist church parsonage, are a common story among ghost hunters. A Google search will show dozens of photos and videos of orbs in allegedly haunted locations.

                 A photo of allegedly ghostly orbs from a debunker website, "American Hauntings"

I heard a story about phenomena similar to the fireballs in the parsonage from Gretchen Quie, wife of Minnesota governor Al Quie (1979-83). She said that in the upper hallway of her grandparents' Minnesota farmhouse, incandescent balls of fire would briefly appear, bounce off the walls, and then vanish. Her description of their size and the eerie glow they emanated resembled the minister's description--except the former made no noise. Mrs. Quie said that the family had no explanation for the orbs, but since they appeared infrequently and didn't disturb anyone, they were mostly a curiosity. 

Another orb-related story, a more sinister one, came from a young Twin Cities journalist. Between jobs one summer he was staying with a friend, sleeping in the attic room of a early 1900's foursquare in South Minneapolis. He slept in the sparsely furnished room only a few nights, but it was a memorable sojourn.

The first night, as he lay on the mattress on the floor in the sweltering heat, a glowing sphere about the size of a baseball suddenly appeared overhead. He watched it curiously as it circled around the room, vanishing after about a minute. The next night he saw it again, an encore performance he would have preferred to skip. The third night he awoke in the middle of the night to see a shadowy figure standing in the corner of the dimly lit room. Afraid to move or speak, the young man lay there in the darkness, watching the motionless figure. After a few moments, the form disappeared.

The journalist left his friend's house the next morning, deciding that it was time to find a place to sleep minus eerie disturbances.

As I was writing up these stories about orbs, it triggered a memory of an experience I had on a trip to Germany in the 1960s. My dad, my cousin George (who was stationed at an Army base in Germany at the time), and I were touring historical sites along the Rhine. 

One night we stayed at a B&B in an 18th-century house. Mine was a small basement room with a narrow bed set between an ancient armoire and a windowless wall.

                               An early 18th century house similar to the place where we stayed.

I climbed into bed, turned off the light via the pull chain over the bed, pulled up the duvet, and closed my eyes. I was dozing off when something prompted me to open my eyes. There, overhead, was a swarm of little glowing orbs, swirling around in a cloud over the bed. I blinked, wondering if I was seeing things. At first I thought they might be bugs, but as I watched the glowing orbs, I grew increasingly alarmed. I'd never seen anything like this weird swarm of lights. What in the world were they? 

Panicky, I sat up in bed, my hand searching in the darkness for the pull chain. It was probably only a few seconds, but it felt much longer before I found the chain and yanked on it. The "bugs" vanished. Looking around the room with the light on, I couldn't find anything that might be the source of the orbs. Fearing that they might return if I turned off the light, I slept with it on.

The next morning I said nothing to Dad and George about the orbs. In fact, I never told this story to anyone until now.

"Enter Ghost" Reprint from Wedge newspaper, Minneapolis, October 1978

                                                            ENTER GHOST

Horatio: Look, my lord, it comes! 

Hamlet: Angels and ministers of grace defend us!/ Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd,/ Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, /Thou com'st in such a questionable shape/ That I will speak to thee. 

A 19th Century Hamlet, Henry Irving, confronts the Ghost at London's Lyceum Theatre in 1874.
 

Few of  us have, like Hamlet, met an apparition of our dead father at midnight and discussed family problems with it. We assume, quite understandably, that ultimately the cause of so-called "ghostly" shenanigans can be found in the physical world. But many people--more than most realize--have experienced things as strange, and perhaps stranger than Hamlet did, virtually right in your own back yard. The Lowry Hill area on both sides of Hennepin seems to be a fertile area for ghostly occurrences. The common explanation for the higher proportion of psychic phenomena reported here is that our neighborhood consists almost exclusively of turn-of-the-century houses which have housed several generations. Why this fact should be significant is a matter of continuing debate among people who are concerned with such things.

Curiously enough, the people whom I interviewed in the Wedge became interested in the theories about ghosts only after some thing very peculiar occurred in their house or apartment. For example, when Peter and Mark (all the names here are fictitious) moved into the ground floor of a big old house on Colfax last year, they were pleased with their new quarters. Peter's work kept him out past midnight most of the time. When he returned home, Mark would already be asleep.This routine went on for over a month, when one night Peter came home to find the light on in Mark's room. This seemed odd, so Peter peeked in to see what was going on. Mark was very puzzled and a little upset. He was a big man, a no-nonsense carpenter who had never had an experience like the one that had happened that night: He was sound asleep when all of a sudden he was awakened by an overwhelming sensation that someone was standing at the foot of his bed. He quickly turned on the light, but there was nothing to see. The incident was inexplicable to him, and he didn't feel very comfortable afterwards. So he decided to sleep with the light on that night. The next night he slept through without disturbance.

Peter noticed. . .along with a couple other close friends. . .that sometimes as they passed through the hall, at the entrance to Mark's room they'd feel a "chill" like the sense of an alien presence. Several weeks after Mark's first midnight wake-up Peter arrived home to find the lights on again in Mark's room while Mark slept. This happened a couple of other times while they lived there, although nothing spectacular ever happened. Eventually they moved out, and at the time Mark suggested that the nocturnal disturbances were partly responsible for his decision to leave.

Further down the street is another late nineteenth century house where the inhabitants have also had some unusual experiences. One night when I was visiting there, Tom complained that he was having trouble laying a floor in the front room. He would carefully line up the parquet block as he knelt in the doorway. Twice, he had turned away for an instant, only to find the blocks scattered helter-skelter when he turned back to work. Other peculiar things have happened to him, too. One day he saw a boy pulling a wagon down the upstairs hallway. . .a child who seemed inexplicably to vanish. Another time a faint glow emanated from part of a back room, a glow that Tom tried in vain to find a source for. These experiences are so strange that Tom, quite naturally, does not fully trust his recollection of them. Others in the house, however, have also reported uncanny events: the upstairs hall light comes on, unbidden, in the middle of the night sometimes. Also, a study lamp goes off and on at odd hours and there appears to be nothing wrong with the wiring.

A few blocks away on Bryant is an 1980's house where only one peculiar thing happens, and this happens over and over again. When they shut the door to one bedroom, it often opens as soon as they turn away. The latch and the hinges appear to work fine. The room used to belong to the son of the original owner, both now deceased.

Up the block is a house which the current residents have owned for two years. When Karen and Jim first moved in, even though they liked the house, they frequently got the feeling that the house wasn't completely theirs, as if someone else's presence sill pervaded certain rooms. One night a while back Karen and a friend came home and entered through the back door. The rest of the family was not at home, and the two women remained in the kitchen, occupying themselves with petty tasks. They dawdled there for some time, when the friend finally remarked, "Don't you feel like running through the house, looking under the beds?" After the friend broached the subject, they both admitted that they felt a presence in the rest of the house and just couldn't bear going into the living room. In a while this feeling passed and they felt they could proceed as usual.

Karen and Jim's daughter, who was three at the time they moved in, quickly acquired the unorthodox habit of leaving her room in the middle of the night to sleep in the hall. This practice has continued to the present day on the average of two or three times a week.

Recently, when Karen slept in this room, she was awakened by the disturbing impression of a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon delivered by a male voice like that of a sidewalk evangelist. A stranger experience yet is that of their son. Last year as he was coming out of his room, he saw a misty figure emerge from the bathroom, turn to look at him, and disappear into his sister's room. The apparition was that of a man, his mousy brown hair wet as though he had just washed it. Who the preacher and/or bather might be, they haven't yet discovered. Some time ago, though, as he was working the the yard, Jim was approached by a funny old man carrying a violin case. He told Jim that he had lived in an upper bedroom (indicating the son's bedroom) for 25 years and he had recently been having recurrent dreams about the house. At least the family knows they aren't alone in having their sleep disturbed by something connected with the house.

All of the people I've mentioned so far have talked about feelings and impressions. But one couple on Bryant has had rather a different experience. Claire and Paul have lived in their house for nearly six years. During that time, some odd things have happened. One night, for example, they came home to find all the basement windows wide open, but most of these incidents could be explained without straining one's imagination. One night last spring, however, this was not the case. 

It was about ten at night and they were preparing to retire after a long day. Paul was already in bed and Claire was just climbing in--when, suddenly, the chest next to the bed began to shake violently. This large, heavy antique chest was not merely vibrating, but rocking rapidly from side to side. They were absolutely boggled by the chest's antics and began to look around the room for clues to its behavior. The light cords the window shade pulls, the drapes, the other furniture--seemed perfectly still. While they sat in bed staring at the chest, the foot of the bed began shaking, too. For the few seconds this went on, they huddled in bed, astonished and frightened at the same time. Then all movement ceased. For the next hour they checked out every possibility as to the cause of the disturbance. Was the chest off balance?. . .Had something fallen elsewhere?. . .An earthquake? etc. But they couldn't come up with an answer. Finally, they gave up and went to bed. Paul soon fell asleep, but Claire lay awake, plagued by a feeling that it was going to happen again. Sure enough, in another half hour or so, the chest started shaking again. Paul awakened and reached out toward the chest. As soon as his fingers touched it, the shaking stopped. They at once felt greatly relieved and spent the rest of the night undisturbed.

What possible explanations for these experiences can be proposed? The theory most frequently advanced, especially by those who haven't had such an experience, is that these weird events are products of the percipients' overactive imaginations or disturbed minds. Somehow, there must be a "rational" explanation; there must be some physical cause which, once discovered, will explain all. For those who find this scientific skepticism inadequate in terms of evidence, there are three possible approaches to take: First, that there is a spirit in all living things which is independent of the body and which lives on after physical death. Thus through seances people try to make contact with this spirit world. Over the centuries this has certainly been the most pervasive and simplest of explanations, although modern psychologists have attacked it. They suggest on the other hand that all living beings emit a psychic energy which can reappear in various ways, independent of space and time. Thus if someone dies in a disturbed form of mind, his agitated psychic force may appear after death in a place he feels comfortable. A third possible explanation is that "ghosts" are subjectively perceived in an extrasensory way and are essentially hallucinations emanating from "mid-level consciousness." Psychic phenomena are really part of the enormous power and faculty of the mind, the nature of which we have barely discerned.

I myself can hardly tell you what to think, let alone decide for myself. Last week I went to Kenwood to interview the owner of a house with a poltergeist, a prankster ghost. Before I left home my portable tape player recorder worked fine, but when I arrived at the other house the apparatus refused to work. After a number of futile attempts to get it going, the lady of the house said resignedly, "Well, I guess Betty doesn't want to be interviewed." I took down the story on paper, then rushed home to see if my record would work there. It did.

Do you have a ghost story to tell? At the suggestion of Ellen Steckert, director of the Institute for Minnesota Folklife, I am collecting stories of urban ghosts. If you or someone you know has such a story, I would be grateful if you would contact me about it. All information will be strictly confidential. If you can help, please call me at 377-XXXX. Many thanks!

NOTE: I have corrected a few misspellings, typos, and punctuation errors. See next post for comments about the article and the events that followed it.