Dear Readers,
There are many things I would like to share with you in this
short season of scary thoughts and imaginings, and I don’t want to leave out vital
details. For those reasons I am dividing this long piece into three parts. Each
one relates one or more true and sometimes creepy experiences of my family at
our one hundred twenty-year-old home at the top of a Barre City hill. I invite
you to read this first installment now and pick up the October 23rd and 30th
editions of The World to continue reading.
These true tales may be best enjoyed in a candle-lit room on a cold and
windy midnight.
Subtle Hauntings?
-installment one-
By G. E. Shuman
Many full moons, fallen leaves, and Halloween seasons ago my
family bought our old house on the hill from an elderly Barre couple who, at
the time, had lived in the house for over forty years. Their kids had grown,
and the house was too much work and just too much house for the couple. Those
are the reasons they gave for wanting to leave the place. I remember, while
discussing our deal on the house, the old man of the couple looking directly at
me and relating that they were tired, that the house had been on the market for
a year, (at a very good price I will add,) and that only four people had even
stopped to look at it, before our inquiry. There was some look of puzzled
disbelief if not desperation in those eyes.
Time is a strange thing, and it is funny, or not so funny,
how it passes, how changes all around you can occur with barely a notice or
warning. This is especially, I think, if you are surrounded by a place that
barely changes at all. We are now the’ elderly’ couple living in the house and
have just finished our own fortieth year here. As with the previous owners, our
children have grown, along with even most of our grandchildren. We have no
plans to leave the house, but plans can change; things can happen to convince
you to go. Given enough time they ultimately must do so, and then you will go.
A suitable time of year to talk about our spooky old house
on the hill seems to be when others are in the mood to hear such things. It is
October and night comes a bit earlier each day now, blanketing the fallen
leaves with ever-lengthening blackness. The winds are colder and stronger than
they were, especially during the night; gnarled ‘witch finger’ bare boned
branches of our large maple tree rub and creak and complain to the world. Jack-o-lanterns
and ghosts adorn the neighborhood, even up here on the hill.
So, in honor the old house and everyone who has grown up
here, or at least spent a night here, I will now relate some things that have
happened within these walls, over the many years of our occupancy.
Disclaimer: I personally do not believe in ghosts, ghouls,
or goblins. I do believe my own eyes and
ears and promise you that every single thing I will tell you here is absolutely
true.
-The Attic-
Our grown and oldest child, Chrissy, is, to this day, fairly
convinced that something besides humans and the occasional mouse lives in our
old house on the hill. I have never asked her directly, but I’m sure something
must have scared her horribly here when she was a young child. She recently
confided to me: “I really have heard and seen things there, Dad.”
For years Chrissy had one of the upstairs bedrooms as her
own and would tell you today that she had often heard footfalls, in the night, as
of something walking across the attic floor above her bed. Ours is a full
walk-up attic, with the usual dust, cobwebs, and creaking floors of such
places. The dampness and darkness of the attic is not inviting; tapping sounds have
been heard, and things have tended to fall to the floor unexpectedly up there. Not
from fear or dread, but rather just of no necessity, we rarely open the old door
and go up there, especially in the night.
Chrissy is a rational, reasonable, intelligent adult. Still,
I doubt that she would ever spend a night all alone in our old house. I know
that if she did, walking up those attic stairs would be out of the question for
her. This, perhaps, because of experiences that only she understands. Sometimes
there are just more reasons to stay away than to venture up into something of
the unknown.
There is, truly, nothing creepier than experiencing
something thought to be impossible or only of your imagination, and then having
that impossible thing firmly verified by another person. Imagining as a child
that someone was lurking under your bed could only be more terrifying upon
learning that someone actually was. Such is the case of our experience of ‘The
Little Girl on the Landing,’ which is part of the next installment of Subtle Hauntings,
to be shared in the October 23rd edition. See you there.
