Haunted

by Dorah L. Williams

  “Did you see that girl again, Rosa?” they would sometimes ask when they arrived home from school.

  She would usually admit that she had not seen her that day but occasionally she would relay her sightings to them, never wavering in the details she gave. Kammie and Matt thought it was a fun game to play, and Rosa enjoyed thinking they really believed what she claimed. After several weeks Rosa stopped talking about the girl, and the matter was all but forgotten.

  Shortly after Rosa ceased to mention the girl in the window, our family prepared to go away for a few days. Before we departed, I made sure all the lights were off and the doors securely locked and inadvertently left my purse on the oak cabinet in the foyer. Upon that cabinet was a large, Victorian-style oil lamp framed by two small family portraits. It was positioned directly opposite the front door. I went back in and picked up my purse, giving the hallway a glance as I headed out the front door, and made sure the foyer light was turned off before I locked up.

  When we returned, I unlocked the front door while Ted unloaded the suitcases from the car in the driveway. I immediately noticed the oil lamp as I walked into the house. The glass chimney that sat on the lamp’s base was now upside down and wobbling on its tip. I stared at it for a moment, unable to believe what I was seeing. I knew it had been properly positioned before we left. Kammie came up behind me and immediately noticed it too.

  “Why did you do that to the oil lamp?” she asked me.

  “I didn’t touch it,” I said, trying to sound calmer than I felt.

  “I don’t think you should leave it like that. It looks like it’s going to fall,” she replied before heading up to her bedroom.

  I picked up the delicate glass chimney and attached it properly to the base. When Ted came in with the suitcases, I told him how I had found it.

  “One of the kids must have done it,” he said, dismissing it with a logical but impossible explanation.

  “When?” I asked. “It wasn’t like that when we left, and no one else has been in the house.”

  He just shrugged his shoulders, and we said nothing more about it.

  4

  THE FLOATING WOMAN

  By the end of the first year the only major home improvement project that remained was the addition of an extra room onto the back of the house.

  We hired an architect to design some plans for the new room and spent a lot of time deciding how and when it would be built. Construction would begin in early spring and we decided, as well, to replace the old shed with a new one. We were very eager to get those projects underway, and Ted and I stayed up late one night discussing the plans, the cost, and other details. I found it difficult to get to sleep after our conversation and tossed and turned for what seemed like hours. Ted, as usual, fell into a deep sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. I lay in bed, facing the bedroom door that led out into the hallway, listening to the sound of his snoring.

  The hallway was lit by the collective glow of the night-lights from each of the children’s bedrooms. That light spilled into our room, making it easy to see, even in the middle of the night. After laying on my right side with my eyes closed, trying to get to sleep, I sat up slightly in order to turn over and face the other way. I opened my eyes, and froze. A dark figure was standing at the door, blocking the glow from the hallway. As my eyes began to focus, the figure before me grew clearer, and I realized it was a woman.

  I was terrified by the sudden appearance of that figure but I could not look away from it. I wanted to turn to Ted and shake him from his sleep, yet could not make myself move. The woman appeared to be extremely tall, and I wondered if she were floating several inches above the floor. That thought scared me even more, and though I desperately wanted to awaken Ted, I could not move a muscle.

  Her figure was very dark against the light, but I clearly could distinguish her clothing and hair. She was wearing a cape of some kind and was draped from head to toe. The idea came to me that she was dressed like a nurse from many years ago. I could not understand why, as her clothing was quite different from a present-day nurse’s uniform, yet the thought had been very clear. The headpiece hung like a veil behind her, and the long cloak covered her dress. Her hair was curled in tight, small ringlets and was clearly visible in front of the head piece. I could see it in astonishing detail; it was as though I could discern each strand of hair. Yet, though I could so easily make out her hair and clothing, I could not see her face. Instead I stared into a blank dark space, void of any features. Even in my shocked and frightened state, that seemed particularly bizarre.

  After several very long seconds, I was finally able to move and leaned over to where my husband was laying. I buried my face in his back and shook him until he awoke. As he had been sleeping deeply, it took him a few moments to become aware of how upset I was. When I looked towards the doorway where the figure had been floating, I saw it was gone. The light from the hallway now streamed in unobstructed. I jumped out of bed and hurried in to the children’s bedrooms to see if they were all right, and found them all sound asleep.

  When I returned to our bed, Ted tried to assure me that I must have been dreaming. There was clearly no one about, and it would have been impossible for anyone to enter the house without our dog barking protectively. The stairs were so creaky that you would have heard someone approaching long before you saw them. I knew all of that to be true, yet the woman had been there. And then she was gone..

  “Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?” Ted asked.

  “I haven’t even been to sleep yet,” I said.

  “There must be some explanation,” he mumbled through a yawn. “I don’t want to sleep on this side of the bed anymore,” I said irrationally. I could not explain why I thought that that particular side of the bed was now to be feared, but I would never sleep there again. That night Ted and I changed places, and I preferred to lay facing the window rather than the doorway.

  As I lay beside Ted, knowing that falling asleep would be next to impossible, I remembered Rosa’s frustration when she had told me about the girl waving to her from the window. She had known I did not believe her, and she had been confused by how the girl had appeared and then vanished. I now regretted my doubt and empathized with her feelings.

  The next day, I was frightened to be alone in the house. I sensed I was being watched and found myself constantly looking around to see if anyone else was there. I was so disturbed that I seriously thought we should consider moving. I recalled the speedy departure of most of the house’s former residents, and I could not help but wonder if they too had seen something similarly frightening. The sound of running footsteps on the stairs, formerly deemed harmless, now seemed to have an ominous quality.

  When everyone was home at the end of the day, I mentioned that I thought it might be a good idea to sell the house and move. The children, unaware of my fears, were very surprised because I had worked so hard on decorating the house and it was finally looking beautiful. They reminded me that the new addition was all planned and building would begin in the very near future and told me they loved living in the house and did not want to leave. I did not want them to be terrified by thinking that they lived in a “haunted house,” so could not tell them what I had seen.

  Ted understood how upset I was. He told me we would do whatever I thought was best, but I could tell that he did not want to move either. I knew it was hard for him to accept what I claimed to have seen. He knew I was not lying but insisted there had to be some logical explanation for it; he certainly was not about to believe we shared our home with a ghost.

  I felt as if there was really no one I could talk to about the sighting, and I found myself trying to rationalize it. Maybe it had been only a dream. Yet I knew I had been wide awake at the time. Perhaps I had only imagined it. But the vision had been too detailed and had stayed before me too long for that. I tried to find any explanation to convince myself that it had not really happened. I did not want to believe we shared our home with a ghost, either.r />
  A few nights later, I was again lying in bed unable to sleep, with my eyes tightly closed. Suddenly I became strongly aware that I was about to be touched. I could sense someone leaning over me as if about to pat my hand in comfort. I opened my eyes fearfully as I was certain someone was standing right beside me. When I looked, no one was there. I sighed with relief, but the feeling of being watched persisted. When I awoke the next day, however, I felt very peaceful and no longer felt an urgent need to move from the house. I thought that whatever I had seen the other night was now gone, and the presence I had felt leaning over me seemed to have left as well.

  The children were relieved when I told them that I did not think we should sell the house after all, and life carried on. We continued to plan for the new addition to the house, and, one night, invited our neighbour Donelle over for dinner. The conversation around the table soon turned to the time when she had been a young girl and friends with the children who had once lived at our address. I asked Donelle about the Ford family, who had lived in the house from 1919 until 1927, even though the clothing of the woman I had seen seemed to be from an era quite a bit earlier than that.

  “Was Mrs. Ford a nurse, by any chance?” I asked her casually.

  “She may well have been before she got married, but I can’t recall for certain,” Donelle mused. “They were a very ‘medical’ family, with lots of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and the like, I do remember that.”

  Everyone ate in silence for a while and then Donelle again spoke.

  “The thing I remember the most about Mrs. Ford, though, was that she was an unusually tall woman,” she said. “She was the tallest woman I have ever seen in my life!”

  I almost choked on my food before I glanced across the table at Ted. The apparition I had seen in our bedroom doorway had been strikingly tall. Could it have been Mrs. Ford? Without seeing a picture of her, I could not be sure. But since the apparition had had no face, even a photograph could not have answered that question. I wondered if I would ever solve the mystery of who she was and why she had been there.

  5

  BURIED TREASURES

  Our household was soon preparing for the construction of the family room and shed in the backyard. We were all looking forward to having extra living space, and the new outbuilding would definitely improve the appearance of the property. When we had first tallied the cost of all that work, we had mulled over the idea of closing in the front porch instead of building a room at the back of the house. The porch was quite large and would have made a nice sun room for a lot less money than the addition we were considering.

  Ted had taken measurements and priced the material necessary to transform the porch into a large glassed-in sitting area. He had crouched down on the front walkway beside the stairs and shone a flashlight beam through the lattice to get a good view of the space underneath.

  “What did you find under there?” I asked him when he came back into the house.

  “Just some crushed rubble that must have been the last set of stairs. I guess they just demolished them and shoved them under the porch,” he replied.

  “Were there any old toys or anything like that?” Kammie asked her father.

  “No. Nothing but big pieces of broken cement and lots of dirt,” he answered.

  We finally decided to go with the original plan of adding an extra room at the back of the house and to leave the porch as it was.

  The shed was built first, and it seemed to go up quickly. Our contractor was ahead of schedule, and we were pleased with how well everything was coming along. Construction of the new room began, and one of the work crew spent the first few days digging deep holes in the ground for the footings. Despite the difficulty of the task, he eventually managed to dig down several feet into the hard, rocky earth. The children enjoyed watching the men working and kept an eye on their progress. Kammie especially seemed to marvel at how deeply the holes were dug and shyly stood at the corner of the yard to see what the shovels of dirt revealed.

  The next afternoon I heard Kammie call out “Mommy!” from the backyard.

  I rushed out and found my daughter standing by one of the holes, clasping something in her small hands.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Look what Stuart gave me,” Kammie said, smiling at the builder with gratitude.

  “What is it?” I asked again.

  “It’s a really old glass jar,” Kammie said. “Can we clean it?”

  I nodded. We walked over to the garden hose spigot, and I sprayed off most of the grime. Then we took it into the kitchen and held the muddy jar under hot running water. Eventually the final layers of dirt dissolved, and we saw it was a small white jar. It was made of thick glass and measured about two inches high by two inches wide. It appeared to have once contained cream or a cosmetic. It was fairly ornate, with delicately engraved columns, in contrast to the plain cream jars of today.

  “Where did Stuart get this?” I asked my daughter.

  “He found it when he was digging the hole deeper. He said I could have it!”

  “I wonder how old that is,” I murmured to myself as Kammie continued to polish the glass.

  “Isn’t it pretty?” she asked, admiring it with great delight. “Where should I put it?”

  I wondered how the jar had come to be buried so deep in our backyard and who had originally owned it. Perhaps another little girl had been given that fancy jar by her mother or grandmother once the product had been used and had treasured it, many years before.

  “Why don’t you put it in your room?” I suggested to Kammie as I started to prepare dinner.

  When Ted came home that evening Kammie could not wait to show him what had been discovered in the footing hole. He looked at it for a minute, smiled at her, and told her she was very lucky to have found such a nice jar.

  “Well, Stuart found it,” Kammie corrected him. “But he said it’s mine now, and I can keep it.” She carefully carried the antique glassware back up to her bedroom.

  When I tucked her in that night before going to bed, I smiled at the sight of her happily snuggled up to the little jar lying on the pillow beside her. She must have fallen asleep while admiring it. I placed it on her dresser and kissed her good-night.

  After school the next day Kammie raced home to see if Stuart had found any other treasures for her from deep within the ground. She was not disappointed. Waiting for her by the pile of dug-up dirt was an antique ink-well. Stuart had found it at the very bottom of the same footing hole. It was slightly smaller in size than the glass jar, and was made from clay glazed a brownish-yellow. It was in very good condition. That artifact, which appeared to be quite old, excited Kammie even more than the glass jar had, and she spent a long time cleaning it. For a quill she used an old feather she had found, that I had cleaned for her, and stuck it into the top of her newest find. The glass jar and clay ink-well were then placed side by side on her window sill, and everyone who visited that spring was invited to view her antique items.

  After those finds, Kammie began digging in the flower beds and other parts of the yard, searching for other things of value. She concentrated her digging in an old garden plot, now located beside the wall of the new addition. When I asked her about that activity, she explained that she had a feeling there was some kind of treasure buried in the yard and she wanted to find it.

  Kammie’s digging unearthed a large rock, close to where Stuart had found the other items, which appeared to have been splashed with gold paint. She told me about her discovery several times during the day, but I was working away at wallpapering and did not go out to see what she had found. It was not until after dinner that evening that Kammie asked me to take a look at the rock to see if I thought it really was gold she had discovered.

  Ted and I looked at each other and smiled at our daughter’s naive enthusiasm, but I followed her into the backyard to examine her find. She could barely lift the heavy rock and struggled to pick it up to be inspected. As I bent down to take
it from her small hands, I caught my breath. The rock was almost completely covered with quartz and was streaked throughout with a shiny gold colour. Kammie had spent a lot of time spraying off the dirt with the garden hose, and the rock now sparkled in the late day sun. I called Ted to come out and look at it, not quite knowing what it was that Kammie had found. Maybe it really was gold.

  Ted’s reaction was similar to mine. He casually walked out of the house, thinking I was just humouring our daughter with feigned interest. When Kammie passed the rock to him, the smile faded from his face and his jaw dropped a bit. He stared at it and then at us, speechlessly.

  “Where did you find this?” he finally asked Kammie.

  “Over there,” she said, pointing to the overgrown spot that had once been a garden.

  “When?” he said.

  “After Stuart left today. I was digging in the old garden looking for something,” Kammie explained.

  “What do you think?” I asked Ted. “Could it really be gold?”

  “It sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” he said. We decided to contact a friend of Ted’s who worked as a geologist.

  She would know what it was that Kammie had found. When Ted telephoned her, she asked him to bring the sample over to her house so that she could have a look at it. While he and Kammie drove over to see her, I stayed at home with Rosa and Matt.

  It turned out to be only pyrite, better known as “Fool’s Gold,” but Ted learned some interesting history about the town, and our property in particular, that evening. His friend told him that well over a hundred years ago, before there was any kind of town in our area, there had been a gold-rush of sorts. A river had once run right through our neighbourhood, and it was in that body of water that people thought they were discovering gold. It caused quite a commotion for a short period of time until everyone finally realized it was not gold at all but pyrite.