After several weeks, I received the beautiful portrait in the mail. From the style of clothing and hair, it appeared to have been taken well over a hundred years ago, and I had bought an antique-style frame in which to hang it.
The day it arrived, I had to take Rosa to a doctor’s appointment and had only a few minutes to spare before we had to leave the house. As the frame was waiting in our bedroom, I decided to place the picture in it to see how it would look. Once I had admired it for a moment, I was eager to see it hanging on the wall. I thought it would only take a minute to do that, so while Rosa waited at the front door, I rushed to get the hammer, and the picture hanger and nail that I had bought with the frame. After determining the best spot to hang the portrait, I started to strike the small nail through the hanger and into the wall. In my haste, I dropped the hanger, and it, along with the nail, fell with a clatter onto the hard wooden floor in our bedroom.
I did not want us to be late for the appointment, so I impatiently got down on my hands and knees to retrieve the dropped items as quickly as possible. The picture hanger was on the floor directly below where I had been hammering, but the small nail was nowhere to be seen. In my frustration I thought to myself, “I need that nail,” as I searched all over the floor for it. It should have been near the hanger but it had completely disappeared.
Suddenly I heard the clink of something fairly heavy hitting the wooden floor directly beneath me. At first I could not understand what had caused the sound, because I knew nothing had dropped from my body. When I looked down at the floor, I saw a large and rusty nail. I stared at it in disbelief. Where on earth had it come from? It certainly had not been in any of my pockets. And I kept our home clean enough to have noticed a large nail like that lying in the middle of our bedroom floor.
I picked up the nail and tried to understand what had happened. The smaller one that I needed to hang the picture had fallen to the floor and completely vanished. While trying to locate it, I had concentrated on a “nail” and one had materialized right beneath me. I thought that was the most bizarre event that had happened in the house, because it had produced a tangible item I could hold in my hand. Obviously it was not just a product of my imagination, and yet there was no plausible explanation for its appearance.
The nail was much bigger than the one that I had lost; I thought I could not possibly use it to hang the portrait. Still, someone or something had known I was looking for a nail and had made one appear. I put it away in Ted’s tool box until I could show it to him. Even he would not be able to explain the incident away with logic, and it was concrete proof that something extraordinary had happened even though he had not been there to witness it for himself.
When Rosa and I arrived home after her doctor’s appointment, Ted was already there. I quickly got the nail for him to examine.
“What are you doing with this?” he said.
“How old do you think it is?” I asked, before telling him my story.
“I’m not sure, but it’s pretty rusted. They used nails about this size for the footings, I think, when they were building the addition. Maybe it came from there. Where did you find it?” he asked.
I proceeded to tell Ted every detail of what had happened that morning. When I described the sound I had heard beneath me and how I had looked down to find the nail lying on the floor, Ted looked at me strangely and then started to laugh. That was not the reaction I had expected.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded.
“Well, if this is something the ‘ghosts’ did, they must really be trying to drive you crazy,” he said, laughing again.
“What do you mean? They were trying to help me,” I insisted. “They knew I needed a nail and they gave me one.”
“If the picture hook nail really did disappear and this was given to you to replace it, don’t you think that’s funny? You don’t help someone by taking away the nail they need and replacing it with a huge one like this that you can’t even use for hanging a picture,” Ted said.
I had not thought of it that way at all. I had believed that somehow someone had known I was in need of a nail and had made one materialize to help me. But why had the small nail disappeared in the first place? Maybe Ted was right. Maybe it had not been intended to help me, especially if it was the same kind of nail that had been used in the building of the new room that had caused us so much disturbance.
Ted maintained that it was a joke on me that such a huge nail had appeared when I was trying to hang our portrait. Several months later, though, we heard a loud crash and hurried into our room to find that the large portrait had fallen onto the floor. The nail I had used to hang the heavy frame was not strong enough and had dislodged from the wall. Why the fragile glass covering the portrait did not break upon impact was a mystery to us, but when I picked up the frame, I realized that it never would have fallen if I had used a larger nail. Perhaps the one that had materialized beneath me that day had been meant to help me after all.
Although nothing unusual had occurred in our home for many months, I somehow sensed that the appearance of that large, rusty nail was the beginning of the end of the quiet period we had enjoyed. Thinking back, I realized that all the nightly disturbances we had experienced occurred within a ten-minute window of time, between 3:00 a.m. and 3:10 a.m. What better way to get our attention than by constantly awakening us in the middle of the night? We had been disturbed by smoke detectors, footsteps, strange appearances, and the melodies of the glass globes. It seemed that interrupting our sleep had been the main objective of those incidences.
It did not make sense to me that there should be a long period when nothing unusual occurred, followed by a renewal of such activity. But whether the appearance of the nail had been an isolated occurrence or if things were going to begin anew would soon become clear.
One evening, shortly after I had found the nail, I lit a tea candle in a decorative glass holder. The holder sat upon a small table beside an antique rocking chair in the living room, and the flicker of the candle light etched the image of the decorative glass against the nearby corner walls. We all thought the effect was pretty, especially Rosa, who delighted in watching it. The candle was small, and if left to burn, would have lasted only a short period of time. About an hour after lighting it and several hours before bed time, I blew out the flame. As a further precaution, I glanced into the holder before I went upstairs that night to ensure the candle had been completely extinguished.
Late the next morning I folded laundry in the living room, occasionally glancing at the television, while Rosa finger-painted a colourful creation in the family room. When lunch time approached, I saw Kammie and Matt racing up to the front porch for their break from school. I picked up the last pair of socks, turned off the television, and went to the front door to greet them. Matt was very excited because he had brought home a Magic-Eye three-dimensional book from the library and was eager to show it to me.
As I carried a platter of sandwiches from the kitchen to the dining room table, a bright light in the far corner of the living room caught my eye and I turned towards it. The candle holder was glowing brilliantly, and its images were dancing around the walls. All three children were in the family room, and Kammie and Matt had not been in the living room since they had come home for lunch. None of them would have lighted that candle anyway; they all knew they were not allowed to play with matches, which were kept in a high cupboard out of reach.
I stood amid the piles of recently folded laundry and watched as the candle’s flame jumped about erratically inside its glass container. I knew the candle had not been burning since the evening before. Not only was it impossible for the small tea candle to have blazed for that long, but it had not been burning while I had folded clothes that morning only a few feet away. The fact that the candle had seemed to ignite by itself was disturbing enough, but the intensity of the flame it produced was really alarming. I blew out the candle, carried the holder into the kitchen, and doused the candle’s waxy remai
ns in a cup of cold water to make certain it was no longer flammable. Then I threw it away.
Kammie was with the dog out in the backyard and I was at the refrigerator getting some milk when I heard Matt call for me from the dining room. “Just a minute,” I answered, and poured milk into three small glasses.
Again I heard him call, this time a bit more urgently. I walked to the dining room doorway and waited to hear what he wanted, but he did not look up from his Magic-Eye book.
“What did you want?” I asked.
“I didn’t want anything,” he said.
“You just called me twice, when I was in the kitchen,” I reminded him.
Matt slowly shook his head and looked sincerely puzzled.
“I heard you call Mommy too. It was your voice,” said Rosa, coming into the dining room.
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Matt, going back to his book.
Rosa and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders. We had both heard a little boy call for his mother, and we had both assumed it had been Matt in the next room. No windows were open to let in a voice from outside, and it had definitely seemed to come from the dining room where my son was sitting. When Kammie came back into the house, I asked her if she had been the one who had called me, but she shook her head. And, in answer to my next question, she informed me that she had not heard anyone calling for their mother. So, as Matt insisted that he had not spoken, we dropped the matter and went on with our lunch.
While we ate, Matt peeked at his book, trying to make the hidden pictures in it appear to him in three dimensions. He was growing frustrated because he could not quite figure out how to make it work. He was so engrossed in the book that he accidentally knocked his glass of milk off of the table and onto his lap. I took the book away, mopped up the mess on the floor, and told him to go upstairs and quickly change into clean clothes. As Kammie was already finished with her lunch, she went upstairs along with Matt to brush her teeth and get ready to return to school for the afternoon.
Rosa was busy colouring a picture in the living room, seated at a little table-and-chair set just inside the opened doors that led in from the foyer. I was putting the lunch dishes into the kitchen sink when I heard a loud commotion on the stairs. Glancing down the hallway that ran from the kitchen to the foyer, I saw a small blond-haired boy dressed in gray leap off of the stairway, run across the foyer floor, and then rush into the living room. Piper, asleep in the kitchen, bolted up at the loud noise and dashed excitedly towards the child, wanting to play with him. I impatiently hurried down the hall because there was no doubt in my mind that Matt had just raced into the living room when he was supposed to be getting changed for school. I was also forever warning them not to run on the stairs.
Rosa, who was still colouring, looked up in surprise when I hurried into the room.
“Where did Matt go?” I asked her, quickly looking around the living room.
“He isn’t in here,” she said.
“Rosa,” I replied, “I saw him run in here two seconds ago. We don’t have time for games; the kids are going to be late for school. Where did he go?”
Piper was now sniffing around the room and whining, as if she were still looking for the boy, too.
“Just you came in, Mommy,” Rosa said, looking at me with confusion.
It had only taken a few seconds for me to reach the living room doorway, but by the time I got into the room, the child had completely vanished. There was no way he could have left the living room without my seeing him.
“Matt!” I called out impatiently. “Where are you?”
I heard a small voice answer me from upstairs in Matt’s bedroom.
“I’m up here,” he said.
When I looked at Rosa in surprise, she smiled at me and nodded her head in an “I told you so” sort of way.
“Are you dressed yet?” I called, knowing he could not possibly have finished changing his clothes if he really had just run across the foyer.
“Yes,” he called. “And I’ve brushed my teeth too.”
Kammie was a few inches taller than Matt. Her hair was a bit darker and quite long, and she had been wearing a red outfit that day. Still I reasoned that, since there were only the four of us in the house, it must have been Kammie I had seen instead of Matt.
“Was it Kammie who came in here just before me?” I asked Rosa. She shook her head and continued to colour her picture, unaware of my bewilderment. Given the speed at which that child had rushed through the doorway, he would have run right into Rosa’s chair and table, and yet she had been oblivious to anyone except me entering the room.
“Kammie?” I called. “I’m up in the bathroom brushing my teeth,” my oldest daughter called down from the second floor. Matt came down the stairs at a safe pace, dressed in jeans and a green sweater, and started to put on his boots.
“Did you want me?” he asked.
“No, I just didn’t know where you were,” I said, trying to make sense out of what had just happened so I could convince myself I was not losing my mind.
“I went up to get changed like you told me to,” he said, petting Piper who was now nuzzling up against him.
“I know. You’re a good boy.” I forced myself to smile but noticed my hands were shaking as I opened up the front door. When Kammie came down the stairs, they both headed back to school.
I walked into the kitchen and picked up the phone, feeling the need to talk to another adult about what had just happened. I called Ted on his phone cellular and caught him as he sat in a lineup at a drive-through restaurant. He was having lunch on the road as his out-of-town meeting with a client had run longer than expected.
I told Ted about seeing the young boy run across the foyer.
“Do you want me to come home?” he asked, thinking I was frightened.
“No, I’m okay,” I answered, and was surprised to find that I actually was.
The fact that the presence was that of a small boy made that sighting different. It made me feel more sad than frightened that this child, who was perhaps even younger than Matt, was a presence in our home. The energy and rambunctious nature the young boy had manifested were just like those of any other youngster. I found nothing terrifying or threatening about him; he was apparently only the spirit of a child who was now no longer alive.
Sighting the boy was also much less scary, not only because it had taken place in daylight, but because he had not attempted to communicate or interact with anyone in the house. Matt and Kammie had not been aware of him on the second floor where I assumed he must have been before running down the stairway. And obviously Rosa had not seen him enter the living room. He had not seemed to notice that the dog and I were right behind him after he ran through the foyer, but both Piper and I had been very aware of his presence.
After the children were tucked into their beds that night, I turned on the lullaby tape I played for them at bed time. They fell asleep every evening to the soft music coming from the cassette player in the hallway. We all said our goodnights, and I was headed back down the stairs when the machine suddenly clicked off. The lullaby tape signified the end of play and the beginning of sleep time, so I thought perhaps Kammie was playfully showing me that she did not yet want to go to bed. I was a bit surprised, though, that she had been able to press the stiff button on the fairly old cassette player firmly enough to stop the tape.
“That’s not funny,” I said as I turned to head back upstairs. I fully expected to see Kammie smiling impishly beside the machine, but she was still snuggled in her bed where I had left her only moments before. There was no way she could have got back into bed that quickly without my seeing or hearing her.
“Who turned this off?” I asked, after looking at the cassette player. The play button had disengaged when the stop button had been pushed down.
All three children peered out of their beds at me in the hallway and shrugged.
“I didn’t,” they all said.
The cassette player had a
lways worked reliably. I turned the tape on again and listened to the music play for several seconds. After convincing myself that I had put the tape in incorrectly or had not pushed the start button hard enough the last time, I started back downstairs, leaving the music behind me.
As I reached the foyer at the bottom of the stairs, I heard another loud click and the music again stopped playing. I raced up the stairs and found the hallway empty but the machine had been turned off once more. The children all looked at me in wonderment, and I hid my uneasy feeling so they would not be frightened. Twice more I left the cassette playing, and both times the machine clicked off as soon as I was halfway down the stairs.
“Why is it doing that?” Kammie asked.
“Maybe it doesn’t want it to be bed time,” Matt laughed. He had been jokingly referring to the machine, but when I heard that innocent remark, I felt goose bumps rise all over my body and I shuddered slightly. I thought of the child I had seen earlier in the day. That was just the sort of thing a rambunctious little boy might do to try to delay going to bed.
I rewound the tape to the beginning of the lullaby and said in a soft but firm voice, “That’s enough, now.” The cassette player worked perfectly after that.
That night, however, for the first time in a long while, we were jarred awake at three o’clock in the morning by a smoke detector sounding its alarm. Both Ted and I were more tired than frightened, and more frustrated than angry. Yet the jolt it gave us was still upsetting.
The next morning, after everyone else had left for the day, Rosa and I finished up our breakfast in the new family room. With its large windows and southern exposure, that room was the brightest in the house, and we spent a lot of time there. I would often put a CD on, and Rosa would dance around the room, song after song.
As I washed up the breakfast dishes in the adjacent kitchen, Rosa asked if I would put on the soundtrack from the movie Michael. We had recently watched that film, which was about an angel. She loved to dance to those songs, and when her favourite, “Spirit in the Sky,” came on, I went into the family room and danced with her. We laughed and spun each other around. When the song was over, Rosa asked if we could dance to it once more before we ran an errand and the other children came home for lunch. I programmed the CD to play the eleventh song, “Spirit in the Sky,” and again we laughed and danced along with the music.
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