Upon our return two weeks later, I asked Matt to put the dog into the yard after the long car ride. When he and Piper had reached the family room, I heard him call for me.
“What is it?” I asked him from the foyer where I had dropped some of our bags from the car.
“Come and see all the flowers!” he said.
I walked into the family room and joined Matt at the window.
The rose bush was once again covered in buds, at least as many as I had pruned before we left. It was a gorgeous sight. Where the bush had come from and how it was able to produce so many lovely roses in such a short amount of time was a mystery to us, but it was a beautiful addition to our garden.
I tried to answer the many questions I had about the bush by researching roses on the Internet, but could not find the information I needed. I finally sent an e-mail message to one of the gardening sites, explaining how quickly the rose bush had grown and how it produced dozens of roses. I wanted to know how it was possible. I never received a response from the gardening site expert, who probably thought I had been joking. I came to accept and enjoy the roses as they were and put aside my questions.
Several days later Beverly called. She told me she had been talking with Dennise the night before. They had discussed our home and Dennise had repeated the information she had received regarding a message located on page five in the newspapers.
“She also asked how you liked your gift of flowers,” Beverly said.
“What?” I asked, surprised by the question.
“Dennise said that she had been told that the spirits had given you a gift of flowers, and she wondered how you liked them. I told her I didn’t understand what she meant, but she said that you would know. Do you?”
Dennise could not have known about the rose bush as I had not mentioned it to Beverly. Yet thanks to her message, I now understood that the roses were meant as a wonderful gift, and the bush became even more special to me.
“Yes, I love the flowers,” I said. I could only shake my head in bewilderment as I stared out the window into the garden.
The bush bloomed repeatedly throughout the summer, and I continued to clip the rose-covered stems. I was running out of places to hang the flowers to dry but did not want to see them wither after they had bloomed. The dried rose wreaths soon adorned every room, and their presence seemed to add a peacefulness to our home.
The winter that followed was very severe, and more than half a metre of snow covered the ground by late December. On Christmas Day we happened to look out at the bush. Although most of it was buried in a drift, one branch poked out of the snow bearing a freshly bloomed rose. We thought it was a remarkable Christmas gift.
A few weeks later, Ted and I were out shovelling snow from our front walkway. While Matt was at a friend’s house, Kammie was curled up on the love seat and Rosa sat on the floor beside the fireplace as they watched a movie together in the living room. A very heavy wood-framed mirror hung directly above the fireplace mantle, and I had loosely arrayed dried rose blossoms along the top of its frame. The mantle was decorated with family portraits in brass, wood, and ceramic frames and a large, fragile antique oil lamp.
While the girls were watching the movie, the nail came out from the picture hook on which the mirror had been suspended by a wire. When the mirror fell, landing a foot below on the mantle, it dislodged none of the fragile items around it, and it remained angled at the same thirty degrees from the wall at which it had been suspended on the wire.
If the force of the fall had not been enough to propel the mirror and most of the other fragile items off of the mantle to the floor below, then surely gravity should have caused the mirror to topple forward. And if that had occurred, Rosa, who was sitting directly beneath the mantle, would have been seriously hurt. The spray of shattered glass from the broken mirror, picture frames and the oil lamp would have harmed both of the girls.
Yet the mirror remained frozen at that impossible thirty degree angle on the mantle and not a single petal of the dried rose blossoms atop its wooden frame had stirred when Ted and I came into the house a few minutes later. The girls met us at the door and excitedly told us what had happened. When I understood what they were saying and looked into the living room to see the huge mirror on the mantle, I raced over, thinking it was about to fall. It remained suspended until I reached my hands up to grab it. Then, as I was about to touch it, all of the dried rose blossoms fell from the top of its frame and it started to fall forward. I caught its sides in my hands, but Ted had to lift its heavy weight down from the mantle.
He leaned the mirror against the wall and inspected it while I gathered up the rose petals scattered all over the mantle and floor and listened to the girls talk about what had happened when it mirror had fallen.
“I don’t know how the things on the fireplace didn’t get knocked over when the mirror fell, especially that big lamp,” Kammie said, and Rosa nodded in agreement.
“I thought that mirror was going to fall on my head!” Rosa said. “But it just stayed there until you came in.”
Ted immediately installed a new and more secure picture hook into the wall above the mantle and was readying to hang the mirror once again over the fireplace. I asked him to wait until I had given it a good dusting. I figured that would be a good time to clean the hard to reach mirror, and went into the kitchen to get the glass cleaner and a cloth. Just as I was about to begin spraying the glass, I noticed some marks near the top of the mirror. Two tiny hand prints, the same size as the little ones we had seen on the bathroom mirror, could be seen. I wondered if I was only imagining them due to the stress I felt over my daughters’ close call, but Ted and the girls could also see them.
Kammie and Rosa told me that it had looked as if someone were holding the mirror in place after it fell from the wall. With what appeared to be a toddler’s hand prints on the glass of the mirror, I wondered if that had been exactly what occurred. I shuddered to think of what might have happened to my girls. If someone’s hands had left those marks when holding back the mirror, I was very grateful for the intervention.
17
ANGELS IN THE DOORWAY
Matt's room was no longer the centre of any unusual activity. It had been some time since he had mentioned seeing or hearing anything at all out of the ordinary, and he had been able to sleep undisturbed. One night, however, he woke me when he called out in a loud, anxious voice.
When I hurried into his bedroom, I found him sitting up in bed with a worried expression on his face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“There was a boy in my room,” he said.
“What did he look like?” I asked, as I sat down on his bed. I wondered if it had been the same young blond boy I had seen some time ago, running down the stairs.
“He was bigger than me. He was maybe about twelve,” my son estimated.
“What was he doing?” I asked.
“He was just standing right there.” He pointed to a spot beside his bed, near the door leading up to the attic. “He was standing there watching me,” he added.
“What did he look like?” I asked again.
“He was sad,” Matt said quietly. “His clothes were like rags and really dirty, like he was poor or something. And his head looked funny.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he struggled to explain. “It was a funny shape, like it had been hurt. His hair was really short, even shorter than Daddy’s. I think it was blond, but it looked all muddy and dirty, like his clothes. And his skin was a funny colour, kind of blue and gray. He looked at me like he was so sad. Why would he be so sad?”
“I don’t know, honey,” I said as I held him close to me.
Matt seemed more concerned about the reason for the boy’s unhappiness than frightened or upset by the sighting.
“I’m okay, Mommy,” he assured me as he lay back down under his covers and prepared to go to sleep.
“Do you want to sleep in
our room tonight?” I offered.
“No, it’s all right,” he said.
I kissed my son goodnight and went back to our bedroom. I lay awake thinking about what Matt had seen and the possible reasons that the haunting was still occurring. We had put back everything from the backyard that had been found there. What else could we have done to stop that activity in our home?
It was dawn when I suddenly had a thought. I got up and went into Kammie’s room, but I could not see the object. Before I returned to my bed, I went to check on Matt to see if he were sleeping soundly. When I walked into his room, I saw what I had been seeking. Displayed on his dresser, not far from the attic door, was the large piece of pyrite Kammie had found in the backyard. We had placed all the items we had found back into the ground except that one. Because he enjoyed looking at the quartz and gold coloured minerals, Kammie had allowed Matt to keep the sample overnight in his room.
I wondered if there could be a connection between the sad-looking boy in the ragged clothes and the piece of pyrite. Perhaps he had been brought to that area by his father, who had been lured by the promise of gold that proved to be worthless. Could the boy have felt some connection to the piece of Fool’s Gold similar to the young girl’s seeming attachment to the ink-well, jar, and button?
That morning, as Ted and the children ate their breakfast, I carried the heavy piece of pyrite outside and laid it on top of the buried items beneath the family room addition. It would serve as a marker for those articles, but it was also very near to where it had been discovered. Kammie had agreed when I explained we had to return it too. Now everything was back in its proper place, and I hoped that would give the spirits and our family some peace.
Soon after Matt had seen the sad boy in his bedroom, Rosa began to talk about angels. I thought she might have overheard a discussion about what her brother had seen, and I was concerned that it may have frightened her. Some subtle questioning, however, revealed that Rosa had no idea that Matt had seen a spirit by his bed, nor did she seem afraid at all of the thought that angels, as she called them, were in our home. After seeing the hand prints on the bathroom and living room mirrors, she seemed to accept their reality all the more.
“I know what angels look like!” she exclaimed with great excitement to me one morning.
I smiled at her, but felt slightly uneasy.
“How do you know that Rosa?” I asked her.
“Because I saw two angels in my room last night!” she announced happily.
“Where were they?” I questioned.
“They were standing in the doorway waving to me!” she said.
“Oh, my,” I said and forced a smile. “And what did they look like?”
“One was a little boy and the other one was a bigger girl,” Rosa replied. “I think they were brother and sister because they looked like each other and both of them had the same kind of yellow hair.”
“Did they talk to you?” I asked.
“Nope. They just stood there and waved to me, and then they were gone. But I really did see them, and I know they were angels.”
“I think they were too. Did it surprise you to see them standing there?” I asked softly as I brushed her hair back from her eyes.
“Kind of,” Rosa said. “I was laying in my bed and looked out the door into the hall because I thought Matt and Kammie were coming to see me. When I saw who was standing there, I knew it wasn’t them.”
“Have you ever seen them before?” I asked.
“Nope. Just last night. But it was like they knew me, like they were my friends. They waved to me as if they really liked me,” she smiled at the memory.
“Well, who wouldn’t like a nice little girl like you?” I said as I cuddled her up in my arms. Rosa squealed with laughter and tried to wriggle out of my embrace.
She had not mentioned seeing the girl who waved to her from her bedroom window for a long time, but I knew she would remember her. Those two spirits must have been different entities or she would have recognized the girl and said so.
I thought of the times over the past few weeks when Rosa had insisted she had heard a little boy calling for his mother. She had entered kindergarten the previous autumn but was only in school during the mornings. In the afternoon, on several occasions, Rosa had asked me, “Didn’t you hear him call ‘Mommy!’? It was really loud. Like when Matt calls you if something is wrong and he needs you to help him.”
I did not hear the voice, and would explain that to Rosa. It did remind me though of the one time both Rosa and I had heard a child calling for his mother when Matt and Kammie had been home for lunch, and we had mistakenly thought it was Matt calling for me. Shortly after that, I had seen the little boy in gray running through the foyer.
After hearing Rosa’s description of the children who appeared at her door the previous night, I wondered if it was the same boy I had seen that day and the girl both Kammie and I had sighted on separate occasions. Perhaps it was the same little boy whom Rosa repeatedly heard calling for his mother. At that thought, I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness that any child should be lost from their parent.
Several days later Rosa called me into her bedroom to tell me she had heard a girl singing. She asked me if Kammie had come home early from school. I told her the children were not due home for another hour yet. I thought her hearing someone singing was only wishful thinking on her part. I knew how much she missed her brother and sister when they were not home to play with her.
As we were leaving her room to head downstairs, I noticed one of Rosa’s dresser drawers was opened. I sent her back to close it before she joined me. As I started down the stairway, Rosa called to me again. I went back up and found her standing in her doorway, pointing to the dresser.
“Mommy!” she gasped. “It closed by itself!”
I looked to where she was pointing and saw that the dresser drawer was now closed tightly. It took me a moment to realize, though, that Rosa had not had enough time to go back into her room, close the drawer, and run to the doorway to call me in the second or two that had elapsed.
I stared at the dresser in disbelief. Apparently it had closed by itself, and I was just as surprised as my daughter.
“Did you see it close?” I asked Rosa.
“No, but I heard it when I got to the door,” my little girl said.
The two of us stood in the doorway for another moment, staring at the dresser.
“I think that angel did it for me,” Rosa finally said.
“What angel?” I asked.
“The one I heard singing before, remember? I thought it was Kammie, but I guess it was an angel,” she said calmly.
I nodded at her and looked again at the dresser. The musical ballerina figurine that stood atop it suddenly turned on, and “The Nutcracker Suite” filled the room as the china dancer spun around and around in time with the music.
Rosa gasped audibly but seemed more delighted than scared by those bizarre events. Whereas Matt had been frightened by his first encounters with the spirits, Rosa appeared to feel fortunate to be having such extraordinary experiences. She seemed to accept the existence of the “angels” as a simple fact of life, and it never occurred to her that there was anything to fear from them.
18
POWER PROBLEMS
It was a very hot day near the end of summer, and the children and I were eating lunch in the family room. The stereo was on in one corner, while a fan cooled the air in the room. When I heard a knock at the front door, I left the children eating and went to answer it.
I opened the door to the electrical inspector, who introduced himself and explained the reason for his visit. Although the new room had been completed for quite some time, he had not yet inspected the site to check on the wiring’s safety.
Knowing that the electrical service in the new room worked perfectly well, I expected it to take only minutes for him to see that everything was fine. I took him directly to the basement so that he could see the new electrical pa
nel box. Everything seemed to be in order, and we went up to the family room so he could check the outlets. Since it was such a sunny day, no lights had been turned on, but I realized when we entered the room that both the fan and the stereo had stopped working.
“Who turned those off?” I asked the children.
“No one,” Kammie explained. “As soon as you went to get the door the fan and stereo just stopped working.”
I looked over at the inspector, but I did not know what to say. He could see the vacuum cleaner that I had used just that morning standing in the corner. It was obvious the fan had been on, as it was too hot to sit in a room with southern exposure on such a sunny day and not be uncomfortable without circulating the air. The power obviously had been working properly just prior to his inspection, but it now was off. He examined the various outlets in the room and went back downstairs to check the panel box again. No fuse had blown and everything on the panel box was in perfect order. No other room in the house was affected, and the man was completely baffled.
“I’ve been doing this job a long time,” he told me, “but I’ve never seen anything like this. I really can’t tell what’s causing this problem.”
I immediately thought of the times in the past when the stereo had turned on by itself but could not bring myself to admit those incidents to a stranger. I hoped the inspector would find a logical, scientific reason as to why the room suddenly had no power.
“Bill Watson was the electrician?” he confirmed with me.
“That’s right. He updated the electrical service for the entire house when he did the new wiring.”
“You better get in touch with him and explain that you have a problem here. I’ll be back after he’s has taken care of it.”
I called the electrician and told him what had happened. When he came to our house later that afternoon, he was as bewildered as the inspector had been. He could find no reason for the loss of power, and nothing he did seemed to help. While the electrician was there trying to fix the problem, I quickly took the children shopping for a new light fixture for the foyer that I wanted him to install. Perhaps it was only an electrical problem that caused it to turn on and off by itself.
Haunted Page 12