Beyond Heaven and Earth

by Steven H. Propp

  Once inside, they looked around with interest. It was fairly light inside, since there were enough large windows that hadn’t been boarded up to allow that late afternoon sun in.

  Ted said, “The first secret to these things is, ‘Get there before it gets dark.’ It’s natural to feel somewhat ‘spooked’ inside an old house when it’s dark. But if you get there while it’s still daylight, it’s much easier to scope the place out, particularly since these places usually don’t have electricity; or running water, for that matter.”

  They were standing in an entryway, which led to a high-ceilinged room, which had a winding stairway along the wall leading to the second floor. There was no furniture, or carpeting, nor even paintings or decorations on the walls. Everything was bare, and covered with dust. About every other floor panel squeaked when you walked on it.

  Abraham shivered, and said, “Damn, it’s cold in here.”

  Ted nodded. “That’s to be expected. These old houses were built so solidly that they’re very well insulated. Consequently, they’re practically impervious to outside temperature; which is why I told you to dress warmly.” He motioned for Jobran and Abraham to put the cases down in the middle of the large room. “We’ll set up camp here. Let me get my lamp going, and maybe that’ll heat things up for us.” He pulled a large lantern from one of the cases, and flicked a switch on it, which caused it to light up brightly.

  “A battery-powered lamp?” Jobran said, with surprise, as Ted nodded.

  “Absolutely,” said Ted. “With an old firetrap like this, you can’t take a chance on burning the place down with a gas-powered one. The batteries are good for about 6 hours, and I’ve got several extra sets.” Ted knelt down and opened up the case filled with beer. “Can I interest either of you gentlemen in a beverage?” Both shook their heads. Ted shrugged his shoulders, as he cracked open his beer and took a large swallow. “No problem; just leaves that much more for me,” and he proceeded to gulp down the remainder of the beer, emitting a loud and satisfied belch when he finished. “Got to get myself ‘prepped’ for the evening.” He then pulled a cell phone from his pocket, and said, “Next, let’s check our communications with the outside world,” and he pressed a number on the phone. He appeared to be listening to some message, and after the “beep” sound, said in a sarcastic tone, “All right, Train, you goddam pussy. So you crapped out on me as usual, huh? That means lunch and drinks are on you tomorrow, so you’d better bring lots of cash, because I plan to do a lot of celebrating. Later,” and he hung up. Then to Jobran and Abraham, he said, “The cell phone works; that’s good. You don’t want to be stuck in one of these places without one.”

  “I thought you didn’t expect anything to happen,” said Jobran.

  “I don’t expect anything supernatural to happen,” Ted corrected. “But you’ve got to be ready for anything. For example, I would never go into a house that had bars over the windows, since the house might catch fire, and we might get trapped inside. A great many fakers wouldn’t think twice about burning down their own ‘mystery house’ if it meant that it would prevent their deception from being discovered; they’ve usually got these places insured to the hilt, anyway. Besides, a lot of the owners that claim they can’t get anyone to move into these ‘haunted houses’ are actually marketing the thing to visitors and tour groups, or selling stories about it to the tabloids. I think that’s what the Realtor who let us in tonight is going to try: Making it a tourist attraction; believe it or not, there are more than 70 so-called ‘Haunted Houses’ in the

  U.S.A. that are open to visitors—usually for only a nominal fee. He probably figures that opening it up to a group of skeptics, including a rabbi—it’s always good to have a ‘man of the cloth’ at these things, although it would have been even better if you had been a priest—will show his ‘good faith,’ as well as be good publicity, particularly if something were to happen to make us leave before the night is up. I wouldn’t put it past him to try and ‘stage’ something for our benefit, with someone he hired for the purpose.”

  Ted picked up the cell phone again, and said, “Speaking of which, I need to let him know that we made it.” He dialed a number, waiting until it was answered, then said, “This is Ted Thornock and the Skeptics’ Patrol, coming to you live from the Halloway Haunted House!” He paused and listened, then replied, “Oh, hell yeah; even brought a videocamera, just to record this little caper for posterity.” Another pause, then he said, “And you never said we couldn’t, either; so just shut up.” Another pause, then, “No problem; I’ll just leave the message on your VoiceMail. But I just want to make sure you’re aware that we’re here, and we ain’t going anywhere until tomorrow morning. So the days of your little ‘haunted house’ scheme are numbered.” He paused, then laughed loudly, and disconnected the call. “Asshole,” he muttered. With a sour expression, he added, “I was hoping to get the local ‘freak radio’ station to let me phone in live updates all night, but they crapped out on me, claiming that ‘no one would be interested.’” He snorted derisively, and said, “Fat chance; they just know that nothing’s going to happen, so they didn’t want to be embarrassed publicly.”

  “So, do you think we should explore the rest of the house before it gets dark?” Jobran suggested.

  “No need, no need,” said Ted, pulling a folded-over sheet of paper from his back pocket. “I’ve got the floor plan here. Let’s see…,” as he mulled it over, then pointed to the left. “That over there is the dining room, with the kitchen and pantry beyond it. This room is the living room, with kind of a parlor beyond it. The servants’ quarters are in the back, connected to the pantry. Upstairs, you have four bedrooms. That’s it,” he said with a satisfied expression, stuffing the paper back in his pocket.

  “You don’t want to actually explore the rest of the house?” Jobran said in disbelief. “Wasn’t that the whole idea of coming here?”

  “The idea of coming here was to spend one night in a supposed local ‘haunted house’; you don’t need to go looking for skeletons chained up in the basement in order to do that.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re afraid to go exploring the house?” Abraham said, delighted to find what he thought was a weak link in Ted’s suit of armor.

  “Hell, no!” spat Ted, contemptuously. “The spook hasn’t been invented who can spook me! But at the same time, do you really want to try walking up those stairs? You see how even the floorboards creak when we walk on them; what do you think those stairs that haven’t been walked on for decades will do? You think we want to try and get a rescue crew up here in the middle of the night to pry you out of a staircase that collapsed?”

  Jobran and Abraham looked at each other, realizing that Ted had a point.

  “What,” Ted said, defensively. “You think the spooks—if there are any—aren’t going to be able to find us if we stay here in the middle of the biggest room in the house?”

  “Well, it’s your expedition,” Jobran said, resignedly. “I just thought it might make this place seem a little less spooky.”

  “Well, this place should seem spooky,” said Ted, as he reached for another beer. “But not because it’s ‘haunted’ or anything like that.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s have some dinner, and then I’ll tell you the whole story behind the Halloway Haunted House.” He opened another case, and tossed a sandwich to Abraham. “Whoops…sorry, Rabbi Abe; that was a BLT—God forbid that I should be the one to make a rabbi eat pork—give that one to Jobe. Here’s you a roast beef,” and he tossed another sandwich to Abraham, who then handed the first sandwich to Jobran.

  “You come prepared; I’m impressed,” said Jobran, opening up the sandwich.

  “You haven’t seen anything yet,” said Ted, as he reached into another case, and pulled out something large that he held above his head, as he proclaimed with triumph, “A Porta-Potty!!” and both Jobran and Abraham doubled over with laughter.
“If you just need to take a leak, you can stand piss on the porch; or just hang it out the window,” Ted said, with a grave expression on his face. “But if you need to take a shit, it may get too cold out there tonight. I brought two rolls of toilet paper, too.”

  “I hope it’s two-ply,” Abraham said, relaxing.

  “So who wants a beer?” Ted asked.

  Abraham raised his hand, and Ted handed him one. Jobran shook his head, saying, “No thanks.”

  “Goddam Puritan,” Ted grumbled, as he reached in the case again and reluctantly handed Jobran a bottle of mineral water.

  “Oh, shit, I almost forgot—we need to put this whole thing on videotape, so I can prove that we were really here.” Ted pulled his videocamera from the case, and began fiddling with it.

  “Didn’t I see something like this in that movie, The Blair Witch Project?” asked Abraham, teasingly.

  “I hope not,” replied Jobran.

  And so they spent the next hour and a half filming each other in various positions and locations: Standing outside in front of the house, standing on the porch, entering the front door, seated in the living room, looking out the dining room window, standing at the foot of the stairs (being careful not to set foot on them, however), and so on. Ted provided the running commentary to the filming.

  “This will also give our Skeptics’ Society something to laugh about at our next meeting,” he said, then adding, “Although since all of them copped out on me, I’m not sure that they deserve to get to see it.”

  Finally, they were done for the time being, and sat down to resume their meal. Ted took a beer for himself, and handed one to Abraham. “Beer’s not very cold anymore; sorry,” he said, nevertheless downing his in only a few gulps.

  “No problem,” Abraham, taking a small sip of his own. “You’re supposed to be ‘roughing it’ when you stay at a haunted house.”

  “And speaking of which,” Jobran said, addressing Ted. “You were supposed to tell us the story of this house.”

  “Goddamn, you’re right; it totally slipped my mind.” He opened another beer, and sat quietly, as if gathering his thoughts. Then he began, quietly. “You know, sometimes places that seem ‘scary’ are that way because some really weird shit did happen there. In the DeFeo house—better known as ‘The Amityville Horror’—the eldest son killed his parents and four siblings while they were sleeping in their beds, for example. At the Myrtles Plantation in Louisiana—supposedly ‘America’s Most Haunted House’—ten people died violent deaths over the years. At Borley Rectory—the so-called ‘Most Haunted House in England’—a nun was supposedly killed by a monk who was her lover, and he was caught and beheaded.” He gestured around the room, then continued, “The Halloway House is another good example. It was built during the thirties, after a lot of stops and starts. Old Man Halloway probably had trouble coming up with the cash during the Depression. Rumor is that he was involved with getting bootleg booze for upscale customers during the early days of Prohibition, so he was no saint. He was about 32 when he married a woman seven years older, probably because he thought she had more money than she did. They had one daughter, that he never took a liking to—at least, initially. They never had any other kids; his wife probably couldn’t, at her age.

  “Anyway, it didn’t seem to be a very happy marriage. The old man was disappointed when he found out that his wife had only a moderate annuity that she inherited, so he probably felt trapped in a loveless marriage—cheated of the prosperity he’d hoped for when he married her. To make a long story short, he began sexually abusing his daughter when she was about twelve or thirteen. One day his wife caught him at it, flipped out and grabbed his revolver, and tried to shoot him. While he was wrestling it from her, it went off, and shot her, although not fatally. His daughter began screaming hysterically and tried to attack him, so he shot and killed her. Since he was now a murderer, he must have figured that his life was over…so he now fatally shot his wife, then put a bullet through his own brain. All of this was overheard by the servants, a husband-and-wife team. Once it’d happened, rather than call the police, they panicked and skipped town. So the Halloways weren’t discovered for almost 5 weeks; when they finally found them, the bodies were all half-decomposed. They tracked down the servants, and the cops threatened them with a murder charge, so they broke down and told the whole story.”

  Ted paused and took a long pull from his beer. “Not a very pleasant story, is it? So that alone would be enough to give anyone ‘bad vibes’ from this place, just realizing that you’re sitting in the very room—and incidentally, we are sitting in the very room—where a double murder and a suicide took place; the old man was abusing his daughter on a couch right over there,” he said, pointing. “Anyway, neither of them had any living heirs that wanted this place—surprise, surprise—so it lay unoccupied for almost twenty years. Finally it was sold in the sixties, but by now the place is a wreck overgrown with weeds and dust, not to mention it’s scary just because it’s been here empty for so long, so two couples that have tried to live here since then have all gotten ‘spooked,’ and left. Thus, its reputation as a ‘haunted house.’”

  “So you see what I’m saying?” Ted stated, passionately. “A lot of these supposed ‘houses of horror’ really did have something unsettling, freaky, or just plain scary happen in them, and so it creates this image and reputation about the place. So when people that—sadly—lack a faculty of critical judgment stay here, they mistake the creaks and groans of an old, unused house for ghostly spirits; their minds are creating the only apparitions to be seen here. But I guarantee you that if a Realtor were to tear this place down and build a nice suburban-style place with a swimming pool on this lot, you’d never hear anything about this location being ‘haunted’ again—’restless spirits’ or not.”

  “So why don’t people that own a place like this do just that?” wondered Abraham.

  “Trouble is, after something happens like what happened here, the value of the property and land goes down dramatically, so it becomes difficult to find a buyer that wants to invest the capitol to upgrade or replace the house. The Realtor does-n’t care; although he doesn’t make any money unless the place sells, it’s not costing him anything, and the owners are some family back east, for whom the place is a tax writeoff. So they probably gave this dusty old account to a new Realtor, and he thought of a ploy to maybe make some money off of it.” He finished his beer, and crushed the can. “At least, until the President of the local Skeptics’ Society and his intrepid associates spend the night there, proving that the whole ‘haunting’ thing is a crock.” He tossed the can away, and grabbed another beer.

  Jobran asked, “Do you think it’s possible that you’re drinking so much because you’re trying to cover up your own secret fears and insecurities about being here?”

  “Hell, no,” Ted snorted. “Drinking just helps me pass the time. Believe you me, spending the night in one of these rat traps can be deadly boring.”

  “So what’s supposed to be taking place, here?” Abraham asked. “Is it ghosts, or…what’s that other word… poltergeists?”

  “There’s a difference?” Ted asked. “One fake spook is the same as another to me.”

  “There supposedly is a difference between ghosts and poltergeists,” Jobran said. “I’ve been doing some reading about it.”

  Ted and Abraham looked at each other, and Abraham said with a smile, “Didn’t you just know that he would?”

  Jobran smiled, and said, “A ghost is supposedly a disembodied spirit; the concept usually implies a soul, and that the ghost is a person who has died. You may be able to see them (a translucent white form, for example); feel them (such as an icy finger across your forehead); hear them (as in footsteps on creaky stairs); or smell them (like a musty odor from a grave). Ghosts have been reported all throughout history; but, although they are usually frightening—at least i
nitially— they are not necessarily malevolent; they may be hanging around a place or person because they feel like they have ‘unfinished business’ to resolve. Poltergeist is a more recent concept, however; it’s a German word that basically means, ‘noisy ghost.’ Supposedly, one of the differences between a poltergeist and a ghost is that a ghost is an apparition, it is visible, whereas poltergeists are supposed to just throw things, make noises, set fires, and so on. Ghosts also supposedly are associated with a particular house—called its ‘haunt’—whereas poltergeists are supposed to follow a given individual or family, even if they move to another location. And unlike ghosts, poltergeists are almost invariably frightening, and may be actually be attacking people.”

  “So are poltergeists supposedly dead people, like ghosts?” Abraham asked.

  “It’s hard to say,” Jobran replied. “Some Spiritists have suggested that ghosts are spirits who don’t know they are dead—although you would think it was fairly obvious, at least a couple of days—whereas poltergeists are angry or restless spirits, if they are even personalities at all, as opposed to some kind of discarnate energy. On the other hand, some people think that poltergeists are just a discarnate form of energy, rather than being a departed spirit. Some psychologists and parapsychologists have suggested that poltergeist activity is more frequent around teenagers going through puberty or otherwise stressed out, or people developing epilepsy—which might suggest that there is some kind of physical reason for the disturbance.”

  “Or else it just indicates that teenage kids are more like to pull off hoaxes,” Ted countered, cynically.

  “So is the Halloway House supposed to be inhabited by ghosts, or poltergeists?” Abraham asked Ted.

  “Well, given the definitions I’ve just been given by our friend, here,” Ted said, indicating Jobran, “They would be ghosts: either the murdered daughter, her murdered mother, and the father who caused the whole problem, supposedly appear, although people have also reported sounds, crashes, and such.”