Picture of some ghosts I took in 2010.
Way back when I was a kid, the age my own kids are now, I lived in a house that was haunted.
Try not to step in the orange ectoplasm as you cross the threshold and I'll tell you how.
You all have heard me talk before about The Farm in Massachusetts where I grew up until moving to Texas. The place was very old, dating to 1731 with a barn from the 1690's that is no longer there. Today the fields and woods surrounding the place have been developed, streets named after our family and so forth, and almost all of the original character that made the site quintessentially Early American is gone.
The house is peculiar in several ways that distinguish it from others built at that time. First, the front door faces away from he road. We know from historical record the place was an early dry goods store dealing specifically in sugar, and was also a tavern and took borders. This history has flummoxed many an historian because why would such a public building face away from the road?
Second, there are unusual cellars, several of them, and two are quite hidden. When I was a kid, to climb into these small, low places was to find a floor of deep sawdust and old bottles of dandelion and cherry wine along with discarded tools and broken barrels. While the wine proved delicious when opened in the early 1990's, these cellars weren't built for wine, as perfect as they stored it. The original use was likely a hiding place during "Indian" raids, the area being one of the hardest fought and bloodiest parts of the state in those early days, and surely doubled as root cellars. Later on, though, they were stop on the Underground Railroad.
Map of the Underground Railroad.
If you look at Massachusetts you will notice an intersection of two red lines, one vertical and one roughly horizontal. Our farm sat not far from that intersection, about half-way between
The Wayside in Concord and The Liberty Farm in Worcester, two famous historical stops. The hidden nature of the cellars suggests our farm was used specifically to hide from bounty hunters, and as a public place it was probably a very good spot. Right under their noses, as it were.
A third unusual feature of the house is the attic. There are two sets of stairs, one right and one left, that branch off the short entrance stairs as the small door is opened. This was a mystery to many a local historian until records were discovered to show the place was built for two families within the same family, cousins I believe, who had a feud. Thus, the attic was divided in a very obvious way.
This attic in particular was the focus of a strange type of hunting we experienced that happened only on New Years Eve. While everyone was downstairs in the main rooms below drinking cocktails and carrying on, at some predictable point after midnight the banging would begin. Now, I can imagine some of you have resumed the eye rolling because this is pretty far fetched, right? The sound of feet stomping on the ceiling was surely a relative such away and having a laugh at the expense of everyone else. Except the tradition was for everyone to carry the party up into the attic and sing Auld Lang Syne to the ghost. And upon entering the attic was empty, the stomping abruptly stopping as the door was opened.
Mom was a singular focus of this supernatural attention, to the point of exasperation. Things like deer antlers coming off the mantle as if picked up and held in the air and then dropped, repeatedly. Doors slamming, opening and closing on their own over and over again as if a bored child was hanging on the knob, waiting for something to do while she ironed clothes. "Stop it!" she would shout when she'd finally had enough, and it would end. Sometimes the curtains would part and pull back, and often items would be obviously rearranged upon reentering a room. These things didn't happen all the time, not every day, but often enough to become ordinary.
My own feelings about these phenomena as a young boy were mixed. I was afraid of a lot of it because, well, I was little but it also thrilled me. As I got older, the cold spots and electric sensations could be very exciting, even while frightening. I have no doubt these are the origins of my adrenaline habit. I have clear memories of how that felt, walking along and suddenly freezing with the clear presence of someone standing next to me, the hair on my neck standing up and the rising clarity of fight or flight taking hold to the reaches of my skin. I would be paralysed for long moments until flight took over, after which I could often be found a half way to the dump, bent at the waist and catching my breath in the most open part of the field farthest away from the house. My best friend would not enter the place alone for these very reasons, especially after the cradle incident.
My grandmother had taken down from the attic an old wooden bassinet, to be given to a relative for their coming grandchild. It was a gorgeous piece of maple furniture, probably a hundred years old at the time, and I really liked the action of its' swing. It sat in the piano room for at least a month that summer, and every day I would spend some time swinging it and messing around on the piano. I was supposed to be practicing but usually I wasn't, and the cradle was a great distraction my attention.
Part of my fascination with the piece was that several times it had started swinging as I played, catching my peripheral vision and interrupting my focus. Having been raised around all manner of antique furniture in an antique home, what drew my attention most was its silence. It never created or made any noise as it moved. It was absolutely silent in its action and I found this most unusual. I had never known a piece of furniture NOT to make noise as it was used. Eventually I could no longer practice for anticipating its movement and looking for a sign. It was one factor that contributed to my ceasing to play the piano.
And then one day my best friend, the one who warned me not to test the ice that nearly drown me as I fell through, had a great idea. "Let's go," he said conspiratorially "and sneak in while your brother is practicing and scare the shit out of him." Of course, this was a brilliant plan and one we undertook regularly with great pleasure. The resulting mayhem was quite fun, often culminating in us being chased across the fields by my brother in the old the old '39 Chevy pickup that we used to haul wood from the lots and garbage to the dump. Those were magical days.
But on this day there was no practice, we misjudged his schedule and he was nowhere to be found. Upon entering the piano room, however, we did find the cradle swinging rapidly from side to side, faster than I had ever seen it go. So fast, in fact, that I could finally hear its action, as the limit had been reached to its range of motion. Then, as we stood frozen in the doorway, paralysed by fear and surprise, the motion abruptly stopped. No winding down or slowly fading, it simply stopped at the trough of the swing. I never saw it move again before it was taken away.
It was the stopping and not the swinging that broke our paralysis, and run out the door we did, as fast as we could. Well, as fast has my friend could, I slipped on an area rug in the entrance, twisting my ankle and banging my knee on the door jam, drawing blood. I still carry the scar from that gas and the same area rug is now in front of my back door, a small Turkish carpet of unknown age. On appraisal I was told it was almost 200 years old, but the nap is so tight it seems barely worn. The bottom, on any smooth floor, is extremely slippery.
And as I slipped my friend was half-way to the barn and never stopped to wait until he'd make the end of the road, a good 500 yards away. I finally caught up with him, blood running down my leg and unable to run and the fear had not left his face. He was terrifyed, far more than he had ever been in my crazy, creepy house. This time things were different, he said. "I will never go in your house again!" he yelled at me, anger replacing fear in his voice. "I HATE your house and I hate those fucking ghosts!" I could not say I blamed him one single bit.
He stopped running where you see the road end.
I have no idea if these hauntings still occurr. The man who owns the place, a successful lawer who moonlights as a successful asshole, is not someone I would personally approach to ask about it. My dad has met him and even took a tour of the house not too long ago, I might ask him to find out. By the time my grandparents sold the place in the late 80's we had been gone several years and some of that activity had followed us (my mother it seemed) to Houston. What activity I saw in summers when I came to visit was less intense, with noted exceptions.
The activity that folowed us to Houston remained consistant: rearranging items, slamming doors, floating objects, cold spots. Eventually, almost all of it simply faded way into silence. To this day, ever so often, something will happen. The energy is much weaker, far less creative really. I look forward to these moments, infrequent as they are. A reminder of and a connection to a time of my life long since past but genuinely and fondly remebered.
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