Hauntings from the World Beyond

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THE HOUSE ON PLANT AVENUE

Plant Avenue is a charming suburban boulevard running through one of the better sectors of Webster Groves, Missouri, in itself a better-than-average small town, near St. Louis. Plant Avenue is not known for anything in particular except perhaps that it does have some plants, mainly very old trees that give it a coolness other streets lack, even in the heat of summer when this part of the country can be mighty unpleasant.

Webster Groves wasn't much of a landmark either until Life magazine published an article on its high school activities, and then it had a short-lived flurry of excitement as the "typical" American upper-middle-class town with all its vices and virtues. But now the town has settled back to being just one of many such towns and the people along Plant Avenue sigh with relief that the notoriety has ebbed. They are not the kind that enjoy being in the headlines and the less one pays attention to them, the happier they are.

In the three hundred block of Plant Avenue there are mainly large bungalow type houses standing in wide plots and surrounded by shrubbery and trees. One of these houses is a two-story wood and brick structure of uncertain style, but definitely distinguished looking in its own peculiar way. The roof suggests old English influences and the wide windows downstairs are perhaps southern, but the overall impression is that of a home built by an individualist who wanted it his way and only his way. It does not look like any other house on the block, yet fits in perfectly and harmoniously.

The house is somewhat set back and there is a garden around it, giving it privacy. From the street one walks up a front lawn, then up a few stairs and into the house. The downstairs contains a large living room, a day room and a kitchen with a rear exit directly into the garden. From the living room, there is a winding staircase to the upper floor where the bedrooms are located.

The house was built in the final years of the last century by a man of strange character. The neighborhood knew little enough about this Mr. Gehm. His business was the circus and he seems to have dealt with various circus performers and represented them in some way. He was not a good mixer and kept mainly to himself and ultimately died in the house he had built for himself.

This much was known around the neighborhood, but to tell the truth, people don't much care what you do so long as you don't bother them, and the real estate agent who took on the house after Mr. Gehm passed away was more concerned with its wiring and condition than Mr. Gehm's unusual occupation. As the house had a certain nobility about it, perhaps due to the German background of its builder, it seemed a good bet for resale and so it turned out to be.



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In 1956 the house passed into the hands of Mr. and Mrs. S. L. Furry, who had been married twenty years at the time, and had two young daughters. Mrs. Furry's ancestry was mainly English and she worked for the Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, having been a major in psychology in college.

Thus she found herself more than shaken when she discovered some peculiarities about the house they had moved into such as being awakened, night after night at precisely 2 A.M with a feeling of having been shaken awake.

On one occasion, she clearly heard a heavy hammer hit the headboard of her bed, turned on the lights only to discover everything intact where she was sure she would find splinters and a heavy indentation. Soon this was amplified by the sound of something beating against the windows at night. "It sounds just like a heavy bird," Mrs Furry thought, and shuddered. There was nothing visile that could have caused the sounds.

One morning she discovered one of the heavy wall sconces, downstairs, on the floor. Yet it had been securely fastened to the wall the night before. On examination she discovered no logical reason for how the piece could have fallen. By now she realised that the footsteps she kept hearing weren't simply caused by overwrought nerves due to fatigue or simply her imagination. The footsteps went up and down the stairs, day and night, as if someone were scurrying about looking for something and not finding it. They always ended on the upstairs landing.

At first, she did not wish to discuss these matters with her husband because she knew him to be a practical man who would simply not believe her. And a woman is always vulnerable when it comes to reporting the psychic. But eventually he noticed her concern and the problem was brought out into the open. He readily remarked he had heard nothing to disturb his sleep and advised his wife to forget it.

But shortly after, he sheepishly admitted at the breakfast table that he, too, had heard some odd noises, of course, there must be a logical explanation, " he added quickly. "It is very likely only the contraction and expansion of the old house. Lots of old houses do that, seemed satisfied with this explanation, but Mrs Furry was not. She still heard those scurrying footsteps and they did not sound to her like a house contracting.

Eventually, Mr. Furry did not insist on his explanation, but had no better one to offer and decided to shrug the whole thing off. One night he was awakened in the bedroom adjoining his wife's boudoir because of something strange: he then noticed a filmy, white shape go through the door into the hall and proceed into their little girl's room.



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He jumped out of bed and looked into the room, but could see nothing. "Must have been the reflection of car lights from the street," he concluded. But it never happened again, and cars kept passing the house at all hours.

The years went on and the Furry's got somewhat used to their strange house. They had put so much money and work into it, not to say love, that they were reluctant to let a ghost dislodge them. But they did become alarmed when their three-year-old child kept asking at breakfast, “who is the lady dressed in black who comes into my room at night?" As no lady in black had been to the house at any time, this of course upset the parents.

"What lady?" Mrs. Furry demanded to know.

"The lady," the three-year-old insisted. "She's got a little boy by the hand."

Some time later, the child complained about the lady in black again, "She spanks me with a broom, but it doesn’t hurt, " she said. Mrs. Furry did not know what to do. Clearly there was something in the house the real estate people had failed to tell her about. After nine years, they found a better house, one more suitable to their needs and moved. Again, the house on Plant Avenue was for sale. It wasn't long until a new tenant for the handsome house appeared.



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In the middle of November 1965, the Walshes rented the house and moved in with two of their three children, ten-year-old Wendy and twenty-year-old Sandy. They had of course not been told anything about the experiences of the previous owners and they found the house pleasant and quiet, at least at first.

A short time after moving in, Mrs. Walsh was preparing dinner in the kitchen. She was alone except for her dog. The time was 6:30. Suddenly, she noticed the dog cringe with abject fear. This puzzled her and she wondered what the cause was. Looking up, she noticed a white cloud, roughly the shape and height of a human being, float in through the open door leading into the living room. The whole thing only lasted a moment but she had never seen anything like it.

"A ghost!" she thought immediately, for that was exactly what is looked like. Clare Walsh is not a simple minded believer in the supernatural. She has a master's degree in biochemistry and did research professionally for five years. But what she saw was, indeed a ghost. She wasn't frightened. In fact, she felt rather good, for her sneaking suspicion had been confirmed. On the day she first set foot into the house, when they had not yet taken it, she had had a deep feeling that there was a presence there. She dismissed it as being a romantic notion at the time, but evidently her intuition had been correct. With a sigh Mrs. Walsh accepted her psychic talents. This wasn't the first time that they had shown themselves.

At the time her husband's ship was torpedoed, she dreamed the whole incident in detail. When she was a child, her aunt died, and she saw her aunt's apparition before anyone in the family knew she had passed on. Since then she had developed a good deal of telepathy, especially with her
daughters.

She dismissed the apparition she had seen in the kitchen, especially since nothing similar followed. But the nights seemed strangely active. At night, the house came to life. Noises of human activity seemed to fill the halls and rooms and in the darkness Mrs. Walsh felt unseen presences roaming about her house at will. It wasn't a pleasant feeling but she decided to brave it and wait for some kind of opening wedge, whereby she could find out more about the background of her house.



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In February 1966, her neighbours next door invited them to dinner. Over dinner, the question of the house came up and casually Mrs. Walsh was asked how quiet the house was. With that, she confessed her concern and reported what she had seen and heard. The neighbours a couple named Kurus nodded to each other with silent understanding.

"There seems to be a pattern to these noises," Mrs. Walsh said, "it's always at 4 A.M. and upstairs."

The Kurus had almost bought the house themselves but were dissuaded from it by the experiences of another neighbour who lived across the street. The man had been a frequent house guest at the house and while there, had encountered ghostly phenomena sufficient to convince him that the house was indeed haunted. The Kurus then bought the house next door instead. When Mrs. Walsh obtained the name of the man across the street, she called him and asked what he knew about their house.

"The original owner has hidden some valuables in a number of places, niches, all over the house," the gentleman explained, "and now he's looking for his treasures."

One of those secret hiding places apparently was the fireplace downstairs. Upon putting down the receiver, Mrs. Walsh started to examine the fireplace. There was a strange hollow sound in one spot, but unless she took tools to pry it open, there was no way of telling what, if any-thing, was hidden there. The vague promise of hidden treasure was not sufficient to outweigh the pride of ownership in a handsome fireplace, so she did not proceed to cut open the fireplace, but instead went to bed. About midnight she was awakened by a peculiar, musty odour in the room. She got up and walked about the room, but the musty odour lingered on. It reminded her of the smell of death.

The next morning she told her husband about it. "Ridiculous," he laughed, but the following morning the same odour invaded his bedroom and he, too, smelled it. Since Mr. Walsh works for a large chemical concern odours are his business, in a manner of speaking. But he could not classify the peculiar odour he was confronted with in his own house. After that, not much happened beyond the 4 A.M noises that kept recurring with punctuality almost of Germanic character.



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But Mrs. Walsh noticed that the door to the attic was always open. The stairs leading up to the attic from the second story have a stair whose tread lifts. Underneath the stairs she discovered a hollow space. So the tales of hidden treasure might have some basis of fact after all, she mused. The secret space was once completely closed, but the catch had long disappeared.

On one occasion, when Mr. Walsh was down with the flu, he used an adjoining bedroom. While Mrs. Walsh was resting she heard the attic door open and close again four times, and thought it was her husband going to the bathroom. But he had only been up once that night. The other three times, it was another person, one they could not see.

As time went on, Mrs. Walsh kept notes of all occurrences, more as a sport than from fear. Both she and her husband, and soon the children, kept hearing the footsteps going up to the attic, pausing at the now empty hiding place. Each following morning the attic door, securely closed the night before, was found wide open. It got to be such a routine they stopped looking for real people as the possible culprits. They knew by now they wouldn't find anyone.

One morning she went up to the attic and closed the door again, then continued with her breakfast work in the kitchen. Suddenly she had the strange urge to return to the attic once more. Almost as if led by a force outside of herself, she dropped the bread knife and went up the stairs. The door was open again, and she stepped through it into a small room they had never used for anything but storage. It was chock-full of furniture, all of it securely fastened and closed.

To her amazement, when she entered the little room, things were in disorder. The heavy chest of drawers at one side had a drawer opened wide. She stepped up to it and saw it was filled with blueprints. She picked one of them up, again as if led by someone, and at the bottom of the blueprint saw the name "Henry Gehm."

She had been looking in the attic for a supposedly hidden doorway and had never been able to locate it. Was it after all just gossip and was there no hidden door? At this moment, she had held the blueprints of the house in her hands, she received the distinct impression she should look in a certain spot in the attic. As she did, she noticed that the furniture against that wall had recently been moved. No one of flesh and blood had been up there for years, of course, and this discovery did not contribute to her sense of comfort. But as she looked closer she saw there was now a door where before a large piece of furniture had blocked the view. Who had moved the furniture?



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She felt a chill run down her back as she stood there. It wasn't the only time she had felt cold. Many times a cold blast of air, seemingly out of nowhere, had enveloped her in the bedroom or in the kitchen. As she thought of it now, she wondered why she had not investigated the source of that air but taken it for granted. Perhaps she did not want to know the results.

The events in the attic occurred on March 1, 1966. The following day, she was awakened quite early by incessant footsteps in the hallway. Someone was walking up and down, someone she could not see. She got up. At that moment, she was distinctly impressed with the command to take out an old music box that had belonged to her mother. The box had not played for years and was in fact out of order. She opened the box and it started to play. It has remained in working order ever since. Who had fixed it and was this a reward for having looked at the blueprints for "someone?"

On March 5, she was roused from deep sleep once more at the "witching hour" of 4 A.M., but the house was quiet, strangely so, and she wondered why she had been awakened. But she decided to have a look downstairs. In the dining room, the breakfront which she had left closed the night before, stood wide open. The teaspoons in one of the drawers had been rearranged by unseen hands. A plant had a shoot broken off and the twig lay on the table nearby. Since the dog had not been in the room, there was no one who could have done this.

The next day, her sleep was interrupted again at 4 o'clock. This time the drawer containing her underclothes was all shaken up. Suddenly it dawned on her that her ten year-old daughter might have spoken the truth when she reported "someone" in her mother's bedroom opening and closing the dresser when Mrs. Walsh knew for sure she had not been in the room. She realized now what it was. The bedroom she occupied had been Henry Gehm's room. If he had hidden anything in it, he might be mistaking her dresser for his own furniture and still keep looking.

On March 8 Mrs. Walsh was in the basement, and her ten-year-old girl, Wendy, was in the garden playing. The house was quite empty. Suddenly, she heard the sound of a child running at a mad pace through the dining room and kitchen. It must be Sandy, she thought, and called out to her. She received no reply, she went upstairs to investigate and found the house empty and quiet. Yet the footsteps had been those of a child, not the same footsteps she had so often heard on the stairs and in the attic.

So there were two of them now, she thought, with a shudder. It was then also that she recalled the baby hair she had found under the couch shortly after they had first moved in. At the time she had dismissed it as unimportant, even though no one with blond hair lived in the house. The hair was very fine, clearly blond and seemed like the hair of a very young child.



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Five days later all but Mr. Walsh were out of the house, in church. He was still in bed, but after the family had left for church he came downstairs, and fixed himself breakfast in the kitchen. At that moment, he thought he heard Wendy running upstairs. He assumed the child was not well and had been left behind, after all. Worried, he went upstairs to see what was the matter. No child. He shook his head and returned to his breakfast, less sure that the house didn't have "something strange" in it.

Upon the return of the others, they discussed it and came to the conclusion that the house was haunted by at least two, possibly three, people. It was a large enough house, but to share one's home with people one could not see was not the most practical way to live.

A few days later Mrs. Walsh was again in the basement, doing the laundry. A sweater hanging from the rafters on the opposite side of the basement suddenly jumped down from the rafters, hanger and all, and landed in front of her. The windows were firmly closed and there was no breeze. What amazed Mrs. Walsh even more was the way the sweater came down. Not straight as if pulled by gravity, but in an ark, as if held by unseen hands.

On March 16 she woke again early in the morning with the sure sensation of not being alone. Although she would not see anyone, she knew there was someone upstairs again. However she decided to stay in bed this time. First thing in the morning, as soon as its was light, she ventured up the stairs to the attic. In the little room the furniture had been completely reshuffled. She then recalled having heard a dull thud during the night.

A trunk had been moved to the center of the room and opened; a doll house had been placed from one shelf to a much lower shelf, and a tool box she had never seen before had suddenly appeared in the room. There were fresh markings in the old dust of the room. They looked like a child's scrawl. Mrs. Walsh looked at the scrawl. It looked as if someone had made a crude attempt to write a name in the dust. She tried to decipher it, but could not.



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The next day she returned to the room. No one had been there. The children were by now much too scared to go up there. The scribbled signature was still there, and not far from it, someone had made handprint in the dust. A small child's hand. As Mrs. Walsh stared at the print of the child's hand, it came back to her how she had the month before heard a child's voice crying somewhere in the house. None of her children had been the cause of the crying, she knew, and yet the crying persisted. Then on another occasion, a humming sound such as children like to make, had come to her attention, but she could determine no visible source for it.

Two days later, still bewildered by all this, she found herself again alone in the house. It was afternoon, and she clearly heard the muffled sound of several voices talking. She ran up the stairs to the attic for it seemed to her that most of the phenomena originated here and sure enough the door to the attic, which she had shut earlier, was wide open again.

Early the next morning Mrs. Walsh heard someone calling a child up in the attic. Who was up there? Not any of the Walshes, she made sure. Slowly it dawned upon her that a family from the past was evidently unaware of the passage of time and that the house was no longer theirs.

But how to tell them?

A busy family it was, too. At 5 A.M. one morning a typewriter was being worked. The only typewriter in the house stood in Wendy's room. Had she used it? She hadn't, but that morning she found her typewriter had been used by someone. The cover had been put back differently from the way she always did it. A doll she had left next to the machine the night before was now on top of it.



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That night, while the family was having dinner in the kitchen, the lights in the living were turned on by unseen forces. Pieces of brightly wrapped candy disappeared from a tray and were never seen again.

The dog, too, began to change under the relentless turn of events. She would refuse to sleep in the basement or go near certain spots where most of the psychic phenomena had occurred. The seven-year-old dog, once the very model of a quiet suburban canine, soon turned into a neurotic, fear-ridden shadow of her former self. It got to be a little too much for the Walshes.

The treasure Mr. Gehm was haunting had no doubt long ago been found and taken away by some earlier tenant or stranger. As for the house itself, the ghosts could have it, if they wanted it that much. The Walshes decided to build a new home of their own, from scratch. No more old homes for them. That way, they would not inherit the ghosts of previous owners. They notified the owner of their intent to move and as soon as the new home was ready, they moved out.

Even on the last day, the sounds of footsteps scurrying up the stairs could be heard. Plant Avenue gossips can add another chapter to the lore of the Gehm house, but the sad little girl up in the attic won't have any playmates now. Even if they couldn't see her, the children knew she was there.


Next haunted story is from North Woodstock, Connecticut.



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TERROR ON THE FARM

North Woodstock, Connecticut, is New England at its best and quietest: rolling farmland seldom interrupted by the incursions of factories and modern city life. The village itself seems to have weathered the passage of time rather well and with a minimum of change. Except for the inevitable store signs and other expressions of contemporary American bad taste, the village is as quiet today as it must have been, say, two hundred years ago, when America was young.

On Brickyard Road, going toward the outer edges of the village, and standing somewhat apart from the inhabited areas, was an old farm house. It had obviously seen better days, but now it was totally dilapidated and practically beyond repair. Still, it was a house of some size and quite obviously different from the ordinary small farmhouse of the surrounding countryside.

There were sixteen rooms in the house, and for the past fifty years it had been the property of the Duprey family. The house itself was built in pre- Revolutionary times by the Lyons family, who used it as a tavern. The place was a busy spot on the Boston- Hartford road and a tavern here did well indeed in the days when railroads had not yet come into existence.

After the Lyons Tavern changed hands, it belonged successfully to the Potters, Redheads, Ides, and then the Dupreys, but it was now a private dwelling, the center of the surrounding farm, and no longer a public house.

Very little is known about its early history beyond that, at least that is what Mrs. Florence Viner discovered when she considered buying the house. She did discover, however, that Mrs. Emery Duprey, the previous owner, had suffered great tragedy in the house. One morning she had taken a group of neighbors' children to school. The school was in a one-room house, less than a mile distant. Her fourteen-year-old daughter Laura was left behind at the house because she had not been feeling well that day. When Mrs. Duprey returned home a short time later, she found the girl gone. Despite every effort made, the girl was never found again nor was any trace found of her disappearance.

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Viner decided to buy the house in 1951 despite its deplorable condition. They wanted a large country house and did not mind putting it in good condition; in fact, they rather looked forward to the challenge and task. It was on Good Friday of that year that they moved in. Immediately they started the restoration, but they stayed at the house and made do, like the pioneers they felt they had now become.

The farm itself was still a working farm and they retained a number of farm workers from the surrounding area to work it for them. The only people staying at the house at all times were the Viners, their daughter Sandra, and the help.

Two months had gone by after their arrival when one evening Mrs. Viner and her daughter, then eleven years old, were alone in the house, sitting in the kitchen down-stairs, reading.

"Who is upstairs?" the girl suddenly inquired.

Mrs. Viner had heard furtive footsteps also, but had decided to ignore them. Surely, the old house was settling or the weather was causing all sorts of strange noises. But the footsteps became clearer. This was no house settling. This was someone walking around upstairs. For several minutes, they sat in the kitchen, listening as the steps walked all over the upper floor.

Then Mrs. Viner rose resolutely, went to her bedroom on the same floor and returned with a 22-revolver she had in the drawer of her night table just in case prowlers would show up. The moment she re-entered the kitchen, she clearly heard two heavy thumps upstairs. It sounded as if a couple of heavy objects had fallen suddenly and hit the floor. Abruptly, the walking ceased as if the thumps were the end of a scene being re-enacted upstairs. Too frightened to go up and look into what she knew to be an empty room, Mrs. Viner went to bed. When her husband returned a little later, however, they investigated upstairs together. There was nothing out of place nor indeed any sign that anyone had been up there.



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But a few days later, the same phenomenon recurred. First, there were the footsteps of someone walking up and down upstairs, as if in great agitation. Then two heavy thumps and the sound of a falling object and abrupt silence. The whole thing was so exactly the same each time it almost became part of the house routine and the Viners heard it so many times they no longer became panicky because of it.

When the house regained its former splendor, they began to have overnight guests. But whenever anyone stayed at the house, inevitably, the next morning they would complain about the constant walking about in the corridor upstairs.

Mrs. Ida Benoit, Mrs. Viner's mother, came downstairs the morning after her first night in the house.

"I'll never sleep in this house again," she assured her daughter. "Why, it's haunted. Someone kept walking through my bedroom."

Her daughter could only shrug and smile wanly. She knew very well what her mother meant. Naturally, the number of unhappy guests grew, but she never discussed the phenomena with anyone beforehand. After all, it was just possible that nothing would happen. But in ten years of occupancy, there wasn't a single instance where a person using a bedroom upstairs was not disturbed.

A year after they had moved in, Mrs. Viner decided to begin to renovate a large upstairs bedroom. It was one of those often used as a guest room. This was on a very warm day in September, and despite the great heat, Mrs. Viner liked her work and felt in good spirits. She was painting the window sash and singing to herself with nothing particular on her mind. She was quite alone upstairs at the time and for the moment the ghostly phenomena of the past were far from her thoughts.

Suddenly, she felt the room grow ice cold. The chill became so intense she began to shudder and pulled her arms around herself as if she were in mid-winter on an icy road. She stopped singing abruptly and at the same time she felt the strong presence of another person in the room with her.

"Someone's resenting very much what I'm doing," she heard herself think.

Such a strong wave of hatred came over her she could not continue. Terrified, she nevertheless knew she had to turn around and see who was in the room with her. It seemed to take her an eternity to muster sufficient strength to move a single muscle.

Suddenly, she felt a cold hand at her shoulder. Someone was standing behind her and evidently trying to get her attention. She literally froze with fear. When she finally moved to see who it was the hand just melted away. With a final effort, she jerked herself around and stared back into the room. There was no one there. She ran to the door, screaming, "I don't know who you are or what you are, but you won't drive me out of this house."

Still screaming, she ran down the stairs and onto the porch. There she caught her breath and quieted down. When her daughter came home from school, she felt relieved. The evil in that room had been overpowering, and she avoided going up there as much as possible after that experience.

"I'll never forget that hand, as long as I live," she explained to her husband.

In the years that followed, they came to terms with the unseen forces in the house. Perhaps her determined effort not to be driven out of their home had somehow gotten through to the specter, but at any rate, they were staying and making the house as livable as they could. Mrs. Viner gave birth to two more children, both sons, and as Sandra grew up, the phenomena seemed to subside.

In 1958 a second daughter was born and Sandra left for college. But three weeks later the trouble started anew.



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One night in September she was sitting in the downstairs living room watching television with James Latham, their farm worker. The two boys and the baby had been in bed for hours. Suddenly, there was a terrific explosion in the general direction of the baby's room. She ran into the room and found it ice cold, as if it had been an icebox.

From the baby's room, another door leads out into the hall, and it is usually closed for obvious reasons. But now it stood wide open, and evidently it had been thrust open stun considerable force. The lock was badly bent from the unpact and the radiator, which the door had hit in opening, was still reverberating from it. The baby was not harmed in any way, but Mrs. Viner wondered if perhaps the oil burner had blown up.

She went down into the basement to check but found everything normal. As she returned to the baby's room she suddenly had the distinct impression that the phenomenon somehow connected with the presence of a young girl. She tried to reason this away, since no young girl was present in the household, nor was there any indication that tied in in any way with the tragic disappearance of Mrs. Duprey's girl, of which she, of course, knew.

Try as she might, she could not shake this feeling that a young girl was the focal point of the disturbances at the house.

One night her sister had joined her in the living room downstairs. Suddenly there was a loud crash overhead in what they knew was an empty bedroom. Mrs. Viner left her worried sister downstairs and went up alone. A table in the bedroom had been knocked over. No natural force short of a heavy quake could have caused this. The windows were closed and there was no other way in which the table could topple over by itself. She was so sure that this could not have been caused by anything but human intruders, she called the state police. The police came and searched the house from top to bottom but found no trace of any intruder.



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Mrs. Viner then began to wonder about the goings on. If these unseen forces had the power to overturn heavy tables, surely they might also harm people. The thought frightened her, and where she had until then considered living with a ghost or ghosts rather on the chic side, it now took on distinctly threatening overtones. She discussed it with her husband but they had put so much work and money into the house that the thought of leaving again just did not appeal to them.

It was inevitable that she should be alone in the house, except for the children, at various times. Her husband was away on business and the farm help out where they belonged. Often Mrs. Viner found herself walking through the rooms hoping against rational reasoning that she would come face-to-face with the intruder. Then she could address her or him, she was not sure how many there were, and say, "Look, this is my house now, we've bought it and rebuilt it, and we don’t intend to leave it. Go away and don't hang around, it's no use.” She often rehearsed her little speech for just such a confrontation. But the ghost never appeared when she was ready.

Meanwhile the footsteps followed by the heavy thumps kept recurring regularly, often as many as four times in a single week. It was usually around the same time of the evening, which led her to believe that it represented some sort of tragedy that was being re-enacted upstairs by the ghostly visitors.

Or was she merely tuning in on a past tragedy and what she and the others were hearing was in fact only an echo of the distant past?

She could not believe this, especially as she still remembered vividly the ice cold hand that grabbed her shoulder in the bedroom upstairs on that September day. And a memory would not cause a heavy door to swing open by itself with such violence that it burst the lock. No, these were not memory impressions they were hearing. These were actual entities with minds of their own, somehow trapped between two states of being and condemned by their own violence to live forever in the place where their tragedy had first occurred. What a horrible fate, Mrs. Viner thought, and for a moment she felt great compassion for the unfortunate ones.

But then her own involvement reminded her that it was, after all, her house and her life that was being disrupted. She had a better right to be here than they had, even if they had been here before.

Defiantly, she continued to polish and refine the appointments in the house until it looked almost as if it had never been a dilapidated, almost hopelessly derelict house. She decided to repaper one of the bedrooms upstairs, so that her guests would sleep in somewhat more cheerful surroundings. The paper in this particular room was faded and very old and deserved to be replaced. As she removed the dirty wallpaper, the boards underneath became visible again. They were wide and smooth and obviously part of the original boards of the house.

After she had pulled down all the paper from the wall facing away from the window, she glanced up at it. The wall, exposed to light after goodness knows how many years, was spattered with some sort of paint.

"This won't do at all," she decided, and went downstairs to fetch some rags and water. Returning to the room, she started to remove what she took for some very old paint. When she put water on the stains, the spots turned a bright red. Try as she might, she could not remove the red stains.

Finally she applied some bleach, but it only turned the spots a dark brown. It finally dawned on her that this wasn’t paint but blood. On closer investigation, her suspicion was confirmed. She had stumbled upon a blood spattered wall, but what had taken place up here that had caused this horrible reminder?

Somehow she felt that she had gotten a lead in her quest for the solution to the phenomena plaguing the house, Surely, someone had been killed up there, but who and why?



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[Headless2]

She went into the village and started to talk to the local people. At first, she did not get much help, totem laglanders are notoriously shy about family matters. But eventually Mrs. Viner managed to get some information from some of the older local people who had known about the house on Brickyard Road for a long time.

When the house was still a public tavern, that is somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century or the very end of the eighteenth, there had been two men at the tavern who stayed overnight as guests. Their names are shrouded in mystery and perhaps they were very unimportant, as history goes.

But there was also a young girl at the tavern, the kind innkeepers used to hire as servant girls in those days.

If the girl wanted to be just that, well and good; if she wanted to get involved with some of the men that passed through on their way to the cities, that was her own busi-ness. Tavern keepers in those days were not moral keepers and the hotel detective had not yet been conceived by a puritan age. So the servant girls often went in and out of the guests' rooms, and nobody cared much.

It appears that one such young girl was particularly attractive to two men at the same time. There were arguments and jealousy. Finally the two men retired to a room upstairs and a fight to the finish followed. As it was upstairs, most likely it was in the girl's own room, with one suitor discovering the other obtaining favors he had sought in vain, perhaps. At any rate, as the horrified girl looked on, the two men killed each other with their rapiers, and their blood, intermingled in death, spattered upon the wall of the room.

As she walked back from the village with this newly-gained knowledge, Mrs. Viner understood clearly for the first time, why her house was indeed haunted. The restless footsteps in the room upstairs were the hurried steps of the unhappy suitor.

The scuffling noises that followed and the sudden heavy thumps would be the fight and the two falling bodies perhaps locked in death. The total silence that always ensued after the two heavy falls, clearly indicated to her that the stillness of death following the struggle was being re-enacted along with the tragedy itself.

And how right she had been about a girl being the central force in all this.

But why the hostility towards her? Why the icy hand at the shoulder? Did the girl resent her, another woman, in this house? Was she still hoping her suitor would come for her, and did she perhaps take Mrs. Viner for "competition?" A demented mind, especially when it has been out of the body for one hundred fifty years, can conjure up some strange ideas.

But her fighting energies were somehow spent, and when an opportunity arose to sell the house, Mrs. Viner agreed readily to do so. Those house then passed into the hands of Samuel Beno, after the Viners had lived in it them 1951 to 1961. For five years, Mr. Beno owned the house but never lived in it. It remained unoccupied, standing quietly on the road.

Only once was there a flurry of excitement. In 1966, someone made off with $5,000 worth of plumbing and copper piping. The owner naturally entrusted the matter to the state police hoping the thieves would eventually return for more. The authorities even placed tape recorders on the ready into the house in case some thieves did return.

Since then not much has been heard about the house and one can only presume that the tragic story of the servant girl and her two suitors has had its final run. But one can't be entirely sure until the next tenant moves into the old Lyons Tavern. After all, blood does not come off eas-ily, either from walls or from men's memories.



More stories to follow…..