2003-01-06 - 11:32 p.m.
I keep thinking about a strange thing that happened the other day. I was in the house alone, upstairs, just puttering around with some chores. I made the bed and was in the process of gathering up the laundry. As I bent over to stuff clothes into a basket, I heard a clanking noise in the bedroom behind me and turned to see what it was. The ceramic pull on the ceiling fan chain was swinging with so much momentum that it was hitting the glass globe of the light. It is over a foot above my head, and I had not even been near it for several minutes.
I can think of no rational explanation for this. This is an old house, of massive post and beam construction, with thick stone walls. Nothing shakes or rattles or vibrates. I would have had to reach way above my head to bump into it, and I mentally retraced my actions and know I didn't do that.
It sounds scary but it really wasn't. I went over and stood there watching until it stopped, and there was no sense of anything sinister, but there was just... something. A sort of energy.
I don't like to jump to conclusions, but there have been times that we have felt a certain presence in this house. Several times I have heard footsteps upstairs when I am in the basement and no one else is here. And there is one big mystery: the attic. We have never seen it. A previous owner installed an enormous attic fan in the only access door and it would have to be dismantled to enter the attic. So we have no idea what is up there. The house is ninety-six years old, built when this part of the city was hardly more than a small outpost. We have heard that other houses in the area built by the same builder were outfitted with secret compartments and hiding places. We found several in our house, too. Floor boards that come up, sections of the joists in the basement that come neatly apart to reveal small compartments. And there is a weird narrow cubby hole space near the kitchen that we think may have been the secret hiding place before later-day remodelers uncovered it.
When you live in a place for a while, you start to wonder what stories it has to tell. If there is a ghost, it has not been unfriendly. I sometimes fantasize that the house is glad to have people live in it who are taking good care of it and having a happy life here. From what we know of the previous owners, it has been through a lot. It was once owned by a couple of guys who had it so elaborately decorated and landscaped that it appeared in Metropolitan Home. One of them died, and it fell into the hands of some high rolling drug dealers and became a party palace. ( Even now, after living here for six years, we occasionally have some shivering addict ringing our door bell looking for "Ray.") After several years of neglect and hard use, it became ours.
I wonder what happened way before all that. What lived here first... who played with all the old marbles we found in the garden? Who cooked when there was a wood stove in the kitchen?
Regardless of all the history and controversy, and the terrible time we had moving in (that's another story) I have always felt safe and comfortable and at home in this house.
A year or so ago, Skootie and I took a community education class on haunted houses where we learned that we are living in an area that is prone to haunting because of the geologic formations. There are an enormous number of houses in the area that are said to be haunted, including one on the campus where I work. The class was a strange mixture of science, pseudo-science and story. They were trying to detect the presence of ghosts scientifically, and yet seemed to believe every rumor that ever floated around.
There are so many things we don't know. I don't really have any beliefs about the spirit world or ghosts or the hereafter. But I don't have any disbeliefs either. If I experience something, I will have to incorporate it into my own understanding. And I did experience something.
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