Bumps In The Night
Dorraine Fisher
Shares Her Ghost Story
By Dorraine Fisher
You think you know what’s real in
this world until something happens to shake up your paradigms.
Some
years ago, I lived in an old Victorian house near our downtown area. I loved
the house because it was huge and roomy and had a lot of character. But it was
well over a hundred years old; creaky and squeaky and settling like it had a
life of its own. And it wouldn’t be long before I found out how true that
statement was.
One day, as I was watching TV in
the living room, I heard strange noises that seemed to come from upstairs. My
roommate traveled for her job and was gone a lot, but when she was home, I
could often hear her upstairs walking around in the hallway. But on this
particular day, she wasn’t home.
I muted the TV volume to listen
more closely, and I heard what sounded like her up there walking around. There
was a spot in the floor that squeaked in a particular way any time someone
stepped over it. And that’s what it was. I’d heard it so many times from
downstairs.
The dog had noticed it first and
stood at the foot of the open stairway barking.
But she didn’t move from that spot. She just stared upward whining.
“Who is it, Brigitte?” I asked the
dog in an urgent tone, trying to get her to go upstairs. She was rarely afraid
of anything, but she just stood there whining and wagging her tail nervously
like she wanted me to go up first instead.
“Some guard dog you are,” I
said. “Hello! Cheryl, are you up there?
I didn’t hear you come home.”
I looked out the window at the
street to see if her car was there, but the whole street out front was empty. I
checked the back driveway to see if she might have parked there, but her car
was no where around. She wasn’t home.
I didn’t really want to go
upstairs to investigate, but the noise stopped abruptly anyway and the dog
suddenly calmed down. So I watched TV for a while that evening and got ready
for bed.
But as I lay in bed reading my
book that night, the dog that was lying on the floor lifted her head and
flipped her ears toward the bedroom doorway. I stopped to listen and heard that
same squeaking noise again in the hallway in that same spot in the floor.
“Hello,” I yelled again. “Is
anyone there?”
There was no answer. I
convinced myself I was just hearing things or it was the house settling again,
and I rolled over and went to sleep.
In the days that followed, I heard a lot of
noises that I attributed to the house settling, but some strange things started
to happen.
There was an old upright piano in
the downstairs hallway that had been left with the house when I moved in. And I
had arranged groups of family pictures on top of it. But strangely enough, one
day I walked in to find one of the larger pictures lying face down on the floor
in front of it. I wouldn't have thought
it so strange but I had arranged the pictures in a staggered pattern and this
one had been situated partially behind another picture that had oddly not been
disturbed. I was puzzled, but I put the
picture gently back into its place and I left for work as usual.
But later when I returned home, I was a bit shocked to find the same picture
face down on the floor again in the same place, still with no other pictures in
front of it having been moved. I was now
starting to feel that something was very strange. No one else had been in the house, no one
else except my traveling roommate had a key, and nothing else had been moved.
Several
more weeks passed. I heard the strange
footsteps periodically and occasionally found something around the house that
had been moved. I tried to think of a
way to dismiss it all as being normal, but one event made that impossible.
One
night as I was sleeping, I suddenly awoke to the feeling of something at the
end of the bed like someone sitting on the corner near my feet. A little surge
of adrenalin rushed over me as I struggled to focus in the dark room, but I saw
nothing. I thought it must have been the
dog moving around in the dark and I went back to sleep.
Then, a very short time later, maybe
ten or fifteen minutes, I woke up again to the dog nudging me and whining
anxiously. I tried to open my eyes and
look at the clock but it was flashing.
Had the electricity gone off? I scolded the dog for waking me up and
sent her back to bed. And I rolled over
and tried to go back to sleep.
A while later, my
heart skipped a beat when I suddenly heard a pounding on the front door. I
didn't want to answer the door alone in the middle of the night, but the dog
had already run downstairs to the door and was barking in a more desperate tone
than usual. I threw on my robe and ran downstairs. The pounding on the door continued furiously
and I could see a dark silhouette of a figure outside with the street lights
glowing behind it. I opened the door to see a fireman in full dress.
“Ma’am you need to
get out of the house NOW. There’s smoke coming from your attic window!”
I sat outside with
the dog in the chill of twilight in late October as the firemen diffused a
small electrical fire that had started from old, frayed wiring in the
attic.
Luckily they had
caught it in time and the damage was minimal, but I couldn’t get the strange
nagging feeling out of my head that someone had been sitting at the foot of the
bed that night.
But the strangeness wasn’t over yet.
After
the repairs to the house were done and everything was quiet again, something
else happened. There was an extra room
on the main level in the house with bookshelves that I called the reading room,
and I had all of my books arranged on its many shelves around the fireplace.
I was sitting in a chair in that
room one afternoon reading my book when something suddenly made me look
up. As I did, my big, thick dictionary
suddenly flew from the shelf and dropped onto the hardwood floor several feet
away from the shelf. If it had been a
smaller, lighter book I might have thought it had simply fallen. But this was a
huge, heavy, collegiate Merriam-Webster version. And it looked like something
had just flicked it off the shelf violently and into the middle of the hardwood
floor.
I guess this should have
scared me, but I’d had a friend tell me her true ghost stories before many
times, I didn’t really believe them before, but now I was really
wondering. It just seemed like something
or some-one was trying to be
noticed. And I couldn't really think
of another explanation for a book flying off a shelf.
After giving it some thought, I decided to go
to the county courthouse and see if I could find some information about the
previous owners of the house.
I
took part of an afternoon off and went to the courthouse and local library and
I sifted through old records and newspapers for any information about the
previous occupants of the house.
When I finally found some
information, it was fairly boring---no dramatic murders, suicides, or
mysterious deaths, but there had been local fire chief who had owned the house
some fifty years before that had died at a fairly young age of pneumonia. Could
he be the one haunting my house for some reason? Unfortunately, I couldn't find any more
information on him, but he was the only individual that I found that had died
an untimely death in the house.
Weeks
went by again and the strange noises and events slowed down a little. Brigitte
had a litter of puppies in the basement and I was up and down the basement
stairs frequently checking on them.
One day I was down there cleaning
when I heard a loud slamming of the
front door upstairs on the main level. I wasn’t too disturbed because it was a
small town and no one kept their doors locked during the day. I immediately thought it might be my dad or
one of my friends coming in but no one had ever slammed the door so loudly.
I listened for a moment as heavy
footsteps walked across the floor above my head from the front door all the way
to the kitchen. It sounded like heavy
boots on the hardwood, and I didn't move for a moment. trying to get a sense of
who it might be. Brigitte, who was
always a good watchdog, paid no attention as I listened to the footsteps shuffling
around the kitchen. So I believed that if she wasn't disturbed by the visitor,
it must be safe.
I suddenly felt curious enough to
investigate and I headed up the stairs.
As I faced the back door, I thought I saw a figure out of the corner of
my eye through the door glass, but when I tried to focus, there was nothing
there.
By
that time I had convinced myself that this was the spirit of the young fire
chief trying to make his presence known, and I was strangely unafraid as long
he showed no animosity toward me.
I pushed the back door open and
walked into the kitchen where the noises had come from. I thought I heard more strange shuffling as I
came in, but it abruptly stopped as I closed the door behind me. The room
became strangely quiet.
“Is
there anyone here?” I asked. No one answered, but I kept talking.
"I
know you're here and I know who you are, and I don't have a problem with your
being here as long as I never actually see you."
It was the truth. But I believed that he
hadn't really wanted to scare me to death. In the beginning he had subtly moved
things around in the house, and perhaps when I failed to believe what was
happening, he threw a dictionary off the shelf.
It had seemed that he just wanted
to be noticed. I hoped what I said would
appease him in some way, and I also hoped that, if he was real, he understood
that it was important that I never ever actually, physically laid eyes on him.
Was it a ghost of the fire chief
who had died in the house all those years ago? Was there some correlation
between his being a fireman and the house catching on fire that night? Had he
been trying to warn me in some gentle way?
After
that day, things seem to become quiet in the old house. There were no other
noises or activities except for a few strange, small thumps every now and then.
It’s almost like he relaxed a bit at me being there. ************
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