There is a built-on porch at the side of the house next to the driveway and here I stopped my car, carefully turning it in case I might wish to leave suddenly. It usually happens in country places that someone comes to greet a stranger but here the only person who seemed interested, was a lad about five years old. He was a quiet, nice-looking boy, and his appearance gave a sense of normality to the house. My companion remained in the car, not because she feared going in, but because she felt I might make better progress alone. In answer to my knock a woman's voice invited me to “come in.”
The young wife was tall with auburn hair, blue eyes, and a restrained but not unfriendly manner. I realized she would want to know my business and lost no time in setting her mind at rest. Nevertheless I felt embarrassed. I had been told that she and her husband would talk freely and willingly, but I hadn't thought how difficult it would be calling on a perfect stranger to say, “I hear your house is haunted.” I sensed at once that they did not treat their peculiar situation lightly and that they were in need of all the sympathy and warmth I could give them. I soon convinced her that we had not come from idle curiosity, and then she told me everything that had happened so far.
She pointed out that the house is not old, for it had been built in 1910. They had bought it in 1949 and had moved in then immediately after their marriage. They looked forward to working a good farm while, in the off season, there would be employment for her husband in the woods nearby. It was a bright outlook, but it did not last long. They had been in the house only a short time when they heard a person walk downstairs in the dead of night. Then they heard horses galloping up the driveway. It was April and there was snow on the ground, but no tracks. This continued for other nights so that they were losing their sleep. At first they kept their trouble to themselves and then decided to invite a few friends in to listen with them. Some heard the sounds of galloping horses, while others heard nothing unusual. By this time their nerves were frayed but they thought they should wait and see if the footsteps came again. When that happened, they moved to the wife's former home and stayed there until that September. They returned then to their own house where they lived undisturbed until April of 1956 when it began all over again.
This time the disturbances took the form of footsteps walking upstairs and the sound of heavy objects being dropped. When asked what sound these objects made she said it was a dead sound. That would mean without any echo or reverberation. There did not seem to be any pattern in these noises except that they always came at night. They might come before or after midnight and last only for a couple of minutes and stop, or they might go on for irregular intervals over a three- or four-hour period. One night when the footsteps were heard the wife's brother was sleeping there. He heard the steps come into his bedroom and he was struck on the face with a soft object which he has never identified.
One day the young couple were sitting in the kitchen when they saw an aspirin bottle quietly leave the pantry shelf. They watched in fascinated amazement as it slowly made its way to a shelf in the porch, with no human agency to transport it. The husband and wife were always together when strange things happened, so it was a shared experience. The footsteps have been heard mostly in the upstairs hall and bedroom, and never in the attic. Upon one occasion, when sitting together in the kitchen, they were frozen to their chairs as they heard slow, careful steps on the stairs as though an elderly person were making his way down. They had never seen their unwelcome visitor, and wondered if the mystery would be solved now. Instead, the steps turned in the opposite direction at the foot of the stairs and went into the parlour.
It was just before we arrived that the most shattering thing of all had happened and it was so alarming that they were once more frightened out of the house. (They were now occupying their own place during the daylight hours only, and were driving three miles every night to sleep in peace at the wife's former home as they had done before.) It had been a bright moonâlight night and the wife was sleeping. Her husband was lying awake when the bedclothes were suddenly lifted off the bed to the height of about a foot above them where they were shaken violently, turned upside down, and dropped back crosswise upon the bed. As they dropped, the wife awakened. At the moment of their levitation her husband did not disturb her, probably because he was too terrified even to breathe. Not then, nor at any other time, did they see their tormentor.
All this was told by the young wife with a quiet dignity and a complete absence of anything dramatic or hysterical. I was thankful that we had come to the end of her recital before her husband decided to join us. I have seldom felt so sorry for any human being as I did for him, for he looked utterly crushed. He walked over to the couch which is part of the furniture of all our country kitchens, and huddled down in the farthest corner. I expressed my sympathy for all they had been through and said, “Do you mind talking about it?”
He replied truthfully, “It doesn't help any,” and little wonder. His friends, no doubt with the best intentions in the world, kept telling him he only imagined these things and he was thoroughly sick of their remarks. When I asked if any of these doubting youths would sleep in the house alone he gave the nearest approach to a laugh I'd heard, and said very definitely, “No.” The only real interest he showed was during the time I suggested things that might help them, for I wanted desperately to ease their burden. For instance I told them that I had been hearing of houses like this ever since I first went out looking for folk songs in 1928, and that my very first visit had been to the Hartlans of South-East Passage. There, I said, the family had built small houses around a dwelling which still stood in the centre and which they called their Ghost House. And, I said, they were very proud of it.
Proud of it? The young husband looked at me with an expression of complete incredulity. Proud of owning a ghost house? How could they be? If there had been any doubts in my mind about the sincerity of their belief in what they had told, they would have been dissipated now. It was beyond his comprehension that anybody could take pride in a situation as desperate as his. This then was no act they were putting on for the sake of notoriety; it was sheer misfortune.
We talked a little longer and then I left, but I asked if I might take photographs of the house. They showed no objection and, I think, were rather pleased although they were careful not to be taken themselves. I took pictures from all angles and, in some of these, included the little boy. I hoped they might show a shadowy figure in one of the windows perhaps. (Actually when they were developed I could see a form there, but it was caused by the draping of the curtains.) However these pictures did serve one useful purpose for, as we drove away, my companion remarked that she supposed they had shown me over the house. I said I had not gone beyond the kitchen. She was surprised because she had distinctly heard a window being raised upstairs while I was inside. On checking up later with the owners no window had been raised by them that day, nor was there anybody else in the house when I was there.Yet the picture shows a raised window.
After that it was impossible to forget the haunted house and its unfortunate occupants. The wife was serious, but it had not upset her as it had her husband. I learned later that he had been a robust young man before this happened, but that now he was wasting away. The continuous strain of fear engendered by the unknown, coupled with the realization that he had invested in a property that might be worthless, weighed heavily upon him. He had what can best be described as a beaten look. I therefore wondered if my going there was mere chance, or was it all part of a pattern? Could I perhaps help in some way, and what would that way be?
Not long before this I had met Mr. R. S. Lambert, and had been given a copy of his book, Exploring the Supernatural. We had also met briefly in Toronto. Since his book deals mainly with haunted houses I wrote and outlined the case, and asked what he thought about it. He replied promptly and at length. Then with his suggestions which included the assurance that nothing could happen to them beyond a very bad fright, and my own all too limited knowledge, I wrote them as reassuringly as I could. I also tried to infuse a feeling of interest in their house by asking them to write down anything that happened so it could be used in scientific research. I thought this might give them something new to think about as well as a fresh feeling of self respect which was greatly needed at that time. I also sent them a copy of a book I had written,
The Folklore of Lunenburg
County
, thinking that perhaps some of its ghost stories might help them, and told how they could get the Lambert book at the nearest library.
From then on whenever I settled down to my night's sleep my thoughts would turn to the young couple and the atmosphere in which they lived, and this was also the experience of my companion of that day. I decided then to talk to everybody I could find who might have information about the place in the hope that some helpful light might be thrown upon this case. I learned first that they had both grown up in the same village, but that ghost stories were not much of a subject of conversation in the wife's home. In the husband's home, however, they were often talked about and believed, and many of their beliefs had been brought from Scotland by their ancestors.
First I visited a man of middle age who had once spent a night in the house, with the intention of speaking to the ghost if it appeared. It had been a quiet night with the intense quiet you get nowhere but in the country. There was not a sound, not even a mouse, for the house is free of rodents or any other animals; he was disappointed. He told me of a friend, however, who had spent a night there when he heard steps but, upon looking back, he could not remember whether they had been going up the stairs or down. But they were indoors; of that he was sure.
From various sources I learned about the former occupants and also that the present owner attributed the visitations to drownings in a nearby lake. In both cases these had taken place in April just before the noises were heard. I soon discounted this theory because the people who were drowned had no connection either with the house or any of the people who had lived there. The occupant immediately preceding the family I had gone to see had lived alone. He was described as a quiet, respectable bachelor, and one not likely to have left any unsolved problems behind when he died. There had been other houses on the property, but not on this particular location.
Only one unexplainable event seems to have taken place in a former occupancy. It happened one evening when a few young men were in the house playing cards and the lamp shade suddenly lifted itself up from the lamp, rose a few feet in the air, and then returned to its place on the lamp again. This sort of thing occurs occasionally before a death in a family, but that was not the reason in this case. If this was caused by any supernatural force it would show that strange things happen whether the present owners are there or not. Rumour has it that a group of boys drove up to the house one evening this year when it was empty and heard strains of beautiful music flowing out, but I had no opportunity to check on this. What I did hear from an eyewitness came from a man of middle age, rather serious and quiet, who is deeply concerned for the misfortunes of his young friends. He said that he was driving home from work at five o'clock one evening when he and his friends noticed a door on the side porch of the house slightly ajar. There are two doors here, but the one facing the road is securely bolted and is never used.They drove up to investigate and, as they expected, there was no one home. They found a storm door outâside somewhere and nailed it over the open door so that no one could make an entrance. Then they reported it all to the owner who said he had left twenty minutes before, and everything had been intact.
There is now no way of discovering whether the first occupants ever heard anything because they have all passed away. If anything had happened during their lifetime they kept it to themselves. A former school teacher who spent two winters there is sure nothing happened while he was in the house. He knew its history and said that only one other family had ever lived there. They were old when they died and one, who was blind, had suffered a long illness. Another was an unmarried woman and a tyrant who made it her business to see that everybody worked hard. She not only organized the home but the people of the village as well, presiding over various organizations where she was feared by all, for her word was law. If any departed spirit had come back he felt she was the logical one. The farm had been prosperous in her day. Now it has only one man to work it, and he spends much of his time in the woods cutting timber. Could it be that she resents this fact and hopes to frighten them away, thus making it available to another family who might keep the place up according to her standards? I passed this thought on to the young couple because a crabbed old woman being a nuisance would not be as formidable as some of the horrors they had envisaged. My only other suggestion is that the house may have been built upon an unknown grave.
In the midst of this investigation I was invited to appear on television. I told a ghost story, but not this one in case the place would be besieged with curious visitors. Later I told the interviewer without, however, mentioning the location. The following day he called on me, for he too could not get the family off his mind. Feeling sure that he would not exploit them I finally gave him the address and he wrote some months later to say he had been there and had cleared up some of the doubtful points for me. It seems they had read in my Folklore of Lunenburg County that a ghost comes only every seven years, although I am at a loss to know where they got that information. Nothing however had been heard since my visit, so they were planning to remain there as long as the place keeps quiet. Nevertheless they no longer take any pleasure in this house so they are preparing lumber for a new one and, as soon as the sawing is completed, they will start to build.