Night Stalks The Mansion: A True Story Of One Family's Ghostly Adventure (16 page)

We could only surmise that at one time there had been
a trap door leading down from the kitchen to the hiding
place, but a new floor had been laid, sealing it off com pletely. On top of this was linoleum which stretched from
wall to wall. There was still no evidence of any exit from
that basement room.

"Well, that's that," I observed. "Enoch was right. They
did hide runaway slaves in this house. Evidently the operation became too dangerous and they sealed the room off
with no chance for detection before they really ran into
trouble. And Enoch probably had cleaned up blood on the
kitchen floor from time to time if a slave had been badly
beaten-or shot. There must have been a trap door leading down here from the original kitchen."

We left the room the way we found it.

When they arrived home that afternoon, Hal and Bob
were as excited as the rest of us. As for Arthur, his enthusiasm
and pride were boundless.

"I felt I'd find something," he crowed. "After all these
weeks, I was nearly ready to give up. But I was right all the
time!"

"You're a good sleuth, Uncle Art," Hal admitted. "When
I think of all the time I stood in the basement and looked
at that window, I feel sort of stupid."

"No need to, Hal. No need at all," said Arthur graciously.
"It took a lot of time and a lot of figuring to come up with
the answer."

Enoch had been loitering in the kitchen even though it
was now getting dark. He stepped to the dining room door.
He was ready to leave.

"You got you a room, Boss. What good did it do?"

Enoch and I looked at each other with perfect understanding. "No good at all, Enoch," I answered. "The room
is useless to us. Tomorrow we'll put the glass back and paint
it over again like it was before. This was just a matter of
satisfying a little curiosity."

He nodded, having accepted my curiosity as one of the
facts of life for several months now.

After Enoch left, we still lingered over our coffee. It had
been an exciting afternoon. Arthur was like a hound on a
warm scent. "I'll bet these walls have a secret passage of
some kind in them," he said.

I laughed. "Art, you've done a good job and you proved
your point. But if you are going to do any digging or tearing
down, I suggest you join an archelogical expedition. We
simply can't take this place apart. We don't even own itl"

He looked deflated.

Dorothy had been unusually quiet. Now she spoke thoughtfully. "Enoch is right, of course. What good does the secret
room do? How does it answer what goes on in this house?"

Hal stared at his mother for a moment. Then he laid
down his fork. "You're right, Mom. Even if someone could
have gotten into that room without breaking the window,
where would he have gone from there? He couldn't have
gotten into the kitchen-not with three locks on the basement entrance."

Suddenly I remembered the newspaper and ran to get it
from my coat pocket. "Let's take a look at this," I suggested.
"Maybe it will tie in with some important event. I found it
on the floor beside the old quilt."

They gathered around me as I spread it out, upsetting
half a cup of coffee that Dorothy quickly sponged up. What
I saw as I read that paper rocked me back on my heels-and
I have never fully recovered. I couldn't speak. I could only
point to the date. The newspaper was only six months old.

"My God!" gasped Arthur. "Someone was down there.
They must have been reading by candlelight or something.
It was only six months ago-and you were all here then!"

"You're rightl We were here." I was completely baffled.
"The kitchen floor is new, tool How did he get in?"

"How did he get through three locks," repeated Hal, remembering his experience in the kitchen, "and how did he
get back into the room so quick if he was hiding?"

"The usual way, I presume," Dorothy replied serenely.
"I can see no contradiction. It might be interesting to know
if some of our guests missed a newspaper about six months
ago.

"Now what are you getting at?" Arthur savagely ground
out his cigarette.

"Just that I see no difference in transporting a newspaper
down there into the basement room 'and in transporting a
vase of spring flowers down the hall and into Mother's
room," she replied calmly. "Especially spring flowers out
of season-and in a snow storm."

"Do you mean to say that any ghost would be interested
in reading a newspaper?" Arthur's face was flushed with
irritation.

"I don't know the habits of ghosts," she replied. "But if
it was taken with an intent to annoy, then I can accept that.
A few of their habits I happen to be familiar with -not all."

"I won't buy that!"

"You don't have to. It's just my purchase." Her voice was
still quiet and reflective. "I wonder if there was any pertinent news in that paper."

We checked it over carefully for any spectacular news,
but it was simply the typical paper of the day. It did occur
to me that the obituary column might offer a clue, but we
knew none of the people listed there and no sensational
local event was commented upon at all.

We never did figure out the answer to this enigma. So we
had another mystery on our hands-one we never could solve.

Eventually Arthur was forced to relegate our ghostly
manifestations to the same category as his UFO's. They
seemed to be real, but they were unexplained-and likely
to remain that way.

We had been in the house for more than a year, trying to
establish a routine in between visitations, both psychic and
corporeal. Many things had changed within the familyMichael exhibited the most obvious ones! Bypassing the
crawling stage and shunning the play pen, our infant son
was an infant no longer. He had boundless energy and
ran - and climbed - all over the mansion, the yard, and
the family.

The dogs served as nannies until we could hire someone.
They watched over Michael, escorting him away from forbidden areas of the grounds, standing guard as cars drove
in and out of the driveway, and generally keeping Michael
as safe as was caninely possible. But Ching and Chang, as
vigilant as they were, had limitations, and we continued
our search for a fulltime, human nursemaid.

It was at this time that we found Clarabel. From North
Carolina, she was separated from her husband and had
come to the Philadelphia area to look for work. When she
came to us, she was penniless, helpless, and lost. I offered
her the job - and free room and board. When she accepted,
we were all very grateful!

We could always find Clarabel in the house. An avid
snuff-dipper, she was constantly surrounded by the aroma
of the snuff, and seemed to travel in a tobacco-scented
cloud. Capable, warmhearted Clarabel adored Michaeland struck up a very close friendship with Hal and Bob, our
two oldest boys. When she was not working, Clarabel was
usually to be found sitting at the kitchen table, trading tall
tales with the boys.

Clarabel stayed for three months. To my relief -and surprise - she was the only one of all our servants who had
never been bothered by the spirits in the house. We were
ready to settle down for a comfortable, steady time with
Clarabel when she decided to leave. This time, we couldn't
blame the mansion, the lady, or the footsteps. Her estranged
husband had found her and convinced her to return home,
to him and their marriage.

Six weeks after she left, we received a letter from Clarabel. The reconciliation was over. She said the marriage was
finished-forever-and she wanted her old job back. We
wired her traveling money and told her she was very welcome in the mansion. She came back almost immediately.

We were delighted. Clarabel very obviously wanted to
stay with us for a while -and the spirits in the house seemed
to have no objection to her being there. We thought we
had finally solved our "help" problem.

Our relief was short-lived. No sooner had Clarabel resettled in her old room, when strange things began to happen.
Footsteps would echo in her room. She'd turn on the light
and find no one. Doors would open and close, with no one working them. She would feel the presence of people beside
her, but never see them. Clarabel became upset and nervous. She felt that forces were being hostile to her; that she
was the target for intense animosity-but she couldn't see
who it was that hated her!

"They're after mel" she would wail, running for comfort
to whoever was nearest. "They're out to get me! They follow me around all the time!"

We tried to console her. We assured her she was in no
personal danger. She insisted that she was being persecuted.
The trouble was that we couldn't prove, either to her or to
ourselves, that she was mistaken.

One day Michael fell down the front steps and was badly
bruised. He had no business being out there unsupervised
and we questioned Clarabel about it. She burst into tears.
"He was pushed, that's what! I saw it All One minute he
was standin' there and then he was pushed down them
steps! It wasn't my fault!"

Dorothy and I were incredulous. Never had a physical
attack been made on a member of the family and we could
not believe that Michael would be singled out now. We reminded Clarabel that her only duty was to keep a constant
check on Michael and she promised to be more careful.

The next incident happened a few days later. Michael
climbed up on the railing of the veranda, no more than a
few feet from the ground. Still, he fell off and broke his
arm. When we returned from a trip to town, Dorothy and
I found young Michael with his arm in a splint. A tearful
Clarabel had summoned the doctor and things were under
control. However, she was waiting on the porch with her
bags packed.

"I'm leavin', Mr. Cameron," she sniffed. "They want me
to leave. They are hurting Michael so you'll get mad and
fire me. I really got to gol"

We tried reasoning with her, but it was useless. She was as adamant as our first servants had been and was determined to leave. So Clarabel left us; not sure why she was
going-but convinced that she had to escape!

"Harold," Dorothy asked after Clarabel had left. "Do you
really believe her story? Do you think that Michael was
pushed down the steps and off that veranda railing?"

"No, I don't!" I replied emphatically.

"Neither do I. But what did happen? She was always so
careful before."

"I think that Clarabel was so terrified that she was beside
herself. I don't think she even knew where Michael was half
the time. His accidents happened when we weren't around
so she didn't have us to give moral support. She was probably hiding in a corner somewhere and was afraid to come
out."

Dorothy gave a sigh of relief. "That's what I thought,
too," she admitted. "I know that our lady wouldn't have
had anything to do with an attack on Michael. Any kid can
fall off a veranda railing if he's permitted to climb up on it.
Even Hal fell out of a tree when he was little. I think these
were all natural accidents."

I agreed.

"But there is one thing that I haven't been able to understand," she went on thoughtfully. "Why was Clarabel under
psychic attack this time and not before?"

"I honestly don't know," I admitted. "It's bothered me,
too."

With Clarabel gone, we were forced to depend on the
chows again to supervise Michael when he got outside. They
were full grown now and were both a blessing and a problem.

"I thought dogs were supposed to be psychic," Bob observed one afternoon after he had finished grooming Ching.
"I've never known these chows to bark at anything except a real live person. And I know darned well that our lady
has walked right by them because I heard her, myself, and
I watched the dogs. Neither even flicked an ear."

"What about the time Carrol was camping out?" I reminded him. "They barked then."

Hal had joined us and was listening to the conversation.
"That's right," he said reflectively. "Then they got plain
scared. But that's the only time I remember, so I guess Bob
has a point. Even Uncle Art was surprised when they didn't
bark the first time he heard footsteps on the gravel."

"Maybe our lady likes dogs and they know it," Bob volunteered.

Their remarks set me off. "We really don't know much
about animals except that they are supposed to have a sixth
sense of some kind," I said. "Cats, for instance, are supposed to be the most psychic animals on earth. Maybe
animals are born conscious of another world. Maybe they
always sense things that we don't. And maybe they just
don't feel that there is anything new to bark at. Perhaps
they accept certain entities now just as they accept us."

"Well, they're pretty smart dogs," chuckled Bob, giving
Ching a final pat of approval. "Maybe they don't want to
waste the effort in trying to bite something that can't be
bitten."

Hal laughed. "I wonder if you realize that one word has
been used this past year more than any other as far as we're
concerned."