Growing Up In A Haunted House
(A Halloween Treat)
Having grown up in a haunted house, I’ve always been somewhat sympathetic to those who claim to have seen or heard something out of the ordinary. But those experiences also never particularly frightened me as a young child. Every child is the lord of his or her own domain, whether being raised in a modest Midwestern home, or a grass thatched hut on the plains of Africa. Kids aren’t about to let a few bumps in the night keep them from their favorite playtime “haunts”. It takes time to learn to be afraid.
I was around four or five years old when I saw my first and only ghost. Not the floating bed sheet kind or the wispy garden variety. No, my ghost had to be towering over me (though most things towered over me at five). It was night and I had left the comforting light of the kitchen to go into the darkened living room. I turned around to face the fireplace and there it was. The apparition had a light about him that gave off a green glow.
He just stood there in the living room. I say it was a he because whatever it was left me with that impression, but I couldn’t tell you what he wore. He didn’t seem to pay any attention to me or speak. I wanted to run an tell my parents, but couldn’t quite bring myself to move or cry out. It was the first and only time I’ve had that sensation.
The apparition finally moved off towards the enclosed front porch and I was free to run to my parents and tell them of the strange green man. I was probably given a hug and ushered off to bed. No one pays much attention to a child’s “imaginary” friend.
What I wasn’t told till many years later, was the next day a neighbor had asked my parents what the green light was they had seen on our porch.
It was the last time I ever saw the ghost (or what I thought was a ghost). But it wasn’t the last supernatural incident. My parents bought us a Scottish terrier when I was about ten. Every once in a while “Duffy” would start barking at thin air. Sometimes he would jump, start scratching at a spot in the floor and then follow whatever “wasn’t” there through the house. Once he got whatever “it” was to the front porch and out the door, he settled down self-contentedly.
When my parents moved us to our home on North Benton in 1970, Duffy never felt the need to “exorcise” that same way again.
There was also an old table in the house that always creaked at the same time each night. I remember my parents laughing about it. It was a low-lying long table that had been used in an old school in St. Louis. My family has the table now, but it stopped being an annoyance once we left the old house.
There were also things that moved on there own, but nothing that we observed first hand. The worst incident was the spring my Father went to get the window fan out of the basement to install. For those of you younger than forty, it was how people survived before air conditioning. The fan had been undisturbed in a corner of the basement all winter. But when he took it out, every fan blade had been bent.
These were heavy-duty steel blades inside a steel cage. The cage didn’t have a mark on it. It would have been very awkward for someone to have gotten to the blades, let alone bend them.
What I don’t remember was ever being afraid in the house. We lived there from when I was about two till I turned fifteen. It wasn’t that old of a home back then, probably being built in the 20’s or ‘30s. But it sat about a hundred feet from a much older building, that we were told by some elderly neighbors, enclosed a partial log structure and had served as a stage coach inn.
Of course belief in ghosts or ghost stories are as old as man. The first recorded description of a ghost can be traced back to 2,000 B.C. This first ever ghost story is in The Epic of Gilgamesh, etched in cuneiform clay tablets from Babylon. The story tells of the hero Gilgamesh and the ghost of his dead friend, Enkidu. Here is an excerpt:
“And Nergal, accustomed to absurd orders, obeyed as soldiers do.
He freed Enkidu to speak once to kin
and showed Gilgamesh how to descend halfway
to Hell through the bowels of earth.
Enkidu’s shadow rose slowly toward the living
and the brothers, tearful and weak,
tried to hug, tried to speak,
tried and failed to do anything but sob.
“Speak to me please, dear brother,” whispered Gilgamesh.
“Tell me of death and where you are.”
“Not willingly do I speak of death,”
said Enkidu in slow reply.
“But if you wish to sit for a brief
time, I will describe where I do stay.”
“Yes,” his brother said in early grief.
“All my skin and all my bones are dead now.
All my skin and all my bones are now dead.
“Oh no” cried Gilgamesh without relief.
“Oh no,” sobbed one enclosed by grief.
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (born around 70 A.D.) was perhaps the most famous Roman Historian who is our greatest source of information about the early Imperial families. His work Lives Of The Caesars has been the major basis for famous works from Shakespeare Anthony And Cleopatra to the I Claudius series. He also passed along a ghost story from his own time. Writing about the life of Augustus Caesar he made the following observation about a haunted villa:
“In the country mansion, near Velitrae, which belonged to Augustus’s grandfather, a small room, not unlike a butler’s pantry, is still shown and described as Augustus’s nursery...It has long been believed that casual visitors would be overcome by a sudden awful terror; and recently this was proved true when, one night, a new owner of the mansion, either from ignorance or because he wanted to test the truth of the belief, went to sleep in the room. A few hours later he was hurled out of bed by a supernatural agency and found lying half-dead against the door, bedclothes and all.”
It reads more like a scene from a modern B rated movie thriller than a description of a haunted house over 1,900 years ago.
I’m happy to report my own home is quiet and nothing the least “supernatural” has occurred here despite the building dating to the 1860s. That is if you don’t count the three imaginary playmates our daughter told my wife about when she was five.
Three spinster sisters had remained in the house together till the last one passed on. The house, built by their father, had been owned by their family for ninety years.
Three imaginary playmates...three spinster sisters...hmmmm, probably just a coincidence.
Happy Halloween!
