Ghosts I've Met (Part 1 of 4)

Tales of True Haunts

Half a century later, the mysterious armoire that was in the basement when we moved in, and the small secret room that I found near the furnace, are surely long gone. But what about the freezing terror spot in the basement floor? Or the pummeling night fists? Or the apparitions? They’d be harder to renovate away . . . (Powell Family Photo)

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We all believe in ghosts at Halloween. The very idea of them gives us delightful tingles. But after the holiday ends, those whose physical senses have never admitted anything even vaguely supernatural into their “view of reality" stop believing in spooks.

But others continue believing long after the final doorbell rings and the last candy drops into a child’s trick-or-treat bag. These folks’ senses have admitted the “other side” (or whatever you want to call it) into their world view.

I’m one of them. I’ve faced ghosts... and actually, still do.

A TV’s Warning?

I can’t say precisely when the house on Sharon Avenue turned against us. My family stayed there only a few years…from around 1958 to 1961. It was an airy Mid-century Modernist cement block with plenty of light streaming onto mom’s plants through big windows wrapped around its corners.

Early on, the house gave us a sign that things wouldn’t be as predictable as we might like. This warning came from our very first TV. Its big black-and-white eye nestled in the middle of a heavy wood cabinet, with gold-toned fabric stretched across speakers below.

After Sears delivered the monster box, dad wrestled it up against the west living room wall, ran cable up to the roof antenna, hustled back downstairs, and turned the TV on. An odd image appeared… horizontal gray bars, separated by thin black lines, with two fuzzy smudges below them at the bottom of the screen. It was on every channel.

Dad was a respected scientist. He helped invent the copying process later known as “Xerography.” He grew the first ruby crystal by hand that was pure enough to use in a laser. He helped develop the multi-part "carbonless" forms that we still use today. And he even worked on the coating for the Space Shuttle’s heat shields. He was, in fact, a 100% no-nonsense scientist.

He was also the first to recognize what we were seeing, and he didn’t like it one bit! “Stay here... Watch the screen,” he barked, and ran outside. We watched him enter our “TV show” from the left, dash to the middle of the screen, and dance around in front of the house’s aluminum siding between two small bushes that mom had planted (the two gray smudges at the bottom of the picture).

Even I knew this wasn’t normal behavior for your average TV. In 1958, no news crew was encamped outside filming our wall, and no satellite orbited overhead to relay the footage to local stations. But there it was. After staring at the outside of the house for a while, dad turned the TV off and then back on… and returned us to “regular” programming.

Things were quiet for a while after that. I still wonder what triggers supernatural phenomena. But it’s possible that two deaths may have launched what came later. And the first of those deaths was mine.

The “Other Side” Draws Near

I had suffered extreme asthma my entire childhood, and it finally killed me at age 12. In my last hallucination… through a raging 109-degree fever… my senses turned the reality of mom trying to get some soup into me into a horned demon coming for me. I fought mom off. She ended up wearing her soup. And my heart simply stopped.

Dad wanted to let me go. My prior years had been awful. But mom wouldn’t hear of it. She called our doctor, who lived several miles away. He rushed over, found no breath or pulse, tried to resuscitate me, and failing that, shot adrenaline into my heart. I came back. But amazingly, from that night on, I never again had asthma!

The second death occurred just down the street (and was more permanent). “Mr. D” was a retired civil engineer who liked to talk with me about math. After his wife died of pneumonia the winter before, he started giving away her jewelry and other things to mom and a few of our neighbors.

And then… one year to the day after Mrs. D’s passing… Mom answered a panic-stricken midnight call from a neighbor who we soon learned was a fairly famous psychic. She had just heard the late Mrs. D repeatedly screaming her husband’s name... followed by the word “DON’T!” So she, mom, and a third neighbor threw on their bathrobes and rushed through the snow to Mr. D’s house.

Apparently, he couldn’t go on living without his wife, and had shot himself just before they arrived. He was a warm, friendly man, and when mom returned home, she said (obviously still in shock) that “He’d always be welcome in our house.”

Could my brief hover between two worlds or mom’s perhaps reckless invitation have precipitated subsequent events? Who knows.

The House Awakens

Ironically, dad (who was an extreme skeptic about the afterlife or spooks) experienced the next strange encounter. He often worked late at the lab and would wind down at home by reading the paper in his comfy living-room chair. On one of those nights… around 2 AM… he heard someone coming down the stairs. He walked over to yell at whichever kid was up at that hour, turned on the light, and saw nobody. But the sound continued moving toward him. He could track it with his eyes and his ears. And as it reached the bottom of the stairs and slipped past him, he felt a cold breeze.

We heard about it in the morning. After the encounter, dad had retreated to his chair and just sat there, staring at the stairs until dawn. We found him there… ashen-faced and barely able to speak. His shock had been intense, and he said that he hoped to never experience the like again.

Fortunately for him, he got his wish. The rest of the fun was for my sisters and (especially) for me.

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Ghosts are tricky things. If they’ve never entered the “reality” painted by your physical senses, you’ll have no reason to believe in them. But those of us who have witnessed this intrusion will never not believe.

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The Night Stalks

After dad’s experience, my two sisters would occasionally wake everyone up with their screams. They reported seeing two columns of light “dancing” around each other in the upstairs hall… and then pirouetting from the hall into their bedroom. Nobody else witnessed this (and as far as I know, mom and my brother never experienced anything strange in the house).

Still later, my turn came. I mostly had physical experiences… but also saw a few apparitions. First were the closet doors. If I walked by one that was slightly ajar, it would open wider by itself… and then slam shut so violently, that if my fingers had been in the way, they would've been cut off. I became so scared of our closets that I did whatever I could to skirt through rooms as far from them as possible. But if I had to pass near one, it was guaranteed to snap at me.

At about the same time, the first of my apparitions appeared. I don’t know if I just picked up on something that had been occurring all along, but I certainly paid more attention after I noticed it. On some moonlit nights, when I looked out my bedroom window, I’d see a glowing blue woman floating across our back yard… trailing watery streams of blue-white light behind her. I couldn't take my eyes off her... and always feared that she would stop, turn, and stare back at me. But thankfully, she never did.

Then there was the night that I was having trouble sleeping (imagine that), and had tossed and turned for hours. In desperation, I finally flipped onto my stomach (a position I still don’t like). And almost immediately, something started pounding my back with vengeance. I froze stiff as a board, but could slowly turn my head… and there was nothing in the darkness on either side of my bed. By morning, most of my back was bruised.

My most shocking apparition, though, occurred around 3 AM another morning. I suddenly woke as my pillow started sliding out from under my head! It was creeping down through the opening between the mattress and my headboard, and I was more irritated than scared. So I pulled the pillow out, lay back down on it, and it again started creeping away. We went through this two more times before I yanked it furiously out of the opening

And that’s when something I can only describe as a “glittering blue death mask” floated up from behind the mattress, through the opening, and hovered between the headboard and my nose… facing me with its eyes closed. (Mine were wide open!) Again, I couldn’t move, and after perhaps a minute staring at each other, the expressionless head glided back down behind the mattress and vanished.

Meanwhile... Down in the Basement...

But I’ve saved the “best”… if you want to call it that... for last! I should preface it though. Dad was seriously obsessive-compulsive about dirt and dust on the ground and in the air. For that reason, we weren’t usually allowed outside when he was home… and the basement was strictly forbidden at all times. So naturally, on the few occasions when I found myself in the house alone, I’d hightail it down there!

Descending a long staircase, I'd pass the door to the garage. And continuing to the bottom, I'd find myself in a small stone alcove… with the washer and drier in front of me and a clothesline over my head. I then turned to the left to enter the unfinished basement.

And it was dirty down there… Grit covered the floor and dust coated boxes of dad's scientific magazines and doodads (like magnets, lenses, slide-rules, and micrometers). I loved rummaging through those boxes… seeing the treasures inside them. (Many years later, shortly before he died, dad told us that one of those boxes had contained a jar of powdered platinum. He apparently used it in his experiments. And you better believe that my sisters and I tried to find it. But we never did.)

There was also a big old wooden armoire in the corner opposite the boxes. It was there when we moved in. It was also locked, and when I asked mom about it decades later, she said that they never found the key, didn’t know what was inside, and that she didn't like the thing at all.

Shortly before we moved out, I also discovered that the wooden back wall of the toilet stall in the furnace room slid to the side! It hid a secret room big enough for one person to stand or sit and look out through a knothole in the sliding panel. I never knew why it was there.

But returning to the story, every time I walked under the clothesline to enter the basement, I always felt fear as I passed over one particular spot in the floor. As I crossed the spot, this feeling turned on and off like a light. And over the months, it annoyed me more and more. So one afternoon, when I was again alone in the house, I just stood in that spot... to “fight” whatever was there.

I lost.

As before, fear instantly kicked in and then grew until it froze me in place. As it morphed into full-blown terror, my body started shaking. And then the metal hangers on the clothesline above me started banging violently against each other. I must have left a contrail of dust as I streaked back upstairs... with those damned hangers still clanging below. And I never returned to the basement.

Time to Go

After years of such goings on, mom and dad finally decided to leave. We left the slamming doors, banging fists, apparitions, locked armoire, angry clothes hangers, and the terror spot in the basement floor for the next occupants. They were a lovely pair of “career women,” who we later learned stayed only a few months before they simply didn't return home.

In Google Maps and Street View, the house and neighborhood seem to have been preserved under a bubble for half a century! Mr. D’s house is still there. Still the same tiny little ranch. The psychic’s house is there too. And the neighboring houses still squat on bare grass yards with very little landscaping… while the gardens that mom lovingly planted all around our yard are now 50 years lusher, and almost completely block Google’s view.

Subsequent owners of the place have added a peaked roof and built an addition where the patio used to be. The roof was flat when we lived there. And when we asked neighbors if anyone had ever died in the house, they said that someone may have when its original roof blew off in a tornado. And that patio? I'm not sad to see it gone. Once, when I was standing in the french doors by the patio watching a storm, lightning demolished a nearby tree and blasted me unconscious into the fireplace across the living room. Just another close call!

Interestingly, the “Old Nichols’ Place”… an abandoned Victorian manse back in the woods that was rumored to be haunted… is also gone. Replaced by a water tower.

When my family drove away from Sharon Avenue for the last time, I assumed we were leaving haunts and other creepy things behind. I was wrong... and that’s for Part 2!

I've noticed that ads for various forms of Ouija Boards are appearing in this series of articles. As much as I hate to interfere with e-commerce, I feel that I must warn you to not mess around with them. We tried one once as kids (in the house after Sharon Avenue)... and as a result, one of my sisters has a seriously terrifying story to tell. Ouija Boards are not toys or amusements.