by Noel Hynd
GHOSTS
2014 Edition
By Noel Hynd
(Six reasons to leave the light on at night)
The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd:
Ghosts
Cemetery of Angels
Rage of Spirits
A Room for the Dead
The Lost Boy (Spring - Summer 2014)
The Prodigy
Visit the author at [email protected]
Copyright © 2014 by Noel Hynd
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Originally published as ISBN 0-7394-4575-8
For the late Alan Hamburger
(1946-2004)
Your many friends will
Miss you forever
Author’s Note to the 2014 Edition:
Ghosts was originally published in 1993, with no advertising and little fanfare. Gradually, over the years, it has become a modern classic of supernatural literature, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. First published in mass market paperback; it was eventually republished in hard cover by the Literary Guild editions fifteen years after its initial appearance.
It just won’t go away.
Needless to say, I’m grateful.
But I’m frequently asked: How did I come to write so chilling a book? At the time I was doing nicely as an author of spy stories. What prompted me to switch gears for several years and delve into the world of spirits?
The explanation is complicated. First, at the time, the Berlin Wall had come down and I felt completely written-out on the subject of espionage. I needed a break, a change. I had a wonderful editor at the time named Wally Exman and with Wally’s company I had a contract for several novels.
I was a fan of writers like Peter Straub, Dean Koontz and Stephen King (who wasn’t? who isn’t?) and I wanted to see if I could enter their territory.
Wally asked me what I would write about.
“Well,” I said, “there’s this house I stay in during summers in Nantucket. And you get a funny feeling sometimes in that house.”
Wally laughed. He had a house on Cape Cod. And there was a ghost occasionally in his place, he said. Not only had he seen it but several of his visitors, without being prompted, had asked, “Who’s the lady upstairs?” after passing a front staircase on the way to the downstairs washroom and seeing a gentle figure on the next floor. So Wally understood. We were off to a good start. Careful readers will note the “Eksman” Paranormal Collection of literature at Harvard University mentioned in the text, a typical “in joke” of a snarky writer.
But back to the house…
The house I stayed in was first built in the early 1600’s. It is often confused with Nantucket’s famous “oldest house.” It actually could be the oldest house and it is without question one of the two or three oldest ones on the island. To put it in perspective, Benjamin Franklin’s mother was born on Nantucket. This house, or parts of it, had been there for several decades when she was born.
Here’s how it looks today in 2014.
It is a beautiful place – someone’s private home.
But what I also remember was the….uh…atmosphere.
People who live year round in Nantucket are always telling ghost stories. Everyone has a few. I started listening to these stories and began to put them in order to write a novel. When I told people what I was working on, often they would say, “Ah! Well, you know what happened to me?”
So I started weaving these stories together, disguising just enough to protect the privacy of those who had related their tales. Then I started to pick up vibrations from the house itself. I would work late nights in the attic where I had an early Apple set up. And there would be creaks in the floorboards, taps at the windows, but no one was there. (Thank God!) Eventually, I would have the abiding and relentless sense that I was not alone.
Sometimes one would walk into a room and see a chair rocking very gently, as if someone had just left. Once in a while one could have sworn one had just heard a voice in the next room. On one occasion, a “female figure in white” walked through a bedroom where my wife was sleeping. She fled the room and had issues with that room ever afterwards. I didn’t see it, but to this day I believe my wife saw….something.
I had one very memorable incident myself that haunts me, if you’ll pardon the expression, to this day.
I was in the habit of going out for a three mile run late in the afternoon. In the summer, often fog descends on Nantucket at that hour. On one specific day, my run had ended and I was walking the final hundred yards back to the house. A voice called out to me. “Noel! I’m over here!”
I stopped short. It sounded like either my wife or my mother, more like the latter than the former. And it was so distinct that when I returned to the house, I asked my wife if she had been out looking for me or had called to me.
She said no. I shrugged it off.
I wouldn’t have thought about it again except three days later my mother died. And the voice had come out of the old Quaker cemetery on upper Main Street.
“I’m over here.”
Make of it what you will.
What follows is, of course, a novel, so certain fictional liberties have been taken: specifically with some of the geographic locations on the island of Nantucket, as well as with the people of the island. Cort Street does not exist by that name, for example, nor do a pair of detectives-with-attitudes like Rodzienko and Gelman. The truth about haunted houses on the island, however, may be stranger than any novelist could imagine.
Relax, enjoy, and keep the lights on tonight.
—Noel Hynd
Culver City, California
November 2013
You could get
lost delving into the
other side of life.
—St. Jude
Part One
The Discovery
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.
—THE EPISTLE OF PAUL TO THE ROMANS
Chapter One
Rev. George Andrew Osaro glanced at his watch. It was five minutes past nine on the sweetly pleasant summer night of June 21, 2013. In the downstairs meeting hall of the Christ and Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Nantucket, Massachusetts, Reverend Osaro moved the evening’s symposium toward its conclusion.
“I think we just have time for our last three stories,” he said, surveying his audience. “Why don’t we proceed?”
On this evening, the minister sat on a stage at the front of the crowded hall. He was a short wiry man, half of European ancestry and half of Japanese. He had short dark hair, a clear fresh face and big round glasses that gave him an owlish look. He sat at the center of a long table, flanked by three panel participants on each side and glanced at two women and a man seated in chairs nearby. His left hand found his pipe, which had sat all evening on the table before him. His right hand found a tobacco pouch and as he spoke he deftly packed a briar with thumb and forefinger.
“Who wants to proceed? Mary?”
At the end of the table a woman named Mary Rovere nodded. “Spiritual Nantucket” was the topic of the evening. “Ghosts on Our Island” was the subtitle. On a stage before an audience were seven people who had, as Osaro might have explained it, experienced the paranormal here on Nantucket Island. Interacted with spirits. Or at least one spirit. Or, at the very least, they all thought they had. George Osaro was a maverick. He used church space to stage an evening of fascinating creepiness, an extravaganza delving into a possible existence other than this one. A
nd why not? Osaro had charged five dollars apiece to tourists and residents, had put ads in the local papers and had induced the radio stations on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard to mention it as a public service. After all, it was a church benefit. He had also put up posters on the supermarket bulletin boards and had drawn one hundred sixteen paying customers. Osaro might have made an excellent advance man for a gubernatorial candidate.
So what if this was small-time show biz in a church hall? Reverend Osaro had painlessly netted in excess of five hundred dollars for his parish. Nantucket was an old island rattling with new money, distant generations and creaking houses. If the distant generations and creaking houses could induce the tourists and summer people to redistribute some of that new money into his church’s coffers, was that such a crime?
Ghost.
A profanity in the minister’s presence would pass unnoticed. An obscenity would breeze past him as well. But “ghost” was one word Osaro disdained.
Spiritual: This was the term Reverend Osaro preferred. Ghosts, he argued, were shapeless white cartoon characters like Casper, or bad actors wearing white sheets in old Charlie Chan movies, or a double image on a television screen. Spirits, on the other hand, were those grand, buoyant, immeasurable, indefinable things that exist within all of us, only to be liberated after one’s earthly demise. Sometimes they hung around for a while on their way “somewhere else.” That was what the good minister said. And that’s what this evening was about. Well, it was his theory, anyway, and it didn’t strain his Christian orthodoxy all that much, either.
For that matter, his Christian beliefs were a large part of it. Osaro constantly endeavored to interpret the afterlife and find the many possible permutations of it in terms of accepted church doctrine.
Yet here again was his penchant for packing an auditorium. The subtitle of the convocation: “Ghosts on Our Island.” The term “ghost” was a bow in the direction of salesmanship. Osaro wanted people to know that if they came and dropped their five bucks into the collection box in the front hall, they could hear seven crackling good “ghost stories” directly from the people who had lived them.
“Ready, Mary?” George Osaro asked.
“Ready,” she said.
Mary Rovere spoke of a house she and her husband had inherited four decades earlier. She was a plump woman with glasses, middle-aged and remorselessly middle brow. She was unfashionably coiffed and dowdily dressed. She had been an island summer resident for forty years, which was part of her story.
“I have to tell you,” Mary said. “When it happened, I was absolutely terrified. Why wouldn’t I be? I was looking at a man who I knew to be dead. Yet there he was. In my bedroom. Right in front of me.” She drew a breath. “And he was trying to tell me something.”
Then she backtracked. It began, she said, a flat thirty years earlier. She was sixteen years old at the time, sitting in the bedroom in the Nantucket house that her family still owned. The house itself was a matter of contention.
“My grandfather was from Germany,” she announced. “He was a very old-fashioned man named Hein Reich Schumacher. He had come to America with a sister named Bettina around nineteen ten. They settled on Nantucket.”
Osaro carefully lit his pipe and drew deeply upon it. A puffy white cloud enshrouded him. Mary drew a breath and eased into her tale.
“All his life, Grandpa was very distrustful of everyone, particularly in the new world. He had also had a very bitter falling out with Bettina. Eventually, she married and moved to Milwaukee. Their parents died in Germany, then the brother and sister each claimed the other had cheated them. How or why, I don’t know. I don’t even know who was right. What I do know is that Grandpa, after he retired from the business of importing textiles, didn’t want to be alone. My mother was his only child and was divorced. So Grandpa invited us to move into the house here on the island. Mother assumed he owned it outright. There was never a problem until soon after he died.”
Death always has a way of complicating things. So it was in Grandfather Schumacher’s case as well. First off, no one could locate the old man’s will. And then there was the main event. Bettina’s side of the family hadn’t communicated with Schumacher for decades, Mary said. When he died, the family was notified, but no one came to the funeral. Only then, after Grandpa was laid to rest, did they decide that they loved him. Or at least, the family’s lawyers loved what they thought he might have left behind.
“When Grandpa passed away, his sister claimed that she and her brother had bought our house jointly in nineteen eleven. A trip to Town Hall actually bore out that part of her claim. Bettina had only allowed her brother to live in the house, argued their lawyers, out of the goodness of her heart. But now that Heinrich Schumacher was dead, some other arrangement would have to be made. The lawyers suggested that Mary’s mother pay Bettina’s family half of the fair market value of the house to settle the claim. That, or sell it, move out and split the proceeds.
“We didn’t have the money for that. Mother was a bank teller. We barely had money for a lawyer.”
Mrs. Rovere sipped from a glass of water. “Grandpa had always said that he had bought out her share. But he had never produced a document,” she continued. “The dispute grew nasty. So Bettina’s family hired a local lawyer, filed suit against us and, over the course of several months, tried to evict us. Mother used to sit at the kitchen table and cry. It looked as though we were on our way out of our own home. ‘Your grandpa would be rolling in his grave if he knew what was going on,’ she used to say.”
Mary drew a breath. As it turned out, she said, Grandpa was doing more than rolling.
“I was in bed reading one night when I was sixteen years old,” she said. “This was in nineteen fifty-six. Uh oh,” she said, laughing slightly. “I just gave away my age.”
Some laughter went around the audience.
“It was late,” she continued, “and my mother was asleep in the next room. I put down the book and I turned off the light. But this strange feeling came over me. I couldn’t sleep. My eyes caught the glimmer of something in the room with me. Let me tell you. I nearly jumped out of my skin. In the darkness, I saw this bright figure materialize through a wall about six feet from me. Then it stopped before my bed. It was in the shape of a man. Then I realized: I was looking at Grandpa. I recognized this flat hat and big long topcoat that he always wore. He was standing there in the dark room looking at me. Somehow, I could see his eyes! Oh, I could feel him there! You know how you just know that there’s someone in a room with you?” There were a few nods around the church meeting hall. “No doubt about it. I sat up real fast in bed and turned on the light. But nothing was there. He was gone.”
Mary paused. She smiled ruefully.
“Now, I’m the first to tell you: Right away I tried to convince myself that I’d dreamed it. I told myself I had. But I finally fell asleep with the lamp on that night. I didn’t want any more visitors.”
Mrs. Rovere reached again for the glass of water that was on the panelists’ table in front of her. She sipped, then continued. “It happened again a week later. Same vision. Late at night. Coming through the same stretch of woodwork. I reached over, turned on the light, and everything was gone again. Yet the second time, it didn’t unnerve me as much. Somehow I didn’t sense any danger. Yet I also knew. Something important was unsettled. So it would happen again.”
Reverend Osaro broke the mood a little by interrupting. “Did you mention to your mother that this had happened?”
“No,” Mary Rovere said. “I was afraid. Well, you know how it is. Mother was upset enough. And anyway, I didn’t know if she would believe me.”
“So it did appear again? This spirit?” Osaro asked.
“This was the third and final time,” Mary said. “It was about a week later. And it coincided with the time when the fight between the two families was about to go to court. Lawyers and lawsuits…” She shook her head. “Very unpleasant stuff. I hated all of it.”
<
br /> “Everyone does,” Osaro concurred.
“I don’t really know how Grandpa communicated with me when he appeared the third time,” Mary said. “I don’t remember his lips moving. But I do remember him telling me something.” She drew a deep breath. “This time, I was half expecting him. So I rose. Sure enough, I opened my eyes and I saw him. He was dark, but sort of shining. He came right through the wall, just as he had the two previous times. He approached my bed. I remember I was sweating now because this was the first time he’d drawn so close. But then suddenly, everything seemed all right. It was my grandfather, after all. When I remembered how much we had loved each other I was completely over my fear. And he had something to tell me.”
Somewhere in the very still meeting hall, someone coughed. “Again, I reached for the light,” Mary said, continuing. “He moved toward me very quickly. He was so close that his face was within a few feet of mine. I will never forget that view. It’s still with me today.”
Mary shook her head. “My grandfather’s face. It seemed solid, yet I could see what was on the other side of it. I worked up the nerve to reach for the lamp. Not because I wanted to chase him away, but because I wanted to see him better. Then I felt his hand on mine. Oh, that hand! That touch! I would have recognized my grandfather’s hand anywhere. But it was cold. Like snow is cold. And yet, he communicated to me that everything was all right. He was there to help Mom and me. So I moved my hand back to the bed and he released me. He stepped back. With a very theatrical motion, he opened this big long black coat that he must have worn for thirty years. It was black serge and I think it had come on his back from Germany. In any case,” she laughed wanly, “he always wore it in his lifetime so why shouldn’t he wear it in death?” To Mary’s left, Reverend Osaro smiled.
