by JL Bryan
“Is there any way it could have fallen on its own?” I asked. “Was it close to the edge? Sometimes, the condensation can make the counter slick--”
“No, no!” Toolie said. “It was moving fast, like somebody hit it.”
“That must have been scary.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Have you ever seen anything else like that happen in this house?” I asked.
“Of course. Chairs slide, doors slam, clothes fly out of the closets...” Toolie shook her head. “It’s been going on for months now.”
“It knocked over my....easel,” Gord said. “One time. Paints spilled all over...the bricks. I’ve seen it...move things around the house.”
“So many things have happened, I don’t know where to begin,” Toolie said. “And the kids have seen things, too, especially Junie.”
“Maybe it would help organize your thoughts if you showed us around the house,” I said. “Then we can identify any possible paranormal hotspots.”
“Hauntspots, we call them,” Stacey added with a grin. That wasn’t true. We’d never called them that, but I guessed Stacey would make it a point to use that word in the future, now that she’d gone and coined it.
“I’ll...wait here,” Gord said. “Want to finish...painting.”
“It’s looking really good,” I told him. He smiled after us as Stacey and I followed Toolie back into the high, narrow central hall that bisected the house.
“I didn’t want to say it in front of Gord,” Toolie whispered after closing the door. “But I’ve seen it.”
“What did you see?” I asked. I was pretty sure she meant an apparition, but I try not to ask leading questions.
“The ghost.” Toolie glanced down the hall and up the stairs. I could hear something like thumping and screeching from the second floor. “Never mind that, it’s just Juniper’s music. She’s in that teen rebel phase. Sounds scary, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. “Where did you see the ghost?”
“In the craft room upstairs,” Toolie said. “Listen, can y’all really get rid of ghosts?”
“In most cases, yes,” I told her.
“Good. Cause I can’t live in this house with this thing for one more day. I’ve had about enough.”
“Do you feel like your family is in danger?” I asked.
“Heck, yes,” Toolie said. “If it can throw furniture around, then it can throw us around, too.”
Then she led us into the spacious living room to tell us more about her ghosts.
Chapter Two
The living room, though enormous, was cluttered with too many antique chairs, tables, cabinets, and hutches, making it difficult to navigate. The walls were paneled in light blond wood, and the ceiling was fourteen feet above us, trimmed in thick but simple molding. A pair of tall windows looked out on the back yard, through sheer curtains that dampened the bright sunlight. Pilasters flanked the broad brick fireplace.
I noticed a giant, greenish stain on the ceiling, not far from the slowly revolving ceiling fan. Whatever had dripped down from the ceiling hadn’t exactly been Crystal Springs water. It was the color of slime topped with scum. Stacey took a picture.
“Was that one of the leaks you were talking about?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. There’s no pipes up there to cause any leaks,” Toolie said. “But that’s not all that’s happened in this room. The ghost’s been very busy down here.” She opened a door in a dark oaken cupboard, revealing a stack of board games. They had Monopoly, Candy Land, Risk, Clue, and a few other classics. “One night, I heard a ruckus down here about two in the morning. I found all these games pulled out, all over the floor. All mixed together. You had the Risk cannons rolling across Candy Land, the candlestick and revolver from Clue stuck into that red-nosed guy from the Operation game, the Community Chest cards scattered from here all the way to the windows.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t one of your kids?” I asked.
“Crane was sleeping over at a friend’s house,” she said. “Juniper said she didn’t do it, and why would she, anyway? She was up in her room, playing video games with her headphones on.”
I nodded, but the thirteen-year-old girl still sounded like a possible suspect to me.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“We’ll find the couch cushions all over the floor when nobody’s been in here. And the pictures! Look, it did it again!” Toolie gestured at a heavy mahogany end table full of framed pictures, mostly of their immediate family members, along with a few other people I assumed to be relatives or friends. Two of them were turned backward, facing the wall.
Toolie turned the pictures to face front again. Both were of her daughter Juniper, one in an elementary-school cheerleader uniform when she was six or seven years old, and another one showing her at ten or eleven, with braces, posed with a fist tucked under her chin. Like her mother, the girl had long brown hair and was a little pudgy. She looked like a friendly kid.
“It moves the pictures?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Some mornings, they’ll all be turned around, or they’ll be lying flat like somebody came and slapped them over in the night. It’s one of the things I used to blame on the kids, before I saw it for myself.”
“You saw the pictures move?”
“They do it when my back’s turned,” Toolie said. “But I’ll hear it. And I’ll be the only one in the room. Oh, and sometimes this T.V. turns on late at night, all by itself, and I have to come switch it off.” She gestured at the flatscreen on the wall. “Before that, it was the phonograph. It’s hand-cranked, so how could it go on by accident?”
“Can I see the phonograph?”
Toolie led me toward a reddish wooden cabinet with a crank built into the side and a thick layer of dust on the engraved lid. She raised the lid to show me the turntable within.
“We never use this thing,” Toolie said. “But the ghost does.”
“It plays records?” I asked.
“It used to, until it figured out how to work the TV.” Toolie shook her head and opened a drawer at the base of the cabinet, full of records dating back to the 1910’s, their paper wrappers yellowed and crumbling. “We’d hear this scratchy music in the middle of the night and have to come cut it off. Always these old records, this big-band stuff. It happened a few times. It stopped after the T.V went to flipping itself on instead.”
“And you’re sure none of this is done by the kids?” I asked.
“Not after the other things I’ve seen. And not after that night I came here and saw the T.V. switching channels all by itself, just clicking through one after another. I turned it off, but I didn’t tell nobody about it. Not for a while.”
“What else have you seen in here?”
“That’s the main things that have happened.” Toolie led us through the open double doors into a small library, the shelves crammed full of old volumes and small statues. Leather-upholstered chairs flanked the little brick fireplace, and a thickly piled ornate rug covered most of the hardwood floor. “Books sometimes fly off the shelves. Makes a racket.”
The library ceiling had two large, green stains, and the rug below it was discolored in the same areas.
“More of the strange leaks from nonexistent pipes?” I asked, and Toolie nodded.
The next set of double doors was closed—each room in the house seemed connected to the next by these double doors, but most of them were propped open like window shutters.
Toolie opened one door, but didn’t step through.
“This is a guest room, but Gord’s been sleeping here. The stairs are so hard on him.”
The room was crammed full of more antique tables and chairs, plus a four-poster bed with thick, dark columns of cherry wood.
“Does anything happen in there?” I asked.
“Sure. Things move. And the ceiling.” She pointed to more of the ugly green splotches. “Oh, but the biggest thing to happen on this floor was the dining room.” Toolie led us up the central hall to th
e long, tall room, lit by a row of high windows. An open pair of double doors led into the kitchen beyond.
The polished birch table could have seated twelve. A large copper and crystal chandelier hung above the table, and paintings adorned the walls, featuring men and women in fancy dress wear of the nineteenth century.
“One time we were having supper in here,” Toolie said. “We usually eat in the kitchen, but it was my husband’s birthday, so I was trying to do something nice, have a nice family meal together. Right in the middle of supper, all the paintings come crashing down off the walls. Some of the plates and things jumped right off the table and hit the floor. Smashed the china gravy boat to pieces—I haven’t mentioned that to my cousin. The china came with the house.”
“Everybody was sitting down?” I asked. “There was nobody out of the room, nobody else in the house?”
“Well, Juniper, she was running out the door in a huff,” Toolie said. “But she wasn’t nowhere near the paintings. And her plate jumped off the table, her silverware, along with the gravy boat and mashed potatoes. She was out in the hall by the time that happened.”
“Why was she running out?”
“Oh, she was upset about this boy...I guess it’s her boyfriend, but I don’t like to call him that. Dayton. He’s fifteen, for one thing, two years older than her and goes to high school, and Junie’s just going into the eighth grade in the fall. And he dresses like a thug, wears his sunglasses indoors, and he always smells like cigarettes. I mean, he’s a bad kid.”
“So you were fighting about her boyfriend?” I asked.
“Well, we was trying to tell her...again...that she wasn’t allowed to see him.” Toolie shook her head. “I knew supper was ruined as soon as we started talking about that boy.”
Stacey and I shared a look. We were probably thinking the same thing.
“What is it?” Toolie asked.
“Sometimes, when you have a young person, especially an adolescent girl, and there’s drama and stress, along with psychokinetic activity, objects moving by themselves...it’s not actually a ghost,” I said. “It’s a poltergeist.”
“Poltergeist!” Toolie’s eyes widened. “Like in the movies?”
“Sort of,” I said. “A poltergeist is created by a living person, usually a young person or child. It’s not created intentionally. Their emotions can create a psychic discharge, if that makes sense.”
“It doesn’t, really.” Toolie scratched her head.
“It’s like a ghost, but of a living person instead of a dead one,” I said. “It’s usually destructive, lashing out with all the feelings that person is suppressing. Anger, frustration, sometimes grief.”
“Wait, now. You’re telling me Juniper made this poltergeist? She’s the one who’s haunting this house?”
“That’s just one possibility,” I said. “But from your description, it’s something we have to consider. Have there been any other incidents with your daughter?”
“She says things move around in her room all the time,” Toolie replied. “Of course, I didn’t believe her at first.”
“Can we speak to her?”
“Come on up.” Toolie led us to the staircase, with three short flights that wrapped around the back end of the hall in a squarish spiral shape. The sound of angry industrial music grew louder as we climbed.
The stairs brought us to the upstairs hall, which had the same narrow, cluttered-with-furniture feeling as the one downstairs, but with a lower ceiling that had a number of the ugly green splotches. Tall windows from the stairwell area brought light into the hall from the back of the house, but there were no matching windows at the far end, just a solid doorway. The hall grew darker as we walked down it, toward the blasting music.
“You saw the ghost somewhere up here?” I asked Toolie, keeping my voice to a whisper since she hadn’t told the whole family about it.
“The...crafts room,” Toolie said. She pointed to the closed door at the very end of the corridor. The room beyond it would have been located directly above the foyer, at the front and center of the second floor looking out over the front garden. “Well, that’s what it was supposed to be, a place for Gord to paint and me to do my sewing and make decorations, but...it never really took off.”
“What do you mean?” I started toward the door, and Stacey walked with me. Toolie followed us slowly.
“Gord stays downstairs, mostly,” she said. “And I...I don’t know, I guess I never felt right in there.”
We crossed an intersection with a smaller, narrower hallway, which ran from one side of the house to the other. Both ends of that cross-hall featured a window and a flight of steps down to the first floor. The loud music came from a door down the hall to our left, which was decorated with construction paper featuring a skull and crossbones and the words EVERYBODY STAY OUT! in angry red letters.
“Do you think the shadowy man I saw in the craft room is a poltergeist?” Toolie whispered.
“A male-energy poltergeist?” I asked. “That would be very rare. I’m not sure I’ve heard of one before, actually, but it’s theoretically possible. Can we have a look?”
“Go ahead.” Toolie trailed behind us as I approached the door. As I drew close to it, a feeling of dread began to fill me from the inside out, from the pit of my stomach to the tips of my shaking fingertips.
Calm down, Ellie, I told myself. It’s just a freaking sewing room.
I looked at Stacey, and she nodded and swallowed. She felt something, too.
The handle was abnormally cold as I turned it and pushed the door open.
On the surface, the room beyond should have been fun and whimsical, and possibly the coolest room in the house. A row of windows looked out onto the front gardens and the street beyond, and a pair of tall, narrow glass doors led to the half-circle balcony out front. Floor-to-ceiling shelving and large cabinet doors were built into the other three walls.
Despite the copious amount of sunlight, shadows filled the room. I flipped the light switch, but nothing happened.
“Lights hardly ever work in there,” Toolie said from where she stood, several feet behind us in the hall.
Boxes and furniture were stacked along the walls. A big Singer sewing machine sat on a work table, surrounded by dusty fabrics. Little plastic bags of buttons and beads, also coated in dust, occupied a pigeonhole rack next to the sewing machine. Everything looked abandoned.
The room was cold. I wished I’d brought my Mel-Meter to check the temperature and electromagnetic energy in the room. My instincts told me something dark and malevolent dwelled here.
“What exactly did you see?” I asked Toolie, who still remained in the hall, clearly not wanting to enter the room.
“A couple weeks ago, I was carrying a basket of laundry up to my bedroom.” Toolie gestured at a door on the right side of the hall, which was the only door on that side, indicating that the master suite took up one quarter of the entire second floor. “When I came down the hall, I saw the door to the crafts room was open. That was strange, since it’s always closed and none of us ever go in there.
“So I looked inside, thinking I might see Crane getting into some mischief. My little boy wasn’t there. Somebody else was—or something else, I mean. It had the shape of a tall man, but it was all darkness, like it was made of smoke or shadows. No face, nothing, just darkness. He held something long and black in one hand. I can’t say for sure what it was, but it was like some kind of leather strap. Little bits of metal glinted all over it.
“Well, I froze right there on the spot. I should have been running or screaming to see a strange man in my house, but I also knew it wasn’t really a man, neither. I could feel him looking back at me, and I thought if I moved at all, he’d attack me like a startled snake. Or a hungry wolf. I can’t explain why I didn’t run, really, but the fear drained out all my go-juice.”
“That sounds terrifying,” I said, looking around the dark corners and the big cabinet doors. Some of those doors were big
enough to conceal a person inside.
“After a minute—it couldn’t have been much more than that, though it seemed to last hours, me and that thing staring at each other—he just up and vanished. Didn’t move one way or another. He was gone so fast it made me wonder if it was all in my mind, and maybe I was going crazy. Then that door slammed itself shut!” Toolie pointed at the doorway between us. “That’s when I could finally run. Just dropped the laundry basket and scooted off downstairs, but I didn’t know how to explain it to anybody else. That was the last straw for me, though. I knew there was something bad in this house, something that meant to hurt us. That’s when I got on the stick about finding some help, and I ended up getting in touch with y’all.”
“Have you seen the dark figure again?” I asked.
“No, but I always get a bad feeling from that room now. Always kind of did, come to think of it, but of course it got worse after that.”
I looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t see any water stains here.”
“Huh?” Toolie stepped closer to the doorway and looked up. “Yeah, I guess we haven’t had any leaks in there. About the only room in the house where that’s true.”
“What else has your family experienced up here?” I asked.
“I’ve heard things in the attic a few times.” Toolie backed up and pointed to one of the doors on her left, across from the single door to the master bedroom. Stacey and I joined her, closing the door behind us and trying not to look too eager to run out of the cold, creepy room.
“Bumping, a couple of footsteps...laughing, one time,” Toolie continued. “High-pitched, like a woman or child. The worst was a few months ago, March or so. I was lying in my bed, and I heard a crash in the attic, and then a bunch of little bumps. It sounded like something was coming down the attic stairs. Then it got quiet. I don’t believe I got back to sleep that night, but I didn’t dare get up and try to see what was happening.
