Haunted (16 page)

“Oh, my,” I said and forced a smile. “And what did they look like?”

“One was a little boy and the other one was a bigger girl,” Rosa replied. “I think they were brother and sister because they looked like each other and both of them had the same kind of yellow hair.”

“Did they talk to you?” I asked.

“Nope. They just stood there and waved to me, and then they were gone. But I really did see them, and I know they were angels.”

“I think they were too. Did it surprise you to see them standing there?” I asked softly as I brushed her hair back from her eyes.

“Kind of,” Rosa said. “I was laying in my bed and looked out the door into the hall because I thought Matt and Kammie were coming to see me. When I saw who was standing there, I knew it wasn't them.”

“Have you ever seen them before?” I asked.

“Nope. Just last night. But it was like they knew me, like they were my friends. They waved to me as if they really liked me,” she smiled at the memory.

“Well, who wouldn't like a nice little girl like you?” I said as I cuddled her up in my arms. Rosa squealed with laughter and tried to wriggle out of my embrace.

She had not mentioned seeing the girl who waved to her from her bedroom window for a long time, but I knew she would remember her. Those two spirits must have been different entities or she would have recognized the girl and said so.

I thought of the times over the past few weeks when Rosa had insisted she had heard a little boy calling for his mother. She had entered kindergarten the previous autumn but was only in school during the mornings. In the afternoon, on several occasions, Rosa had asked me, “Didn't you hear him call ‘Mommy!'? It was really loud. Like when Matt calls you if something is wrong and he needs you to help him.”

I did not hear the voice, and would explain that to Rosa. It did remind me though of the one time both Rosa and I had heard a child calling for his mother when Matt and Kammie had been home for lunch, and we had mistakenly thought it was Matt calling for me. Shortly after that, I had seen the little boy in gray running through the foyer.

After hearing Rosa's description of the children who appeared at her door the previous night, I wondered if it was the same boy I had seen that day and the girl both Kammie and I had sighted on separate occasions. Perhaps it was the same little boy whom Rosa repeatedly heard calling for his mother. At that thought, I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness that any child should be lost from their parent.

Several days later Rosa called me into her bedroom to tell me she had heard a girl singing. She asked me if Kammie had come home early from school. I told her the children were not due home for another hour yet. I thought her hearing someone singing was only wishful thinking on her part. I knew how much she missed her brother and sister when they were not home to play with her.

As we were leaving her room to head downstairs, I noticed one of Rosa's dresser drawers was opened. I sent her back to close it before she joined me. As I started down the stairway, Rosa called to me again. I went back up and found her standing in her doorway, pointing to the dresser.

“Mommy!” she gasped. “It closed by itself!”

I looked to where she was pointing and saw that the dresser drawer was now closed tightly. It took me a moment to realize, though, that Rosa had not had enough time to go back into her room, close the drawer, and run to the doorway to call me in the second or two that had elapsed.

I stared at the dresser in disbelief. Apparently it had closed by itself, and I was just as surprised as my daughter.

“Did you see it close?” I asked Rosa.

“No, but I heard it when I got to the door,” my little girl said.

The two of us stood in the doorway for another moment, staring at the dresser.

“I think that angel did it for me,” Rosa finally said.

“What angel?” I asked.

“The one I heard singing before, remember? I thought it was Kammie, but I guess it was an angel,” she said calmly.

I nodded at her and looked again at the dresser. The musical ballerina figurine that stood atop it suddenly turned on, and “The Nutcracker Suite” filled the room as the china dancer spun around and around in time with the music.

Rosa gasped audibly but seemed more delighted than scared by those bizarre events. Whereas Matt had been frightened by his first encounters with the spirits, Rosa appeared to feel fortunate to be having such extraordinary experiences. She seemed to accept the existence of the “angels” as a simple fact of life, and it never occurred to her that there was anything to fear from them.

POWER PROBLEMS

I
t
was a very hot day near the end of summer, and the children and I were eating lunch in the family room. The stereo was on in one corner, while a fan cooled the air in the room. When I heard a knock at the front door, I left the children eating and went to answer it.

I opened the door to the electrical inspector, who introduced himself and explained the reason for his visit. Although the new room had been completed for quite some time, he had not yet inspected the site to check on the wiring's safety.

Knowing that the electrical service in the new room worked perfectly well, I expected it to take only minutes for him to see that everything was fine. I took him directly to the basement so that he could see the new electrical panel box. Everything seemed to be in order, and we went up to the family room so he could check the outlets. Since it was such a sunny day, no lights had been turned on, but I realized when we entered the room that both the fan and the stereo had stopped working.

“Who turned those off?” I asked the children.

“No one,” Kammie explained. “As soon as you went to get the door the fan and stereo just stopped working.”

I looked over at the inspector, but I did not know what to say. He could see the vacuum cleaner that I had used just that morning standing in the corner. It was obvious the fan had been on, as it was too hot to sit in a room with southern exposure on such a sunny day and not be uncomfortable without circulating the air. The power obviously had been working properly just prior to his inspection, but it now was off. He examined the various outlets in the room and went back downstairs to check the panel box again. No fuse had blown and everything on the panel box was in perfect order. No other room in the house was affected, and the man was completely baffled.

“I've been doing this job a long time,” he told me, “but I've never seen anything like this. I really can't tell what's causing this problem.”

I immediately thought of the times in the past when the stereo had turned on by itself but could not bring myself to admit those incidents to a stranger. I hoped the inspector would find a logical, scientific reason as to why the room suddenly had no power.

“Bill Watson was the electrician?” he confirmed with me.

“That's right. He updated the electrical service for the entire house when he did the new wiring.”

“You better get in touch with him and explain that you have a problem here. I'll be back after he's has taken care of it.”

I called the electrician and told him what had happened. When he came to our house later that afternoon, he was as bewildered as the inspector had been. He could find no reason for the loss of power, and nothing he did seemed to help. While the electrician was there trying to fix the problem, I quickly took the children shopping for a new light fixture for the foyer that I wanted him to install. Perhaps it was only an electrical problem that caused it to turn on and off by itself.

When we returned home, the electrician was packing up his tools. I could hear music from the stereo playing in the family room and knew the electricity had been restored.

“What was wrong with it?” I asked.

“I still don't know,” he answered truthfully. “I went out to the truck to get something, and when I came back in, everything seemed to be working fine. I never did anything, and I still can't figure out what the problem was.”

I thought I knew what might have caused the power outage but said nothing. I showed Bill the new Victorian-style fixture for the foyer and asked if he could install it in place of the old one before he left. I was pleased with how it looked when he was done.

“The old one always turned on and off,” Rosa told the electrician.

He smiled at my little girl, not understanding what she meant. “You won't have any problems with this one,” he assured her.

When Ted got home from work I told him about the electrical problem we had experienced in the family room earlier that day. He walked around the room and checked the light switches and outlets, but everything was now working properly.

The inspector came back the following afternoon, and as I walked towards the front door to let him in, I quietly asked whomever was listening not to fool around with the electricity again. The inspector was pleased to see that the power had been restored, and he quickly completed his inspection.

To my relief, the new light in the foyer did seem to work much better. It remained on when it was turned on, and off when it was turned off. In fact, for a while after that, everything seemed normal again in our home.

On November 11, Remembrance Day, Rosa and I were walking past a shop downtown where a display had been set up to commemorate the local soldiers who had fought in World Wars I and II. As we stopped to look at the old photographs and news clippings, a name from the list of soldiers killed in action caught my eye. It was that of William Neen, the soldier who had rented our house in 1917 from the Barkers. He had died in World War I, just as I had thought when I had researched the house and found no further record of him.

That night, after the children were in bed, Ted and I watched a television program about Flanders Field. I told Ted about William Neen and explained that he had been killed in action overseas during the war. As I did so, the new light in the foyer went out. We looked at one another, exasperated at having gone to the expense of replacing the fixture only to have the same problem. When I went into the foyer to look at the fixture, however, I realized that only three of the four light bulbs had gone out and apparently needed replacing.

The next day, after purchasing new light bulbs, I went to the basement and got the ladder I would need to reach the foyer light. When I looked at the bulbs still in the fixture, it was no longer possible to tell which had burned out. When I had inspected the light the previous night, and even that morning, I could clearly see three that were blackened. When I had returned home from the store, just moments earlier, the fixture had still had only one working bulb. But now, as I stood on the ladder examining the light, all four bulbs appeared to be fine. I got down off of the ladder and turned the hall light switch on to confirm which bulbs needed replacing. All four of the bulbs lit up, and it was no longer necessary to replace any of them.

That became the new pattern of the foyer light. It would not turn on and off completely as it had with the old fixture, but periodically, one, two, three, or all four bulbs would appear to burn out and would remain that way until an attempt was made to replace them. Then, as soon as the ladder was brought up from the basement in readiness to restore the light's brightness, all four bulbs would begin to work flawlessly once more.

The telephone also began to cause us some frustration. At first we thought we were the random target of a prank caller and gave little attention to the frequent and annoying hang-ups we received. When the phone calls disturbed us up to twenty times a day, for days at a time, it eventually became a real nuisance. They would stop for a while, only to begin again with equal persistence. We bought a new telephone that featured caller identification, but that did not solve the problem. Whomever was dialing us registered as “unknown caller,” and when we picked up the receiver, no one was ever there.

It took a while for me to wonder whether there was a connection between the problem with the telephone and the other occurrences in the house, but I began to think that perhaps that was possible. On some days the telephone would not ring at all except for the “unknown” calls, yet several family members and friends would tell us upon reaching us on another day that they had tried to call many times. The calls would go through, they all said, ring several times, and then the line would go dead as though they had been disconnected. We were also unable to call out on our line during those periods. It was impossible to get a dial tone, as though the phone line had been disengaged.

Although Ted took the new telephone back to the store and explained the problems we were having, the retailer's inspection revealed nothing wrong. There was no reason for the telephone not to work properly.

Of all the unusual occurrences in our home, the disturbance with the telephone seemed to have the most negative effect on me. Each time it would ring, a knot would tighten in my stomach from the stress. It unnerved me so much that I began to want to leave the house once and for all. For Ted, it seemed no worse of a prank than turning the light or stereo on or off or making his beer erupt in his face. But to me it felt like a real violation of our peace. It was a frequent reminder that something very strange was happening in our home, that we could not control or stop.

THE BASEMENT FLOOD

T
ed
listened quietly as I talked to him late one night about my serious wish to leave the house. I had tried to adjust to the occurrences in our home, and the children seemed happy living there, but I had reached a point where I no longer felt comfortable being alone in the house. I was constantly looking over my shoulder to see if someone was watching me. It was too unsettling, and I did not want to remain in such an atmosphere.

Ted took my concern seriously. “We could build a house in that new subdivision on the west side,” he suggested.