Haunted (2 page)

On a beautiful spring morning three months after we first saw it, we moved into the house. When we arrived, Mr. Ryan was still there, although all his possessions were gone. I found him standing in the dining room, staring out into the yard.

“Will you look at that,” Mr. Ryan said quietly as he gazed out the window.

“Is anything wrong?” I asked him.

“Oh, no dear,” he assured me. “It's just that my magnolia tree is finally blooming.”

“Oh,” I replied, not fully understanding the significance of that.

“We received that tree as a gift from my niece when we first moved into this house. Every year I hoped it would bloom like that, but it never did. In fact, it has hardly even grown at all since it was planted. I just came in here to have one more look around, and what do you know? It's in full bloom! That's a nice housewarming gift for you, isn't it?” The old man smiled rather sadly, then prepared to leave his home for the last time.

I looked out the dining room window and saw the small tree enveloped in gorgeous white blossoms.

“That must be a good omen,” I thought happily and began to unpack the first of our many boxes.

When Kammie came in, she too was greeted by a lucky sign. She found coins lying in the middle of the floors and on window sills and countertops, and she went around to all of the rooms picking them up. When the other two children realized what Kammie was doing, they too joined in on the treasure hunt. I was surprised at the number of coins they collected as I knew Mr. Ryan had hired a maid service to give the house a thorough cleaning before we arrived. I had not noticed a single coin anywhere, yet the children soon found them.

STEPS THROUGH TIME

D
uring
our first few months in the house, we were busy with non-stop renovations. We fixed the kitchen walls, floors, ceiling and cupboards. We finished the attic, put up new shutters, replaced all the windows, and added two new ones in an attempt to gain some much needed sunlight to brighten the dark interior.

I painted and wallpapered, choosing colours and patterns I imagined might have adorned the walls when the house was originally constructed. First, though, layer upon layer of ancient wall paper had to be removed. Nine different patterns had covered the foyer walls in the past ninety years. Even the ceilings had been wallpapered several times, and it was a tiring and painstaking job to remove it before fresh paint could be applied.

Returning the house to its original beauty became almost an obsession, one I had not experienced with the two other older homes Ted and I had owned. And I had only wanted to achieve a warm and “homey” feel in our last new home, which had been easily done using bright colours and contemporary furniture. That old house, in contrast, seemed to have a personality of its own, and I felt a strong desire to uncover and if necessary re-create its Edwardian era charm.

We still had not built the new family room or replaced the dilapidated shed in the backyard. Those projects had to wait until we could afford them, for we had encountered enough expensive problems. When the shag carpet had been pulled up from the floors prior to moving in our furniture, we discovered that someone had poured cement beneath the rug to affix it to the original oak flooring. Because of this damage, all the floors had to be professionally refinished. When that was completed, though they gleamed as they must have when first installed.

By the end of the first year, even before the redecorating was completed, it looked like an entirely different house. It had been transformed into a beautiful and charming Victorian home. It would take time before everything was decorated the way we wanted it, but I was prepared to work away, one room at a time, for as long as necessary. I left the girls' bedrooms and our master bedroom. Although the wallpaper in those rooms was not of our choosing, we could live with the patterns until all the other areas were finished.

Matt's bedroom, though, could not be put off. Its walls were a hideous grey-brown from years of dust, and cobwebs had needed to be swept from its corners when we had first moved in. It looked as if it had not been used for generations, which I thought very odd. Mr. Ryan had several children and grandchildren who had visited him regularly and surely he could have made use of the space. I could understand sealing off the attic, if only to save on heating costs, but why had that room been closed off as well?

I felt uncomfortable working in the room, but I thought it was simply because of its drab appearance. The atmosphere would be much nicer once it had been painted and decorated. My little boy wanted a hockey theme in the room, as that was his favourite sport, and I found the perfect border to match the paint and paper. The other rooms in the house were decorated in Victorian and Edwardian style, but the children had been allowed to choose whatever colour and pattern they wanted for their own bedrooms. Kammie wanted her room to look like a forest, and Rosa wanted teddy-bear wallpaper.

Matt's room looked completely different when I was finished. He was happy with its fresh look, but he had been drawn to that room even before it had been cleaned and redecorated.

It may have been because we were so busy those first few months, or perhaps we just assumed what we were hearing was the natural creaks and groans of an old house, but it was some time before Ted and I began to notice the sound of footsteps running down the stairs between the first and second floor. On many occasions we would sit in the living room after putting the children to bed and hear someone descend the stairs into the foyer, continue down the hall, and enter the kitchen. We always assumed it was either Kammie, Matt, or Rosa. I would order whomever it was to stop running on the stairs in case they fell. And Ted would sometimes call, “Come on out. We know you're up,” in case the child did not realize we knew they were out of bed and hiding in the kitchen. A glance, however, always revealed an empty stairway, and none of them ever appeared where we were seated.

Even the children remarked on hearing the sound of footsteps, but it did not bother them. It gradually became so commonplace that after a while we just accepted the peculiar noise and paid it little attention. Another oddity we all came to accept was the wonderful aroma of bread or cookies baking that mysteriously and frequently wafted through the house. It seemed to emanate from the kitchen even though I had nothing cooking in the oven. Even stronger was the distinctive smell of a wood-burning cook stove. Ted and Kammie noticed that phenomenon the most and would often comment on it.

Shortly after we began to hear the footsteps and smell those aromas, I tried to learn as much as I could about the previous owners of the house. I visited the local history section at the library and the downtown land registry office. Through that research, and conversations with elderly neighbours who had lived on the street for many years, I learned that the property had had seventeen different occupants, including us. Old telephone books proved to be a valuable source of information as they listed not only the address and name but also the owner's occupation and spouse's name. The town's newspaper, saved on microfilm, also provided a lot of detail, and I read as many back issues as I could.

One family had lived in the house for forty years, and another had resided in it for nine. Mr. Ryan had sold it to us after living there for two decades. Apart from those three families, all the other residents seemed to have come and gone rather quickly, and there were many years when the house had sat altogether vacant.

I knew the house had been built in 1903, as our home and several of our neighbours' houses had all been constructed in the same year. That fact was verified by many elderly residents and by the old town records. I could not establish who the land's original owner had been through the telephone directories at the library, as that form of communication had not yet existed at the time the property was sold. At the land registry office, however, I learned that on March 29, 1865, the property upon which the house now stood, which had once been Crown land, had been sold to a Mr. F. Lincoln. At that point, the town's small population had been growing steadily and there were a few industries, including a carriage factory, tannery, and mill.

Mr. Lincoln had kept the property until April 9, 1879, when he sold it to James Raye. On March 10, 1880, Mr. Raye, in turn, sold it to Walter Smit. By that time the property was only half an acre in size and the price paid was $450. The local economy was good, and based on newspaper advertisements from that period, eggs sold for only ten cents a dozen, a pound of tea, for less than forty cents, and flour, was six dollars a barrel.

By the time of Walter Smit's death, on June 23, 1903, the property had been divided into three small lots, each boasting a brand new house. Mr. Smit left the property to his son Walter Jr., who then sold the house we would one day own only a few days later to Robert Hudson for the sum of $2,150. Mr. Hudson kept the house for only four months, selling it on October 29, 1903, to Ivan Wards Jr. for a price that was illegible in the old record book.

Mr. Wards apparently left the house less than six months later. The records seemed to indicate that it had been repossessed by the financial institution that held the mortgage because the payments could not be honoured. Or Mr. Wards simply chose to walk away from his monetary obligation for some other reason and allowed the bank to repossess the house only half a year after purchasing it. His father must have decided to live there next. The house sat empty and the bank was unable to resell it to any other purchaser until July 29, 1905. On that date, for the bargain price of $1,300, someone named Ivan Wards Sr. became the next owner of the house.

Mr. Wards did not live there for any longer than his son did, however. After six months, he also moved out and sold the house in early January of 1906 to Mr. Evan Albertson for $2,600. At that time, automobiles were still quite a rarity and the nearest mechanic was over a hundred miles away. The central location of the house must have made it very desirable as it was only a short walk away from all the town's amenities. Those would have included the first movie houses, which, for a five-cent admission price, played silent films that were changed three times a week.

Four years later, on April 16, 1910, Fredrick Barker bought the property for $3,150. Mr. Barker and his wife lived there only until October 11, 1911, at which time they moved just two doors away, leaving the house vacant.

In April of 1912 the whole world was stunned by the tragic loss of the Titanic. But locally 1912 was a prosperous year, and the real estate market was booming. Still the house remained vacant. It was not until 1917 that William Neen became its next resident. His occupation was listed as baker and then as soldier. Apparently he was renting the house from the Barkers because the property remained in their name. When I saw that he had been a baker, I immediately thought of the aromas that teased us in the house, and the woodburning cook stoves that would have been used for baking in 1917.

Mr. Neen was not mentioned after the end of the World War I, and I wondered if he had ever come home again. Whatever might have been his fate, there was no record of a wife. The house remained vacant again until August 30, 1919, when Mrs. Barker, now a widow, finally sold it to a Mr. and Mrs. Ford for $3,050. That was less than she and her late husband had paid for it nine years before.

Of all the former owners of the house, the Barkers' actions intrigued me most. Why would they leave the house eighteen months after its purchase only to move two doors away into an identical house on the same street? The appearance, layout, and dimensions of the two houses were exactly alike. I could have understood their moving if the house two doors away had been larger, or had had a different floor plan, or if they had moved to a different location. But the only visible difference between our property and the one two doors away to which the Barkers relocated was that the lot was two feet wider.

What seemed even stranger to me was that the house had sat vacant for such a long time, given the neighbourhood's preferred location. That would have been the case even more so early in the century, with its close proximity to the downtown core. Other than the Barkers' eighteen-month residency and the one-year period in which it had been rented out to Mr. Keen, no one had lived in the house at all in the eight years the Barkers owned it. In a time when real estate sales were brisk and buyers were eagerly seeking houses, why could the Barkers not sell the house when they had no intention of using it themselves? And why did only one person rent it during that period when, according to an old newspaper article, housing was in such high demand? Finally, why, when Mrs. Barker was able to sell it, had she taken a loss on what they had paid for it several years before?

I went back to the library to do more research and noticed some strange patterns I had not noticed before. Not only had the Barkers abandoned the house after eighteen months to move two doors away, but the first two owners had also stayed for just a few months before moving within the same neighbourhood. Robert Hudson had lived there for only four months when he moved down the street, eight houses away. The next owner, Ivan Edwards Jr., stayed for six months before leaving, and he too bought another house right around the corner. Obviously those former residents liked the neighbourhood as they chose to remain in it. They must have liked the style of the home because their next ones looked identical. Why then had they not simply remained in the house?

Another unusual coincidence I detected was that, with only two exceptions, one of them being our family, every new owner of the house seemed to come from out of town. It seemed as if only strangers to the area, those unfamiliar with local history, were willing to purchase and then live on that property, but in most cases, not for very long. We had been in town for six years when we purchased the house, but we had not been very familiar with its local history either. Yet my search through the newspaper archives did not uncover any report of an unusual or tragic event ever taking place at that location.