Haunted (5 page)

“No, we didn't learn anything about that. I'm not sure why, but I just had a feeling about it. Something made me want to look there for a special buried treasure. It was like I knew it was out there somewhere,” Kammie said. “And I finally found it.”

The last item Stuart found for Kammie was an antique glass button that had been buried close to the other items in the yard. I took it from him to clean before it joined the other objects Kammie now owned. He also found several bones in another location. When he mentioned that to us, quietly, so the children could not overhear, I felt my stomach tighten.

“What kind of bones?” I asked, dreading the answer, for I remembered something Donelle had told us.

After Kammie had shown her the items found in our yard, Donelle had reciprocated by showing us an arrowhead that she had found and kept from her own property and explained that our neighbourhood had once served as a Native encampment. In fact, one of the oldest homes in town, built in the mid-1800s, was near our house, and you could still see the original heavy wooden shutters inside the windows that had been installed to protect its inhabitants from any possible attack. Its close proximity to the encampment and the fact that the house had been built on Native land had obviously caused its owner to nervously expect a retaliation that never came.

Given Stuart's discovery, I was afraid that our house might have been built on an ancient burial ground. Ted knew exactly what I was thinking and asked Stuart to show him what he had found. When Ted saw the bones, it seemed evident to him and to all the other men at the site that they were actually the remains of a large animal, probably a horse. I was greatly relieved that they were not human bones, of course, but was still unhappy that an animal carcass had been buried right by our back door. Ted assured me that the partial skull and two leg bones were probably from the time long ago when our neighbourhood had been farmland.

I never did see the bones. They were put into a truck along with other debris and then removed from the site by the contractor. And, as I had hoped, no more were ever found.

During the week that the contractors were digging, the frequency and intensity of strange occurrences increased inside the house. I did not immediately connect the two, but it soon became obvious that the construction of the addition had triggered that increase. We had been living in the house for two years, and had only experienced a few odd events in that time that could not be logically explained. Those although unnerving, were easily forgotten in the long intervals between their occurrence. During those periods, we were a happy family living in a lovely home and our life seemed perfectly normal. But, with the construction of the addition, our household stopped seeming “normal” altogether.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT

A
short time after the construction began, we were all awakened late one night by the shrill sound of a smoke detector. Ted and I quickly leaped out of bed to establish which of our many alarms was signalling the warning. The screech was coming from the alarm in Matt's room. Though we could detect no trace of smoke, the detector relentlessly sounded, and Ted had to dismantle it and remove the battery before it fell silent. As it was a fairly new detector, and we had recently replaced all the batteries in the alarms on the weekend we switched to daylight-saving time, we could not figure out why it had malfunctioned. It took a while for us all to get back to sleep after that incident.

The next day I purchased and installed a new battery for the alarm in Matt's room, in case the old one had been faulty. That night, however, I was once again disturbed from a sound sleep when Matt suddenly began calling for me. I went into his room and found him sitting up in his bed, looking very frightened. He was so upset that I had to hold him on my lap and calm him before he could tell me what was wrong.

“Did you have a bad dream?” I asked him, assuming a nightmare had frightened him. He shook his head and clung to me tighter. “Try to tell me what's wrong,” I said softly.

“I woke up,” he said quietly.

“Yes, you woke up,” I said. “What frightened you?”

“I woke up,” he began again. “And there was a lady sitting on my bed looking at me!”

I stared at him for a moment. Obviously something had terrified Matt, yet I wanted to believe he had only imagined that vision. I did not want to consider that the ghostly image I had seen was still present in our house.

“What did she look like?” I asked him.

“I think she was a church lady,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled by that description.

“You know, those ladies with the long hats, like in the movie? She looked like that,” Matt tried to explain.

I realized he was referring to the film The Sound of Music, which we had recently watched on television.

“Do you mean a nun?” I asked.

He nodded his head.

As we had watched the movie only a few days earlier, I thought it might be possible that Matt's memory of seeing the nuns in the film had triggered a similar dream.

“Were you dreaming about a nun and then woke up and thought you saw her?” I asked.

“No,” my little boy said, firmly shaking his head. “I felt someone sit down on my bed and it woke me up. When I turned around to see who it was, there was a church lady sitting where you are.”

I knew he was telling the truth. I also realized that the woman I had seen had been dressed very much like a nun. I had assumed she was a nurse, but the veil and the cloak could have been a nun's habit or might at least be mistaken for one.

I wanted Matt to know that I believed him, but I also hoped to make him feel safe.

“Did she look friendly?” I asked.

“She wasn't smiling,” he whispered fearfully. Unlike my sighting of the woman, Matt had obviously been able to see her face. If I had been terrified by the sight of her figure before me in the doorway, how frightened my little boy must have been, waking up to see a strange woman on his bed, staring down at him, while the rest of the family was sound asleep in other rooms.

I brought Matt into our room and let him sleep at the foot of our bed in his sleeping bag. He fell back to sleep almost immediately, but I was unable to rest at all.

The next morning, after Matt and Kammie had left for school and Rosa was happily watching cartoons, I went into Matt's room and sat on the edge of his bed. In the bright light of day it looked like a typical little boy's bedroom, with wallpaper featuring hockey players, toys and books scattered about, and artwork covering the dresser and bookcase. Yet I could not forget the fright I had seen on Matt's young face the night before. Now that one of my children had been affected, I was much more angry than afraid of whatever it was that was present in our home. I decided to try to talk to whomever or whatever had sat down on his bed.

“I won't have you scaring my children,” I said, speaking just loud enough to make myself heard but not to disturb Rosa in the living room below. “Maybe this used to be your home, but we live here now. I don't want you making your presence known to us any more,” I said firmly.

The house seemed calm and quiet after I had spoken to this presence, and we all slept through the next few nights undisturbed. Then Matt called out to me once more in the night, and I again went in to comfort him. When I entered his room, he mutely pointed to the door near his bed that led up to the attic. Always firmly closed at night, it now stood wide open.

“The door opened up all by itself,” he told me nervously.

I closed the door, made sure it was properly latched, and then sat down on his bed.

“Who opened the door?” he asked.

“I think it just wasn't closed properly and swung open on its own. Things like that can happen in an old house,” I said, trying to calm his fear, despite my certainty that I had closed it tightly when I had tucked him into bed.

“Can Piper sleep with me tonight?” he asked. I nodded my assent and went down the stairs to the living room to get the dog. I hoped that, on that occasion, she would stay with Matt and comfort him. Piper snuggled happily into my arms when I picked her up, but as we approached the stairway to the second floor, she started to tremble. When I brought her into Matt's room and put her on the bed with him, she immediately jumped down and dashed into the master bedroom. I found her hiding under the covers of our bed, beside Ted.

I tried again to have Piper stay with Matt but she simply refused to do so. I finally closed the door of his bedroom so that she would not be able to leave. Just as I was about to lay back down in bed, Piper began howling desperately, frantic to get out of Matt's room. That sound woke up the other children. Even Ted awoke, after sleeping through all the other commotion.

“What's wrong with Piper?” Kammie called out sleepily.

“We can't let her do this all night,” Ted grumbled, looking at the clock that told him it was only a little past 3 a.m. I went back to Matt's room. The minute I opened the door, the dog burst out, shaking with fear.

“Matt, I think Piper only likes to sleep downstairs,” I said, not wanting him to know that it was only in his bedroom that the dog refused to stay. “Would you like to camp out in Mommy and Daddy's room tonight instead?”

He nodded eagerly. After I tucked him into his sleeping bag atop our bedroom carpet, I took a relieved Piper back down to the living room.

The next morning Ted and I had a long talk about what had been happening in our house. We decided that, if we were not going to sell the property, then we would at least do some rearranging and let Matt have another room. We could move the two little girls into one bedroom. Their rooms appeared to be undisturbed, except for Rosa's past insistence that a girl occasionally waved to her from her bedroom window. We thought Matt would feel more secure in a different room, and we could use his current bedroom as a den or a day-time play room for the children. I recalled how that particular bedroom had not been used prior to our purchasing the house, and I thought I now understood why that had been.

When Matt came down for breakfast we shared our idea with him. We fully expected him to happily agree to the new arrangement.

“I don't want to leave my room,” he said, to our amazement.

“Matt, remember how scared you were last night? Don't you think it would be better if we just put you in another room, and then you wouldn't have to worry about the attic door or anything else like that any more?” his father asked him.

“I like my room the best. I want to stay there,” Matt pleaded.

We were puzzled by his reluctance.

“Honey, you can't sleep in Daddy and Mommy's room every night, and it seems like sometimes you're scared in your bedroom. Wouldn't you feel better sleeping in another one from now on? We can decorate it any way you like,” I coaxed.

He shook his head again. He told us he never wanted to move and insisted he would not be afraid in his bedroom any more.

“Okay,” Ted sighed. “You can stay there for now. But we don't want to be awakened every night. If you keep getting scared in there, we'll have to make other sleeping arrangements.”

Matt seemed immensely relieved and ate his breakfast contentedly while Piper sat by his side.

That night I was awakened yet again by our son's cries. I rushed into Matt's room and found him trembling under the covers. The temperature in his bedroom was freezing. I walked over to the radiator and touched its icy side and realized I would need to call a repair man. The heat from the furnace was obviously not reaching his room, although the rest of the house was quite warm.

“What is it?” I asked him softly.

“Someone's walking down the attic stairs,” he whispered. We sat together and listened but heard nothing. “It's stopped now. But I heard footsteps walking down the stairs and stopping at the door,” he told me.

I opened the door that led to the attic and turned on the light. Matt felt calmer upon seeing that no one was there. As I had done the previous night, I closed the attic door and ensured it was properly latched. Then I pulled his heavy wooden toy box in front of it. I showed Matt that it would be impossible for the door to be opened then as his toy box was blocking the way, and that seemed to remove all of his fear.

“Are you okay now?” I asked, reluctant to leave him alone. He nodded sleepily and turned over. “Do you want to camp out in our room tonight?” I suggested.

“No, it's okay now,” he said bravely, as I put an extra quilt over him to keep him warm.

I went back to our room but found it difficult to rest. I kept straining my ears, listening for footsteps. I did not doubt what Matt had told me. We had all heard running footsteps on the main staircase, and I would be frightened, as Matt had been, if I heard them approaching my bedroom door late at night.

During the days, the kids were happy, the dog was content, and our life seemed to be ideal. At night, however, the house seemed to take on an eerie quality, and I was finding it more and more difficult to sleep. I had never suffered from insomnia before, but I lay awake for hours, wanting to rest, but listening for sounds instead.

Matt must have been tired as well because his sleep was often interrupted. Besides the recurrence of the footsteps on the stairway coming down from the attic, he also insisted that he had heard them in the hallway outside his room and on the stairs leading up from the foyer.

One night, after he had called out and I went in to check on him, he told me he had seen something round floating near the ceiling with a long, thin tail hanging down all the way to the floor. He was unable to describe it properly. He said he had not seen anything like it before, and it had been a different shape from that of a person, but that was all he could tell me about it. He did not seem as much frightened by it as mystified.

The next day I gave him a pencil and paper and asked if he could draw me a picture of what he had seen in his room. He immediately started to draw a strange object that resembled the funnel cloud of a tornado, but just what it was that he had seen was no clearer to me.