Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf (7 page)

I crashed immediately after going into my room. Even though my bed was just a few feet away, I often slept on one of the couches because it was more comfortable. I dreamed of my grandparents’ house as it was before the fire, but as the dream went on, panic set in. Soon the dream version of the house was in flames, and I was startled awake.

As my eyes opened, I saw my grandfather sitting in his chair across the room. It wasn’t the first time a family member had seen his spirit—a few months after his death, during a family gathering on the front lawn, he appeared in the window of his second-floor bedroom. But this was the first time I saw his ghost, and I was a little frightened. He just looked at me; once our eyes met, he vanished.

The next night I was awakened in the middle of the night to see my grandfather sitting in his chair. Again, once he turned to look at me, he was gone. Finally, on the third straight night of his appearing in his chair, he didn’t disappear immediately and instead pointed to the melted pink flamingo against the concrete wall.

I knew right away what he was trying to say: “Get that thing out of here!”

I didn’t even wait until the next morning; I got right up and took it out into the back yard of the house. There were some woods behind the house, and I chucked the melted pink flamingo as far back there as I could. When I went back into my room, there was no sign of my grandfather in his chair, and he never returned to it again.

The remains of my grandparents’ house were plowed over and another house rebuilt over it. The new house is essentially a modernized version of what was there before, and to this day, it pains me to look at it. It’s just not right.

I’m not sure if the chair carried the spirit of my grandfather, or if it was attached to the flamingo. My gut tells me he’ll always be sitting in his chair and that he didn’t want any reminder of the fire, which is why he pointed to the flamingo. Maybe he knew I wouldn’t want a reminder, either. Of course, all of this could have been avoided had he just thrown that flamingo away when we asked him.

The Mummy That Suck the Unsinkable

Many feel the following story is nothing more than a myth, but if there’s even the slightest bit of chance that it’s actually true, it will go down as one of the most haunted—and deadly—objects in history.

According to legend, four wealthy Englishmen traveled to Egypt in the late 1890s or early 1900s to visit the site of a massive excavation. Hoping to collect some ancient Egyptian artifacts, which were all the rage among the English elite of the time, the four friends nearly fell over one another to purchase the prize of the excavation: the ornate sarcophagus containing the remains of the Princess of Amen-Ra, who had died nearly 2,500 years before.

The mummy at the center of curses and tragedy.

Little did they know that the princess had placed a curse upon her tomb. The Englishman who purchased the sarcophagus wandered off into the desert, never to return. Each of the other three men also suffered great misfortune: One was shot by his servant and lost an arm, one went bankrupt immediately after returning from Egypt, and the other became terribly sick and lost his job.

It didn’t stop with those four, either. The sarcophagus eventually made it to England and was purchased by another collector, who saw three family members injured in an accident and his house burn down before he finally realized what was causing all the bad luck. He donated the sarcophagus to the British Museum. While being unloaded, the truck it was on went into reverse, striking a bystander in the process. One of the men who carried it into the museum fell and broke his leg. The other died mysteriously two days later.

The sarcophagus was placed on display in the Egyptian Room, where more tragedy befell those who came near it. One night watchman died while on his rounds, and another quit because he couldn’t take the banging sounds and muffled sobs that came from within it late at night. One person’s child died of the measles, and other people who worked at the museum allegedly died after coming in contact with it. There are even stories that a photographer took a picture of the sarcophagus and the image that resulted scared him so greatly, he shot himself that night, unable to shake the horrific image from his mind’s eye.

The museum knew it had to get rid of the cursed sarcophagus and sold it to a prominent American archeologist. It was to be shipped to New York aboard the state-of-the-art RMS
Titanic
in April 1912. Of course, it never made it there—it allegedly sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic along with 1,517 people who suffered its final wrath.

Is that story really as unbelievable as it sounds? Many think it was the concoction of William Thomas Stead, a
Titanic
survivor who was also a journalist and ardent spiritualist. Stead allegedly made up the story in conjunction with another in which a medium warned him not to go on that fateful journey. There was never any record of such an item being loaded onto the ship, and surely something that valuable would have been logged and placed somewhere safe. And even the sarcophagus itself is something of a mystery; while many seek to explain away this curse by stating it still resides in the British Museum, the museum itself denies having ever had it in their possession.

Legend has it the mummy may have caused the
Titanic
to sink.

Of course, nobody would want to admit to having something that caused so much destruction, pain, and death. So perhaps in this case, the old joke about denial “not just being a river in Egypt” applies.

Uncle Webb’s Tools

Many people believe we need to find peace when we die before we can cross over to something eternal. After we pass, we want any problems we had to be solved, and for everyone to know how much we cared. Writing a will is a way to get that peace while we are still alive. Each person gets what he or she deserves, and the distribution of belongings is a way for us to assure our soul finds balance upon death.
Johnny gets the coin collection he always wanted. Susie gets the wedding dress, so I can be with her on her wedding day. Each grandchild gets money that will help him or her go to college.
All the pieces fall into place.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen, and the spirit can’t move on until everything is right with the living. An object becomes the focus of a haunting. In this case, the spirit will continue hanging around, trying to communicate so people can understand. When that item remains a symbol of a strained relationship, the haunting might be even more intense. The need to get the object into the right hands becomes an obsession, sometimes for the living and the dead.

While everything on the surface was fine between Jimmy and his father, Webb, there was always something underneath that was unsettling.

Webb was always being confused with other relatives, so early on people suggested he drop his real name, Charlie, and go with his middle one. That suited him fine. There was uniqueness about the name “Webb” that made him stand out, and though many people considered him average, the people who knew him best said there was always something special about him.

“Uncle Webb was always the center of attention,” said his nephew, Carl, who spent a lot of time with his uncle and cousins growing up. “If he was there, everyone else went to the background. Everyone wanted to hang with him. People just listened, like he was going to say something funny or deep. That guy made most things both at the same time.”

Webb was a contractor who took great pride in his work. Coming from a blue-collar background, he wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and work with his hands and a good tool when he grew up. He told people about the business they would start together, working side by side, like he wished he could have done with his dad.

Jimmy wanted nothing to do with it. He went to college to become a teacher, and while his father eventually came to accept his career choice, he always took little jabs at his son.

“He wanted Jimmy to be a contractor, but to be honest, Jimmy was all thumbs. He couldn’t even hang a picture,” Carl said. Carl watched the relationship from the sidelines, listening to Jimmy when he talked about his father’s disappointment in him. “I know it gnawed at Jim, but he got over it. It was like he was a teenager stomping his foot. He would pay people to do the easiest repair job, and find a way to slip it into conversation when we were all together. You could practically hear Uncle Webb biting his tongue.”

In 2005, Uncle Webb died from cancer. He was still a young man with no thoughts of death and no will. He was not a rich man, so there wasn’t a lot of money to distribute among the kids. Everyone assumed Jimmy would get his father’s tools, as it is the kind of thing you pass down to your son, but Jimmy wanted nothing to do with them. Instead, they went to Carl, who had probably spent more time using them while Webb was alive than anyone else. He became a computer programmer, but understood the need to be useful around the house.

Carl’s house, located a few miles from the mansions of Lakewood, Washington, has been a haven for ghosts since the day he and his family moved in. For more than 10 years he and his wife and two children have shared the space with several different ghosts, although the house is much quieter now. For the most part, they have become used to the haunting and pass it off as part of their lives. They have never called in paranormal investigators or felt threatened.

“I did research, but nothing. No tragedy or little secrets,” Carl said. “Just a house and a family that for some reason is a magnet for dead people.”

The ghosts come and go, but the family can tell the difference between them by the activity in the house. Some move things around. Some run up and down the stairs. Little children are heard giggling at times. The most active spirit is that of a little girl they call Kay, who has a crush on Carl. While Carl dated the woman who is now his wife, Kay would lock the doors and pull the sheets off the couple. For years she would play with an old music box in the dining room, winding it up and moving it around the house. They even heard a humming along with the song. When their first child was born, they could not keep the baby out of the crib.