We Hear the Dead (3 page)

One loud knock sounded.

My father's shoulders hunched in apparent embarrassment. My mother looked vindicated. Mrs. Redfield's eyebrows rose sharply, and she took a few steps toward my bed, looking us over carefully. Our hands were all within sight, and we had not moved even the slightest bit.

“Can you count to five for Mrs. Redfield?” my mother continued.

We all heard five raps while Mrs. Redfield scrutinized Lizzie and me for some kind of movement. Finding nothing, she walked quickly around the room, looking in the corners and under the beds.

“If you are the spirit of a murdered person, demonstrate this by two raps,” my mother then commanded. By the time we had heard these two raps, Mrs. Redfield had finished her search of the room and her demeanor suddenly changed.

“Girls, you look so terrified!” she exclaimed. I, for one, certainly was, but not for the reasons she imagined! “I am going to bring my husband here to see this for himself, but I admit I am loath to leave you here so frightened!”

Kate reached over and gripped Mrs. Redfield's hands earnestly, looking frail but determined. “We can be brave until your return.”

Maggie

Made bold by our high success with Mrs. Redfield, I regained a little of my own spirit and bounded out of the bed to take my mother's arm. “Mother,” I urged, “if Mrs. Redfield is returning with her husband, then we should cover ourselves more decently, don't you think?”

“Yes, child. This haunting has quite addled my wits!” exclaimed Mother. “We are in no state to receive visitors.”

Mother and Lizzie put on their housedresses over their nightclothes while Kate and I merely donned our cloaks and climbed back into bed, pulling the blankets up over our legs. I felt excited and giddy. So the house was haunted by the spirit of a murder victim, was it? Surely I had something to add to this story, for I would be ashamed to be outdone by my little sister!

We did not have long to wait. Soon there was a great deal of commotion at our front door. Mother quickly went to meet the visitors, and we heard a confusion of voices talking all at once. Mrs. Redfield had indeed brought her husband but had also stopped at the Dueslers' house and pressed both of them to come, along with Mr. and Mrs. Artemus Hyde, who had just been departing from a visit with the Dueslers. In addition, they were joined by three men all in fishing gear, who had been night-fishing at the creek when they spotted the activity outside our house and decided to investigate. All in all, there were more than a dozen people crowded into the little bedroom of our house, and I had to pinch myself to keep from laughing at the hilarity of it.

Mr. Redfield was a little wisp of a man, not nearly as imposing as his wife. With the Dueslers it was the opposite, for Mrs. Duesler resembled a wilted flower while her husband was large, loud, and athletic, with dark, curling hair and a fashionably large mustache. Mr. and Mrs. Hyde were both tall and dignified, exquisitely dressed as befitted their station as the richest family in town. Mr. Hyde's father had founded Hydesville, and Mr. Hyde owned the house in which we now lived.

Mr. Hyde was proclaiming in a loud voice that he had never heard any complaint about this house before, and it was certainly nonsense that a murdered man was buried here. Mr. Duesler was quick to agree, pointing out that he would know if anyone had been murdered on the street behind his own home!

In this, Kate and I quickly discovered that we had a friend in Mrs. Redfield. Having been convinced herself, she did not wish to be made ridiculous. Her voice rose above the others as she repeated what she had heard.

“'Tis a prank,” scoffed Mr. Hyde. “Tomorrow is April Fools' Day, and I am afraid you have been made the April fool, Mary!”

“Artemus, it is no prank. I will vouch for these girls myself! If you used your ears instead of your tongue, even an old dog like you might learn something!” scolded Mrs. Redfield.

As if it had been waiting for its introduction, our ghost suddenly rapped loudly. All present heard it and began to look around uneasily for the source of the sound.

“Is this the injured spirit who communicated to me and the Foxes earlier this evening?” Mrs. Redfield inquired in a loud, dramatic voice.

Two raps.

“Two means yes, and one means no,” Mrs. Redfield explained to the crowd.

“Why, someone's having a game with us!” exclaimed Mr. Hyde. “They're in the attic and knocking on the ceiling above us!”

This caused the fishermen to hurry out of the bedroom and into the hallway, where we heard their feet pounding up the attic stairs.

Mr. Hyde followed them out into the hall and called up to them, “There's a cellar as well. The steps lead down from the buttery.” The fishermen came down with their light and tramped off to the buttery, where they found the cellar steps and descended. I tried to picture that horrible damp place with its soggy wet floor, and I knew that it was a place well suited to harboring a ghost.

After a brief time, the fishermen returned, reporting to Mr. Hyde that they had found no living soul. A sharp rap followed closely upon this pronouncement, as if our spirit had been waiting to make itself heard.

“Are you the spirit of a man, then?” asked Mr. Duesler, speaking into the air. He received two raps in reply. “Murdered in this house?” Mr. Duesler went on, ignoring Mr. Hyde's huff of indignation. Two raps. “How were you murdered?”

There was a long silence. I wondered if I was going to have to say something, when Mrs. Hyde unexpectedly spoke up and pointed out that the spirit could only give yes or no answers.

“Was it a rope?” Mr. Duesler then asked. One rap.

“A knife?” Two raps.

“Were you stabbed?” Two raps.

“In the chest?”—one rap. “In the throat?”—two raps. “Aha, so your throat was cut?” Two raps.

Mrs. Duesler moaned softly and held hands with Mrs. Hyde. Lizzie covered her face with her hands, but Kate looked as if she was enjoying a deliciously horrifying story.

“Now, Bill,” protested Mr. Hyde, “don't you think we'd have noticed if one of our people had disappeared from town?”

“Spirit,” continued Mr. Duesler, “were you a resident of Hydesville?”

One rap. Of course not. As Mr. Hyde said, people would have noticed.

“Were you a visitor to town, a guest?”

After a moment, there were three raps.

“Now what the devil does that mean?” asked Mr. Duesler.

“Bill, your
language!
” whispered his wife.

“You asked two things at once,” interjected Mrs. Redfield. “A visitor and a guest.”

“Were you a visitor?” Two raps.

“A guest of someone in town?” One rap.

“A visitor but not a guest?” pondered Mr. Duesler.

“A peddler!” guessed Mrs. Redfield. That was not what I had in mind, but it presented interesting possibilities. Two raps.

“You were a peddler,” repeated Mr. Duesler. “You visited the people in this house, and they murdered you by cutting your throat with a knife.”

“Preposterous!” exclaimed Mr. Hyde.

“Who had this house before John Fox?” asked one of the fishermen.

“It was the Weekmans,” declared one of the other fishermen. “And they left all suddenlike, without telling anyone they were going!”

Mrs. Redfield spoke up immediately. “They told
me
they were going! Mr. Weekman had an offer of employment back east, and they had to leave at once or lose the position. They could not possibly have done this terrible thing! Why, Hannah Weekman was the mildest of women, and her husband, Michael, was a soft-spoken gentleman!”

Mr. Duesler asked the spirit, “Was it the Weekmans who murdered you?”

One rap. Mrs. Redfield liked the Weekmans, and I liked Mrs. Redfield.

Our neighbors worked their way backward through the former tenants of the home, and finally the spirit agreed that Mr. Bell, a man of whom I knew nothing, had been the dreaded murderer. Mrs. Redfield narrowed her eyes and declared, “I never liked John Bell.”

The questions went on well into the night. Mr. Hyde slowly became convinced that he was hearing something extraordinary. He exclaimed again and again that the newspapers would hear of this crime and that no villain could get away with such an act in a house he owned!

Eventually the raps diminished and vanished. Questions went unanswered and no more sounds could be summoned. Kate was asleep across the bed, and my own eyes were drooping uncontrollably. Mrs. Redfield invited my mother to bring us to her house across the street for the remainder of the night. Her husband, Charles, she announced, would stay with my father and watch the house for further disturbance until morning.

Mr. Duesler gathered Kate up in his arms and carried her from the room. Mr. Hyde himself offered me his arm and helped me out of bed. As the crowd dispersed, my eyes caught those of Mr. Redfield, who was shaking his head solemnly. Speaking his only words of the evening, he stated, “I still say this is a prank.”

***

Morning came late for me. I awakened to Kate's low voice, rich with excitement, urging me out of slumber. There were a few moments of disorientation when I opened my eyes, until I was able to identify my place on a trundle bed in Mrs. Redfield's bedroom.

“Maggie, wait until you see!” Kate was saying. “The whole town has come!”

For a moment, I thought she was telling me that the entire town of Hydesville had come to punish the two of us for last night's wickedness. Kate's persistent grin seemed out of place. Finally I pushed myself upright, taking in the full daylight streaming in the windows and hearing the murmur of voices outside the glass. A dress was strewn across the foot of my bed, one of my own, taken from the trunk in my bedroom.

Within a few minutes, I emerged fully dressed onto the front porch of Mrs. Redfield's house. Blinking in the daylight, raising one hand to shield my eyes, I saw an amazing sight.

A large crowd of people stood outside the house in which we lived, just across from the Redfields'. The front door of our house stood open, and people milled in and out as if it were a place of commerce. Several people took note when Kate and I appeared, and there came an excited murmur among the crowd. Men removed their hats and bowed to us. Ladies whispered to one another behind their hands, and a few of them inclined their heads in respectful greeting.

All these people had come to see the house haunted by the ghost of a murdered man!

Throughout the afternoon, our house was the site of a great commotion. Over and over, we heard our mother and Mrs. Redfield repeat the story of last night's events to curious neighbors from all over Arcadia Township. To my vast amusement, the story grew in the telling of it! The more Mrs. Redfield and my mother talked, the more they believed their own words. Kate chimed in whenever they would allow her to speak, agreeing with everything they said, while I smiled behind my hand and Lizzie looked bewildered.

There were many people who searched our house during the day, but of course there was nothing to find. No one seemed surprised by the lack of ghostly sounds in daylight, although everyone was anxious to see what would happen when night fell. There was talk of digging up the cellar to look for the peddler's body, but without my father's permission, nobody wanted to begin such an endeavor.

My father, meanwhile, had left. He had gone to the building site of our new home, just as he had promised David the day before. We learned later that he said nothing to David about the night's excitement, and my brother was ignorant of the events in town until he went home for the evening meal and found a house full of gossiping neighbors.

When evening finally came, it was nearly impossible to find standing room in our miserable little house. People completely unknown to us had arrived by carriage and were pushing and jostling their way into our bedroom. This room, where Kate and I sat unnoticed on our little bed, was the best place to hear the knockings of the peddler's ghost.

Mr. Duesler at once took charge and asked most of the questions for the crowd. He repeated all of last night's questions over again and received all the same answers—that a visitor to town was murdered by having his throat cut. Various committees were formed to go into the attic or the cellar to listen and look while the raps took place. No sounds could be heard in any room except this one bedroom, and eventually Mr. Duesler found out that the murder had taken place in this room!

It was about this time that my brother, David, appeared, gently inserting his way through the curious onlookers. I wasn't sure what David thought when he first heard the raps for himself. I admit that I was nervous. But eventually he suggested what others had been saying all along: they should get some picks and shovels and overturn the cellar floor. Nobody had wanted to do this without the approval of my father, or at least Mr. Hyde, but when David seemed willing to take charge, several men produced the desired digging tools.

The crowd surged out of the bedroom and into the buttery, where the cellar stairs seemed likely to give way under the weight of spectators watching David, shirtsleeves rolled up, breaking up the dirt floor with a pickax. The fever of excitement was catching, and I found myself as anxious as anybody to hear what he found. Kate said calmly that she was sure David's findings would satisfy everyone, and because I had no problem believing that there probably was a body in that horrid cellar, I had little fear of being found out.

Mr. Duesler was distressed to lose his place as the center of attention. He was not quick enough to get a spot among the diggers, and so he returned to the bedroom to recommence his role as spirit questioner. In a moment's inspiration, he offered to recite the alphabet, and if the spirit rapped at certain letters, he could spell out answers other than yes and no. By this process the name of Bell was spelled out again and again as the peddler named his killer.

Mrs. Redfield, not to be outdone by Mr. Duesler, came forward at this point and cried, “Oh, you poor restless spirit! Is there not a heaven for you to attain?”

The spirit rapped yes.

At this, Mrs. Redfield's eyes filled with tears, and she asked if her little child Mary Louisa were in heaven. Very quickly, the sympathetic spirit rapped yes.

Instantly, a chorus of voices called out, asking after a legion of dead relatives and acquaintances. The spirit assured all present that every single one of their loved ones was in heaven with the Almighty.

A great emotional outburst commenced, with women bursting out in tears as they wept for lost children and men blowing their noses into handkerchiefs as they remembered their dear old mothers. Thankfully, there came a great upheaval of men from the cellar at that point, and David appeared with his digging crew, their trousers damp and their shoes coated with mud.

“We cannot excavate any further tonight,” my brother declared. “The holes fill up with water as fast as we can dig them. There's a spring under this house, and it's going to require a pump to do any kind of thorough search.”