My TRUE ghost story, our haunted house part 2

10/30/2010

We did our best to convince each other that it was just an old house, maybe what we saw in the hall was caused by a car going by on the street and somehow its lights cast a shadow up here on the 2nd floor. But the entire time we were trying to convince each other that we were being paranoid, down deep we knew whatever went down that hall blocked the light coming into our room. The only way to do that was come between the light and the door. I didn't tell B that night, but as I lay there trying to go to sleep I was thinking what the hell did we get ourselves into?

Sunday was another day of work. We unpacked and moved things around, I hung pictures in the rooms with finished wallpaper. The dogs were constantly under our feet until I went into the bedroom directly across the hall from our room. It was the room that we had chosen for B's son R when we had the kids. We had decided to put the kids rooms as close to the master as we could. When I walked in there I noticed the kind of heavy feeling that I felt when we papered the walls. I shrugged it off then as being overly tired and pushing myself too hard between packing up the old house, working on the mansion and still trying to work 54 hours per week. I noticed right away my old dog Ollie wouldn't cross the threshold and cried in the hall the entire time I was in there. I kept talking to him and trying to coax him in while I hung curtains and made the bed. He simply refused and the whining was seriously getting on my nerves. When my work was done and I walked out of the room Ollie barked and jumped all over me like he does when I first get home. The rest of the day we both noticed that when the dogs were upstairs they gave that doorway in the hall a wide berth. Simply refusing to go near it.

That night we were exhausted. I think a marching band could have came through the room and we would have slept through it. When the alarm went off Monday morning I reluctantly got out of bed and took a shower. I always left the house by 5:30am. Living here would be no different as it was only an extra 2 miles to work and I always got there early anyway. So I decided not to change my departure time. B always got up for coffee with me and saw me off to work before he got ready to start his day. There was a beautiful sunroom overlooking the back yard, about 10x12 right off the kitchen. We had determined that it had once been an open porch and someone had it glassed in and vented so it was a 4 season room. It had long tall windows and a set of patio doors. I loved the room from the moment I saw it and knew it would be my morning coffee room.

I had parked my car in front of the house on the street so it was out of the way in the rear driveway. B followed me to the front door and turned on the porch light as it is still dark at 5:30. He stood in the open doorway till I got in my car and had it started with the lights on. I looked up at the house and waved goodbye to him and he closed the door. I put my seatbelt on and once again looked up at this huge mansion that we now called home. That is when I saw movement in an upstairs window. It was my step daughters room that faced the street. I saw what I thought to be a wave and the first thing I thought was man B must have flew up those stairs to be up there already waving to me. Once I got to work and had parked my car I called B to tell him I had arrived safe and sound like I always did. Then I said "wow you must have taken the stairs 2 at a time to get up to J's room to wave goodbye to me." He was silent for a moment and said "what?" As I was repeating what I had just said it slowly dawned on me that it wasn't my husband in that upstairs window.

I couldn't shake the thoughts that were with me that day. I kept thinking we are seriously screwed here. Here we are in debt with this house and we are stuck. We can't give it back. The bank holding the mortgage would frown on that. And at that point, so early in the game, I seriously thought about my credit rating. I had worked my butt off for the past 7 years to repair the perfect credit rating that was damaged when I got divorced from my ex. Was I willing to ruin B and my credit rating because our house was haunted? No! I was going to fight. This was our house now, our dream home and I wasn't going to let anyone or anything take that away. Once I strapped the bull head on I felt pretty good the rest of the day. My friends at work were all talking about coming to see the house and teasing me about being rich to live in such a fancy mansion. Our neighborhood was all huge old mansions and most of the people that lived in them were doctors, lawyers and folks with money. Some of the homes had been in the same family since they were built in the mid and late 1800's.

I always got home before B. And that Monday was no different. When I got home I let the dogs out into the back yard and started supper. B got home shortly after I did and was hanging in the kitchen as I finished supper, I knew something was on his mind. Finally I asked him what it was. And slowly he told me what had happened when he got ready to leave for work that morning. He had went back upstairs to take a shower and when he came back down the servants staircase which comes out in the kitchen he glanced into the sun room and saw a man walking briskly from one end to the other. My big handsome, tough, muscular husband told me he almost screamed. What really got to him was the fact that he couldn't see the ghost's feet. He said it appeared that he was walking on stumps. That really creeped him out and he started questioning if we were safe here. He was terrified to get his kids that upcoming weekend.

The rest of the week went by rather smoothly and when Friday arrived the kids were already calling B before he got off work, ready to come for the weekend. We picked them up and went straight out to supper. They couldn't wait to get to Dad's new house and see their new rooms. That was short lived. The girls were thrilled with their new digs (although later refused to go upstairs alone) but R didn't like his room from the moment he stepped through the doorway. In the years we lived there he only slept in that room once, and that was when B stayed in there with him. And that is an event that I will cover later. When R would come he and the girls would take their suitcases upstairs and R would drop his just inside the door of his room and that is where it stayed till he left. He slept on J's floor and I think M actually slept in her room twice and that is when J stayed with her because R had fallen asleep on his sisters bed "hogging the entire thing!" as she told us later.

Even though they had every electronic device known to man upstairs, Nintendo, Playstation 2, and in their rooms they each had a 19in. color tv, vcr, and dvd. Down the hall from the bedrooms was also a bedroom that we used as an office. It had the desk top computer, with extra speakers, a large comfortable desk, chair and sofa. That room was barely used. When the kids wanted to go online they made one of the others go along.

Things died down through June July and August as we were working outside doing some much needed landscaping. The inside was far from done but we had the main rooms that we used done and we didn't have the furniture to fill the other bedrooms anyway. There could have been a band of Gypsys living in the west wing and the 3rd floor for all we knew. I ran a dust mop down the long wooden hallway in front of all the other closed bedroom doors but never went in them to clean. No one used the bathroom down there either and when B wasn't home I didn't feel comfortable exploring behind those closed doors.

Once fall began we started looking for a company to put new guttering on the house and we also needed a painter to scrape and paint the roofline, and upper windows. To save money we decided that we could do the trim around all the main level windows and porches. We had trouble getting a gutter company to come and do the work due to the height of the house. We finally did find someone in the budget we had allotted. Painter was a different story. Once they saw the height of the house and knew that we wanted to do part of the job ourselves they hit us hard. We simply couldn't afford it. So as the temps cooled we began work on the inside again. The main floor bathroom. It all started again, slowly at first.

One day we drove over to St. Louis to visit B's parents. We had stopped at the Lowe's over there and got a few of the supplies we needed for the bathroom. A friend of B's stopped in at his parents house when he saw the truck with Illinois plates and knew it was B. During conversation he told us that he had been laid off from work and was looking for some home improvement work. B told him about our house and the painting that needed done. He was thrilled to have the work. He came over and said he wasn't worried about the heights and he started that following Saturday. I asked him to start with two sides that were visible from the street so the city could see that we had indeed started to beautify the place. Meanwhile while F was out on the ladder scraping, B and I were pulling the 60's style pink sink and vanity off the wall in the bathroom. About 1pm I went into the kitchen and whipped up some sandwiches and asked B to call F in to have a bite of lunch with us. As we sat in the sunroom having lunch, F said "by the way, M is up from her nap." And I of course said "what?" when I looked at B's face I knew the answer but I said "what?" again. F said "I was up scraping the big double window on the front of the house and I saw M playing on the floor. I tapped on the window but she wouldn't turn around." He thought he was seeing B's youngest daughter up there, but this wasn't our weekend. There was no one upstairs.