Haunted Too. Dorah L. Williams

so frequently up until then, completely stopped from that day on. And although we remained in the house for several more years after that, I can’t recall there being another single incident.

      Maybe my mother’s spirit was protectively watching over us and wouldn’t let other spirits bother us anymore.

      The House Beside the Mill

      My experience is very much remembered through the eyes of a child, as I was only about eleven or twelve for the bulk of the time that I lived in this house. My family, particularly my aunt, who owned the house, would provide a far more insightful articulation of this story, but I doubt it is a story she would care to retell. The experiences in this house were not at all pleasant and were the impetus for her to relocate her family to another home.

      My aunt was puzzled by the high vacancy rate of the house and the surprisingly low lease payments that were being asked by the owner, who was trying to sell it. She was, however, ecstatic about the find and gratefully signed the lease and moved her family in.

      The house was located in a small town (population around three thousand), at the end of a small dead-end street beside a mill that had burnt down sometime at the turn of the twentieth century and been rebuilt.

      The house itself was beautiful. It was built in the colonial style and was two stories, with white wood siding and four ominous (but stately) dormers across the front. Upstairs, there was a master bedroom, a regular bedroom, and a third bedroom that had a small room off of it. At one time it must have served as the quarters for a nanny or wet nurse. The main floor contained a kitchen, dining room, living room, and drawing room. The floors were connected by a grand spiral staircase.

      One of the strangest features of the house was the basement, which contained many antiques and treasures that must have come with the original house and that, surprisingly, no one had taken. There was a door down there that led out, underground, to a tunnel connecting to a smaller house on the street behind. This, apparently, was the tunnel that connected the main house to what was perhaps the servants’ quarters behind it. While the house was by no means a mansion, it was somewhat strange and out of place in comparison to the other houses in this small town.

      I lived in this house for two months one summer, when my parents shipped me off for summer vacation, and I spent many weekends here as well. I can’t quite recall how long my aunt actually lived there, but I don’t think it was much longer than a year.

      I realized very quickly that there was something unusual about this house. The day my aunt moved in I was around to help unpack the boxes, and I remember feeling a weight in the house that was unsettling. It’s hard to know if this was a child’s intuition or simply the discomfort that comes with being in an unfamiliar place, but it was there nonetheless.

      The darkest and most unsettling room was the bedroom on the second floor that served as the nanny’s room. It is hard to describe, but it was a cold and damp and heavy-feeling room, quite unlike any of the other rooms. For the duration of the time that my aunt lived there, it remained very unused. It served as a guest bedroom that everyone refused to sleep in, though no one ever really articulated why.

      My aunt’s two-year-old son slept in the small room off the nanny’s quarters, and her baby daughter slept in the master bedroom with her parents. The other bedroom was also a guest room, and my room when I stayed for the summer.

      The first occurrences in the house revolved around the sound of a child crying. In the first instance this was not unusual, as my aunt had two small children. But when she went to check on them she would find her children fast asleep or playing peacefully with no sign of being distressed. Later, we would get used to hearing the sound of a child on the stairs, sliding down on their behind, one [step] at a time, and laughing.

      There was also the constant sound of someone pacing in the hallway, back and forth, for hours on end. Only when we climbed up the stairs to see who was there would the pacing stop. There were days where we would hole up in the kitchen, with the pacing overhead, clinging to the hope that whoever, or whatever, was up there would not come down the stairs and show themselves.

      My aunt’s young son seemed most tuned into the presence, and would often blurt out, “Who’s that man?” He would point to the corner shadows of the room where no man was ever seen standing. Some nights he would wake up screaming, obviously afraid, and would refuse to return to his small room to sleep. Near the end of my aunt’s stay at the house, everyone crammed into the master bedroom to sleep.

      Doors slammed, household items disappeared and reappeared, floor and walls shook, and voices were heard whispering as everyday occurrences. An old bureau in the bedroom where I slept held a mirror that, if you pulled it away from the wall, could be flipped around. (I am not sure if you are familiar with this particular piece of furniture, but it is fairly common. There was a mirror on the front side and wood on the back side, and it was built to accommodate all the various superstitions around mirrors.) Often, I would leave the room only to return to find the mirror had been flipped around (an impossibility considering the piece of furniture was extremely heavy and the mirror could only be flipped when it was pulled clear from the wall).

      My aunt had a number of psychics and clairvoyants through the house and tried an endless number of things to rid the house of the ghosts. She tried to hold seances, she put salt in all of the corners to “absorb” the energy, she lit candles, she prayed, and on and on and on. All to no avail.

      Strangers who came to investigate the haunting would leave the house after poking around (particularly in the basement), and almost all of them met with some bizarre accident or illness upon leaving: car accidents, broken bones, strange illnesses, etc.

      The last day I slept in the house, before returning to my parents’ house, I was carrying my suitcase from my room upstairs to the front hall on the main floor. As I was descending the stairs, I felt a weight behind me, and I found myself lying at the bottom of the stairs with an incredible pain in my back. I pretended I was fine and waited for my dad on the front steps to pick me up. I remember irrationally thinking that if I told my aunt about the pain she would take me to the hospital and somehow I would be forced to recover from the fall in her house, as opposed to going home. This was an unfathomable thought for me, after living two months on edge. I remember getting home and crying for days (and finding out three years later that I had a slipped disc in my back from the fall).

      After that summer, I think my aunt stayed for a few more months before moving out. My uncle, who refused to believe that there was such a thing as a ghost, came home one night and saw the ghostly image of a man standing in the drawing room. Wasting no time, he grabbed a hunting rifle and shot at it, leaving a bullet hole in the wall and scaring the life out of my aunt and his kids. This was the last straw. The next day my aunt moved out.

      My aunt did a lot of research into the history of the house, including the fire that destroyed the mill next to it. She still believes that the sounds of the children crying and playing have something to do with the child labourers who died in the mill fire.

      Someone to Watch Over Me

      I grew up in a very volatile environment due to my parents’ alcoholism. One night when I was pretty young my mother and father had a particularly horrible fight, and I was terrified.

      After everything calmed down and everyone else was sleeping that night, I was still lying in bed, wide awake, frightened and crying. There was a night light on in the room. At one point in the night I remember a strong feeling that someone was watching me, so I looked up from my pillow and saw an enormous shadow filling two walls: the wall beside the bed that I was on, and on the other wall, right behind the bed. It looked like a huge shadow of a nun’s head and shoulders. We weren’t Catholic, and I hadn’t been praying, just crying. It wasn’t any religious influence that would have made me think that, but I could immediately see that is what it seemed to be.

      From the position of the shadow, it looked like she was right above me and looking down protectively,