The House of My Youth

Part 9 - Real Bumps are Scary


I just spoke with my Aunt Laurie about a half hour ago. She is coming down from up north to visit my mother in the hospital on Wednesday. She wanted to know if I was interested in having her bring down a bin filled with old, unsorted, photographs which had once belonged to my grandmother and Aunt Cile.


Yes! I am interested.


Most of the photographs will be from before I was born, but that's all right. Mother can help me identify some of the people (hopefully). But some will be of my siblings and myself, up north at Grandma's House, or even at The Old House. I don't believe Grandma took too many pictures at our place, but she took some. A pity I don't have any new pictures to post with this entry. Ah, well. I'm getting some, and for that I am happy.


Anyway, to today's topic.


In Part 8 I wrote about visual manifestations. Visual manifestations can be terrifying, to be certain. But they were easier to explain than the other two: audio and physical.



I posted before on how we often heard someone talking. It was faint, so we were never sure what was being said. There was also the sounds of someone walking around upstairs. Investigations always showed the upstairs to be devoid of human life (except for the investigator/s).


Recently, I spoke with Helvie. She reminded me of some things I had forgotten and told me some I hadn't known. This first one was funny.


Helvie and I were still in grade school. Gayanne, Judayl, and Lynahr were in high school. They had already caught their bus and were gone, leaving Helvie and me home alone. I was in the bathroom. Helvie was in the dining room, although at that time we weren't using it as a dining room. It was our living room.


There was a sofa against the stairwell wall and Helvie was sitting on it. She heard the familiar steps of someone moving between rooms upstairs. She was scared, but she was now old enough to force herself to remain calm and think rationally. There was nobody there. No reason to be frightened. None at all. Until the footsteps began descending the steps.


She sat quiet, determined not to be frightened away. It was just her imagination. The steps would cease and all would be fine. There were thirteen steps. She was counting them. Four, five, six, seven. No. She would not run. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Whoever (whatever) it was, was on the landing just a few feet to her left.


Z0000000oommmmmm!


She was outside. Behind her, she could hear the crashing of furniture, which made her run far from the house before turning around. When she turned around she saw the reason for the crashing furniture. I was tripping over things in my own panic to get out. I had heard nothing - except Helvie's dash to get out of the house. One didn't ask questions in those days. One just ran.


Another audio manifestation was the "hitting of the house". I don't know how else to put it. This happened quite often, actually. Mostly in winter. (That may have been significant.) It usually took place in the living room in the middle of the long wall. What happened was, suddenly, the sound of someone hitting the house with a baseball bat (or other heavy implement). Twice it happened while I was sitting right there. I remember jumping up and staring. That was the night everyone was home except Daddy. Mother, being Mother, loaded the 410 shotgun, went to the door, opened it, and fired out into the darkness. "That's once!" she bellowed.


It was once. But it wasn't the last time it happened. The worst was when we were all in the living room (again, Daddy was absent). This time the crashing began near the kitchen door. We all stood up to go investigate, but the banging continued along the house's outside walls, passing around Daddy and Mother's bedroom, the living room, back up past the dining room and around to where it had begun. When we told Daddy, he didn't believe us. Daddy wasn't into this kind of thing. He believed in imagination.


He kind of changed his mind, I think, when he came home early one night. He was drunk, and he passed out on the sofa, which was against the notorious wall. Suddenly, the banging began - waking Daddy! He had sobered considerably, but he wasn't scared. He was p*ssed off. He went to his room, loaded his revolver, and went outside into the snow. It was fresh snow. I remember this because of what happened. We were scared. Human or ghost, Daddy was outside alone in the dark. Anything could happen.


Nothing did.


Daddy came back into the house with the oddest look on his face. No tracks in the snow. Whatever it was, it had left no tracks in the snow.


Wouldn't you just love to live in a house like that? At the time it was terrifying, but I find I miss it now. I would love to go back and visit. But it's gone. Destroyed by fire.


We can never really go home again. Perhaps it's just as well.