Haunted (4 page)

When I returned to our bed, Ted tried to assure me that I must have been dreaming. There was clearly no one about, and it would have been impossible for anyone to enter the house without our dog barking protectively. The stairs were so creaky that you would have heard someone approaching long before you saw them. I knew all of that to be true, yet the woman had been there. And then she was gone..

“Are you sure you weren't dreaming?” Ted asked.

“I haven't even been to sleep yet,” I said.

“There must be some explanation,” he mumbled through a yawn. “I don't want to sleep on this side of the bed anymore,” I said irrationally. I could not explain why I thought that that particular side of the bed was now to be feared, but I would never sleep there again. That night Ted and I changed places, and I preferred to lay facing the window rather than the doorway.

As I lay beside Ted, knowing that falling asleep would be next to impossible, I remembered Rosa's frustration when she had told me about the girl waving to her from the window. She had known I did not believe her, and she had been confused by how the girl had appeared and then vanished. I now regretted my doubt and empathized with her feelings.

The next day, I was frightened to be alone in the house. I sensed I was being watched and found myself constantly looking around to see if anyone else was there. I was so disturbed that I seriously thought we should consider moving. I recalled the speedy departure of most of the house's former residents, and I could not help but wonder if they too had seen something similarly frightening. The sound of running footsteps on the stairs, formerly deemed harmless, now seemed to have an ominous quality.

When everyone was home at the end of the day, I mentioned that I thought it might be a good idea to sell the house and move. The children, unaware of my fears, were very surprised because I had worked so hard on decorating the house and it was finally looking beautiful. They reminded me that the new addition was all planned and building would begin in the very near future and told me they loved living in the house and did not want to leave. I did not want them to be terrified by thinking that they lived in a “haunted house,” so could not tell them what I had seen.

Ted understood how upset I was. He told me we would do whatever I thought was best, but I could tell that he did not want to move either. I knew it was hard for him to accept what I claimed to have seen. He knew I was not lying but insisted there had to be some logical explanation for it; he certainly was not about to believe we shared our home with a ghost.

I felt as if there was really no one I could talk to about the sighting, and I found myself trying to rationalize it. Maybe it had been only a dream. Yet I knew I had been wide awake at the time. Perhaps I had only imagined it. But the vision had been too detailed and had stayed before me too long for that. I tried to find any explanation to convince myself that it had not really happened. I did not want to believe we shared our home with a ghost, either.

A few nights later, I was again lying in bed unable to sleep, with my eyes tightly closed. Suddenly I became strongly aware that I was about to be touched. I could sense someone leaning over me as if about to pat my hand in comfort. I opened my eyes fearfully as I was certain someone was standing right beside me. When I looked, no one was there. I sighed with relief, but the feeling of being watched persisted. When I awoke the next day, however, I felt very peaceful and no longer felt an urgent need to move from the house. I thought that whatever I had seen the other night was now gone, and the presence I had felt leaning over me seemed to have left as well.

The children were relieved when I told them that I did not think we should sell the house after all, and life carried on. We continued to plan for the new addition to the house, and, one night, invited our neighbour Donelle over for dinner. The conversation around the table soon turned to the time when she had been a young girl and friends with the children who had once lived at our address. I asked Donelle about the Ford family, who had lived in the house from 1919 until 1927, even though the clothing of the woman I had seen seemed to be from an era quite a bit earlier than that.

“Was Mrs. Ford a nurse, by any chance?” I asked her casually.

“She may well have been before she got married, but I can't recall for certain,” Donelle mused. “They were a very ‘medical' family, with lots of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and the like, I do remember that.”

Everyone ate in silence for a while and then Donelle again spoke.

“The thing I remember the most about Mrs. Ford, though, was that she was an unusually tall woman,” she said. “She was the tallest woman I have ever seen in my life!”

I almost choked on my food before I glanced across the table at Ted. The apparition I had seen in our bedroom doorway had been strikingly tall. Could it have been Mrs. Ford? Without seeing a picture of her, I could not be sure. But since the apparition had had no face, even a photograph could not have answered that question. I wondered if I would ever solve the mystery of who she was and why she had been there.

BURIED TREASURES

O
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household was soon preparing for the construction of the family room and shed in the backyard. We were all looking forward to having extra living space, and the new outbuilding would definitely improve the appearance of the property. When we had first tallied the cost of all that work, we had mulled over the idea of closing in the front porch instead of building a room at the back of the house. The porch was quite large and would have made a nice sun room for a lot less money than the addition we were considering.

Ted had taken measurements and priced the material necessary to transform the porch into a large glassed-in sitting area. He had crouched down on the front walkway beside the stairs and shone a flashlight beam through the lattice to get a good view of the space underneath.

“What did you find under there?” I asked him when he came back into the house.

“Just some crushed rubble that must have been the last set of stairs. I guess they just demolished them and shoved them under the porch,” he replied.

“Were there any old toys or anything like that?” Kammie asked her father.

“No. Nothing but big pieces of broken cement and lots of dirt,” he answered.

We finally decided to go with the original plan of adding an extra room at the back of the house and to leave the porch as it was.

The shed was built first, and it seemed to go up quickly. Our contractor was ahead of schedule, and we were pleased with how well everything was coming along. Construction of the new room began, and one of the work crew spent the first few days digging deep holes in the ground for the footings. Despite the difficulty of the task, he eventually managed to dig down several feet into the hard, rocky earth. The children enjoyed watching the men working and kept an eye on their progress. Kammie especially seemed to marvel at how deeply the holes were dug and shyly stood at the corner of the yard to see what the shovels of dirt revealed.

The next afternoon I heard Kammie call out “Mommy!” from the backyard.

I rushed out and found my daughter standing by one of the holes, clasping something in her small hands.

“What?” I asked.

“Look what Stuart gave me,” Kammie said, smiling at the builder with gratitude.

“What is it?” I asked again.

“It's a really old glass jar,” Kammie said. “Can we clean it?”

I nodded. We walked over to the garden hose spigot, and I sprayed off most of the grime. Then we took it into the kitchen and held the muddy jar under hot running water. Eventually the final layers of dirt dissolved, and we saw it was a small white jar. It was made of thick glass and measured about two inches high by two inches wide. It appeared to have once contained cream or a cosmetic. It was fairly ornate, with delicately engraved columns, in contrast to the plain cream jars of today.

“Where did Stuart get this?” I asked my daughter.

“He found it when he was digging the hole deeper. He said I could have it!”

“I wonder how old that is,” I murmured to myself as Kammie continued to polish the glass.

“Isn't it pretty?” she asked, admiring it with great delight. “Where should I put it?”

I wondered how the jar had come to be buried so deep in our backyard and who had originally owned it. Perhaps another little girl had been given that fancy jar by her mother or grandmother once the product had been used and had treasured it, many years before.

“Why don't you put it in your room?” I suggested to Kammie as I started to prepare dinner.

When Ted came home that evening Kammie could not wait to show him what had been discovered in the footing hole. He looked at it for a minute, smiled at her, and told her she was very lucky to have found such a nice jar.

“Well, Stuart found it,” Kammie corrected him. “But he said it's mine now, and I can keep it.” She carefully carried the antique glassware back up to her bedroom.

When I tucked her in that night before going to bed, I smiled at the sight of her happily snuggled up to the little jar lying on the pillow beside her. She must have fallen asleep while admiring it. I placed it on her dresser and kissed her good-night.

After school the next day Kammie raced home to see if Stuart had found any other treasures for her from deep within the ground. She was not disappointed. Waiting for her by the pile of dug-up dirt was an antique ink-well. Stuart had found it at the very bottom of the same footing hole. It was slightly smaller in size than the glass jar, and was made from clay glazed a brownish-yellow. It was in very good condition. That artifact, which appeared to be quite old, excited Kammie even more than the glass jar had, and she spent a long time cleaning it. For a quill she used an old feather she had found, that I had cleaned for her, and stuck it into the top of her newest find. The glass jar and clay ink-well were then placed side by side on her window sill, and everyone who visited that spring was invited to view her antique items.

After those finds, Kammie began digging in the flower beds and other parts of the yard, searching for other things of value. She concentrated her digging in an old garden plot, now located beside the wall of the new addition. When I asked her about that activity, she explained that she had a feeling there was some kind of treasure buried in the yard and she wanted to find it.

Kammie's digging unearthed a large rock, close to where Stuart had found the other items, which appeared to have been splashed with gold paint. She told me about her discovery several times during the day, but I was working away at wallpapering and did not go out to see what she had found. It was not until after dinner that evening that Kammie asked me to take a look at the rock to see if I thought it really was gold she had discovered.

Ted and I looked at each other and smiled at our daughter's naive enthusiasm, but I followed her into the backyard to examine her find. She could barely lift the heavy rock and struggled to pick it up to be inspected. As I bent down to take it from her small hands, I caught my breath. The rock was almost completely covered with quartz and was streaked throughout with a shiny gold colour. Kammie had spent a lot of time spraying off the dirt with the garden hose, and the rock now sparkled in the late day sun. I called Ted to come out and look at it, not quite knowing what it was that Kammie had found. Maybe it really was gold.

Ted's reaction was similar to mine. He casually walked out of the house, thinking I was just humouring our daughter with feigned interest. When Kammie passed the rock to him, the smile faded from his face and his jaw dropped a bit. He stared at it and then at us, speechlessly.

“Where did you find this?” he finally asked Kammie.

“Over there,” she said, pointing to the overgrown spot that had once been a garden.

“When?” he said.

“After Stuart left today. I was digging in the old garden looking for something,” Kammie explained.

“What do you think?” I asked Ted. “Could it really be gold?”

“It sure looks like it, doesn't it?” he said. We decided to contact a friend of Ted's who worked as a geologist.

She would know what it was that Kammie had found. When Ted telephoned her, she asked him to bring the sample over to her house so that she could have a look at it. While he and Kammie drove over to see her, I stayed at home with Rosa and Matt.

It turned out to be only pyrite, better known as “Fool's Gold,” but Ted learned some interesting history about the town, and our property in particular, that evening. His friend told him that well over a hundred years ago, before there was any kind of town in our area, there had been a gold-rush of sorts. A river had once run right through our neighbourhood, and it was in that body of water that people thought they were discovering gold. It caused quite a commotion for a short period of time until everyone finally realized it was not gold at all but pyrite.

Perhaps, then, some former gold prospector, or someone who knew him, had buried that large sample of pyrite on our land. Or maybe our backyard had once been the site of the short-lived but very real “rush” that ended in much disappointment. If the prospecting site had not been located right on our property, it had been very close by, and the rock could be a souvenir of those earlier days. It might have once belonged to someone like Kammie, who regarded it as valuable because of its beauty and not its economic worth.

I had thought she would be disappointed that her discovered rock did not contain real gold, but Kammie was still thrilled with it. She proudly took the exquisite sample of pyrite to school the next morning for Show and Tell.

“See?” she said to me. “I knew there was something buried in the backyard.”

“How did you know that?” I asked her. “Did you learn in school that fool's gold had once been discovered here?”