Do You Believe in Ghosts?
I didn’t. I was convinced that every phenomena had a logical, fact-based explanation. I questioned anything paranormal, and always discovered a reasonable cause.
Ghosts? Not a chance. They do not exist. Period.
That was before we bought a Queen Anne Victorian mansion.
The mansion was built by Dr. Warnock and completed in 1899. It had four bedrooms and a maid’s room upstairs; a music room, parlor, dining room and kitchen on the main level, and a full basement. Eventually, it passed through several owners and ended up in the Smith family. Grandpa Smith died in the house and the home sat in disrepair until another doctor and his wife restored it in the 1990’s.
The home was converted to a Country Inn and was for sale when we first saw it. We were given a key and spent our first night there alone. We locked the doors and retired to one of the bedrooms, the Blue Room. Just before nodding off, we heard the front door slam shut! I immediately sent my wife downstairs to investigate.
I know what you’re thinking. Big macho dude sends his tiny wife to check out the door. Well, she’s a bit younger than me, and I had these hip problems, and…
Anyway, she came back and said the front door and the back door were both locked. What the hell was that sound? It was a huge door and the sound was unmistakable. Must be some logical explanation.
We eventually fell asleep and bought The Inn the next day. The door sound soon became a distant memory.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” the former caretaker of The Inn asked me one day.
“No,” I replied, “why do you ask?”
She then proceeded to tell me a story about what had happened to her while she was working in the basement. She heard a very loud sound and went upstairs to investigate. Finding nothing unusual, she returned to the basement. Another loud sound. Bigger than before and she thought that a built-in cupboard full of dishes had fallen over, and all of the dishes had broken. Gingerly, she climbed the stairs and peeked into the kitchen from the basement stairway. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she entered the kitchen. All was normal.
She then called a friend, a member of the Smith family, and told her what happened.
“It’s Grandpa Smith,” she said. You will have to make your peace with him.
Not knowing exactly what to do, she said aloud, “Grandpa Smith, I can’t be running up and down the stairs anymore. Stop what you are doing, and stop it now!”
She was never “bothered” by Grandpa Smith again.
I thought very little of her story until a couple of years later.
I did almost all of the cooking at our Inn and spent most of my time in the kitchen. One day I was looking for a certain off-set spatula I wanted to use to frost a cake I had made. It was nowhere to be found. I accused the staff and everyone in sight of not putting it back in my drawer. I had one drawer in the kitchen where I kept all of those unusual utensils. You know the type of drawer. You all have one.
Miss Nancy looked everywhere in the kitchen; took everything out of the drawer and replaced all of the tools and utensils with the handles all pointing in the same direction. The spatula was gone!
I frosted the cake with another spatula and went about my business for the next few days. Then, one morning I pulled open the drawer and there was the spatula lying on top of the other utensils, on an angle as if carefully placed to draw my attention. Without moving it, I assembled all of the staff, showed them what I had found, and all denied any knowledge.
That was once.
Several weeks later the pair of scissors we always kept in the kitchen disappeared. Same search, same interrogation, same denials. The scissors were gone.
A few days later, I went to The Inn one morning to make bread and there, lying on the floor in front of the oven were the missing scissors! No one claimed any responsibility. No one knew how they got there in plain sight. What to do?
I didn’t believe in ghosts, but that day I told Grandpa Smith what I thought about his pranks, in language that only a sailor would understand. There were never any missing items again for the duration of the time we owned The Inn.
Eventually, we bought the house next door and moved out of The Inn. This opened another bedroom to rent out, and made our life much easier. Some of our guests would tell us that there was a “presence” in the house. Most of them had spent the night in the Blue Room. If that wasn’t enough, one guest told my wife and I that they heard the front door slam in the middle of the night. They went downstairs and checked the door. It was locked.
We just looked at each other.
Do I now believe in ghosts? What do you think?
Happy Halloween!
