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As I put pen to paper, my memory jumps back to the house on Walton Street. You might ask what makes this house so significant. After all, it was a rather nondescript wood frame house, painted in earth tones. Nor was it a well traveled street.
What made it significant was that it was haunted. We didn’t believe in ghosts then, but we believe in them now. Of course, I’m getting ahead of myself.
At the time, we were looking for a place to stay, and we were looking for one on the cheap. Father had just gotten fired, and mother was working as a housekeeper to keep our finances out of the tank.
When we saw the house on Walton Street, we decided that it would suit our needs just fine. I remember my parents coming back, looking stunned. They went to the renter, to ask how much it was, and were quoted a price that seemed too low to be believed.
After repeating it several times, to prove he wasn’t joking, he explained. A dozen tenants signed rent papers, but ran away after one night. He was tired of losing money, and he couldn’t get anybody to rent it. Word went around that it was haunted.
When my parents heard this, they laughed out loud. If only we had paid attention. My parents put down the first and the last month’s rent, and we moved in.
The accommodations were Spartan, since our furniture was in storage. We laid out our air mattresses, and put our sleeping bags on top of them. Since there was no stove, we had to cook our dinner above a propane camp stove.
We joked about camping indoors, and we talked about what a big adventure this was. While there was a grain of truth to all our big talk, the reason was to prop up our sagging spirits. We talked about how much fun we were having, to hide how miserable we were.
Plus, encroaching dark did a lot to take away our bravado. It was easy enough to deny ghosts in the light of day. As darkness falls though, it is difficult to maintain that level of certitude.
When candlelight is the only light you have, the uncertainty is only magnified. The shifting, darting shadows can hide a multitude of things that have no business existing in the light of day. Besides, there was nothing to do, but go to bed.
A pounding sound from upstairs woke us up. It stopped once we were awake, though it was later that we found that out. Each of us lay in the dark, alone with our own fear. One by one, we dismissed it as a figment of our imaginations, and rolled over to go back to sleep.
Once again, something began pounding upstairs. It quit for a while, and we lay frozen in our beds with terror. There was no question of getting back to sleep at this point. The pounder got tired of waiting for us, and began picking up the racket again.
The first clue I got that somebody else was awake was hearing mom whispering to dad that there was a prowler upstairs. It didn’t occur to me until later how silly that idea was.
A prowler breaking into the top floor of a house would have to be stupid. Furthermore, only a rank amateur would make that much noise. Still, we latched onto the idea as the logical one. After all, who wants to admit believing in the boogums of the dark we spend our days denying?
With much muttering, my father got up, and grabbed a candle. That set off a chain reaction. Kenny suggested he go along, in case dad needed some help. Then I jumped in, and offered my services as well.
Within a minute, we all decided to go together. In retrospect, it was the herd instinct kicking in. None of us wanted to be left alone in the dark.
Something that caused the hair to rise on the napes of our necks was the sound of the pounding sound following us to the stairs. I don’t know who started screaming first, but once it started, everyone joined in.
At the top of the stairs was a chair. This may not seem scary to you, but the thing was jumping around, with no sign of anybody touching the thing. It became quite clear it was what was making the banging noises.
It began hopping down the stairs, toward us on its back legs. Everybody shrank away from it, as if we were expecting it to leap down on one of us. Of course, it made no such moves.
As it got close to the bottom of the stairs, the door to the basement flew open with a hollow boom. The chair didn’t hesitate for a second. It swung around the former on one leg, and then began hopping down the stairs.
We stood there, staring in wide-eyed stupefaction. This was not something that happened every day. The chair spun around, as if it were regarding us. That caused a wave of fear to sweep over us. Then the chair started bouncing up and down, before starting to hop down the stairs again.
It dawned on us that it wanted us to follow it down into the basement. To reinforce that conclusion, an invisible hand pushed us in that direction.
We went down with a sense of trepidation. The only surprise we found down there was the floor was dirt. The chair began hopping from one leg to another on one spot. Whatever it wanted us to see, that was the spot.
The chair backed off while we began to dig. Since we didn’t have any tools, we had to use our hands. It didn’t take long to find what it wanted us to find. Buried in a shallow grave was a body.
It was decomposed almost to a skeleton, so it was difficult to be sure of much with our quick visual scan. Of course we knew that whoever it was, they had been murdered, and the chair wanted the body to receive a decent burial.
We stared at each other, and then reburied the body. There was no way we could give it a proper burial, and we weren’t prepared to answer the questions that would follow.
That infuriated the chair to no end. It began hopping up and down, then butting us. Being attacked by a psychotic chair was too much for us. We ran up the stairs, the chair attacking us all the way. We didn’t even bother to grab our stuff.
My dad ended up spending three weeks wrangling to get our rent money back. By then, he was employed again, and we were scraping up the money for a deposit on a house.
After we fled, I think there were one or maybe two tenants that rented the place. Nobody stayed more than one night there.
A few years later, the house burned down, and the renter was arrested on charges of arson. To the best of my knowledge, the body was never recovered. The scorched foundation remains its only mausoleum.
