You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

TWO GHOST STORIES

Story 1

A woman and her 14-year-old daughter, moving to Portland from Los Angeles, rented my house on Mississippi Avenue, which, in 1992, was in a rough neighborhood. A drug dealer lived across the alley. Gunshots were frequently heard. They parked their U-Haul truck behind the house. The girl was carrying things from the truck into the house through the back door. After helping her mother set up furniture in the bedroom, she returned to the truck and found an African American man in it, rummaging through their boxes. Having been raised in a poorer part of LA, she was fearless. She didn’t run, but she did scream, obscenities, words he would understand, as she grabbed a broom, intended to sweep out the truck, and began beating the thief with it. He dropped what he had in his hands to protect his head and scurried out of the van with her in hot pursuit. As he ran from the yard, she yelled after him, “And don’t even think of coming back!”

Her 40-year-old mother was, by comparison, a bit unhinged. After they were settled, the mother complained about things over which I had no control. For example, she said the stairs were too steep. I began to think that her main creative activity was to find some reason to complain. She must have gone through her day ruminating over an endless list of complaints about her life. The act of complaining, to me, or anyone else, seemed to give her satisfaction, a catharsis of sorts, giving her the feeling that, having delegated the problem to someone else, she could check that item off her list. I would listen to her complaints. They were rarely about things that could be fixed.

On one occasion, she concluded her rant by saying, ”And besides that, the house has a ghost.” “Oh, how do you know?” I asked. “It’s obvious. You probably knew it all along. The ghost moves things around at night. The other night, I left a glass of water on the counter in the bathroom. In the morning, it was on my bedside table. I put my glasses on the dresser; in the morning, they were on my chair.” “Oh,” I said, “I do know that ghost. It is the same one that haunts the house where I live.” She seemed confused for a moment. Then, realizing my intent, she turned and left in a huff.

Story 2

The family of my first wife, Margery, owned a 300-year-old house on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. They called “Upholland”. Originally, it had been a cabin with a large fireplace. Over the decades, a living and dining room had been added. Above them, two stories with bedrooms were added, and an antebellum columned facade was somewhat superficially applied to the front. It gave the house the appearance of a Southern Plantation Mansion. A large kitchen addition was also added with slave quarters above it. A narrow twisting stair connected the kitchen to the slave’s room. One of the slaves who had worked in that kitchen was buried on site. Her grave was marked with a small concrete slab into which was scratched the name “Martha”.

Margery’s brother, Doug, a Washington, DC lawyer, insisted that the house was haunted. He claimed to have heard the sequential creaking of the central wooden staircase leading up from the living room, past his second-floor bedroom, to the third floor. Adding to the mystery of this old house, there was, in the third-floor bedroom, a bookcase which was actually a hidden door to a secret room. John insisted that it was either a ghost or a burglar moving around in the house at night. When staying at Upholland, he slept with his wife on one side and a loaded 38 caliber pistol on the other.

Old frame houses creak at night, I thought. He’s imagining ghosts and burglars. That is, until one rainy night, while relaxing in the living room in front of that large fireplace, with my wife “Margery” and her sister, we heard the familiar sound of the kitchen screen door spring stretching, followed by the easily recognized creaking of the kitchen door hinges. These were sounds which would usually evoke no concern, but on this night, we did not expect a visitor. I called out “Hello” as I got up to walk from the living room, through the dining room, and into the kitchen. There was no one there, but the kitchen door was standing open. I went up the slave stairs to see if the visitor had gone up there. The slave room was empty, but a casement window was wide open. There is a second “secret” door in that ancient house. It led from the slave’s room through the back of the master bedroom closet. I found it to be closed with things stacked in front of it. It was certain that no one had left the slave quarters and entered the house through that door.

I closed the window, went down the narrow stairs, closed the kitchen door, and returned to the living room to tell the women what I had seen of this strange intrusion. We were all aware that the kitchen door had been closed. Margery’s sister said, “I was in the slave room this afternoon. No windows were open then.”

I would have thought it was an intruder, but on this rainy night, there were no wet footprints on the floor, and no sound of a person climbing the creaky slave stairs. Sitting there in front of the fire, we concluded that it was not an intruder but rather that Martha’s ghost had come to visit her old haunts.