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

TWO GHOST STORIES

Story 1

I had two old houses, one of which I rented to a 50 year old woman who was a complainer. She would occasionally come out of her house to tell me that the stairs were too steep or some other issue, about which I had no control. I think that her main creative activity was to find some reason to complain. She must have gone about her daily activities ruminating over an endless list of complaints about her life. The act of complaining to me seemed to give her satisfaction, a catharsis of sorts, giving her the feeling that she could then check an item off her list of complaints. I would listen to her complaints. There was rarely one that I could rectify.

On one occasion, she concluded her rant by saying “…and beside that, the house has a ghost.” “Oh, How do you know?” “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 in the bathroom before I went to bed. In the morning it was on my bedside stand. I put my glasses on the dresser. In the morning they are on the arm of my chair.” “Oh” I said “The same ghost haunts the house where I live.” On hearing this, she seemed confused at first. 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 additions had been added including: living and dining rooms, two stories were added to provide bedrooms, an antebellum columned facade was added for grandeur, and a large kitchen addition was added with slave quarters above it. A narrow twisted slave 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 preserved with a small concrete marker 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 sequential creaking of the central wooden central staircase leading up from the living room to the second and third floors. In the third floor bedroom there was a book case that 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 at Upholland, he slept in a second floor bedroom with his wife on one side and a loaded 45 caliber pistol the other.

Old frame houses creak at night, I thought. He is imagining ghosts and burglars. That is until one rainy night, while relaxing in front of the large fireplace in the livingroom, with my wife “Margery” and her sister, we all heard the familiar sound of the kitchen screen door spring stretching, followed by the easilly identified creaking of the kitchen door hinges. These were sounds which usually would evoke no concern, except 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 the casement window was wide open. There is a second “secret” door in the house. It leads from the slaves room into 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 foot prints on the floor and no noise of a person walking up the creaky slave stairs. Sitting there in front of the fire, we concluded that it was not an intruder but rather it had to have been that Martha’s ghost had come to visit her old haunts.