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

GHOST STORIES :

Story 1

A woman and her daughter, moving to Portland from Los Angeles, rented my house on Mississippi Ave. In 1992, this was a rough part of town. A drug dealer lived across the alley. Gunshots were frequently heard. While the mother seemed a little scatterbrained, her 14-year-old daughter, having been raised in a poorer part of LA, was clear-headed and fearless. They parked their U-Haul moving van behind the house. The girl was carrying things from the van into the house through the back door. After helping her mother set up furniture in the bedroom, she returned to her task of clearing the truck and found an African American man in it, rummaging through their boxes. She didn’t run or even pause, but she did scream, obscenities, words he would understand. 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 50-year-old mother was, by comparison, a bit unhinged. After they were settled, the mother would complain 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, I suppose, seemed to give her satisfaction, a catharsis of sorts, giving her the feeling that she could then check that complaint 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 the arm of 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 it “Upholland”. Originally, it had been a cabin with a large fireplace. The house consisted of: a large kitchen with slave quarters above it, a three-story addition providing a living and dining room with two stories for bedrooms, and an antebellum columned facade. 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 the second-floor bedrooms, to the third floor. 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. In one of the third-floor bedrooms, there was a door disguised as a bookcase. It opened into a “secret” room.

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 identified creaking of the kitchen door hinges. These were sounds which usually would 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 the 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 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.