Just when you thought you’d had enough of Halloween horror, spooks, and spirits, I have one more tale I’d like to lay on you. It happens to be true. I know, I know, I don’t have to say that because everything I write in this column is true. Oh, it may contain alternate facts, such as Kellyanne Conway would say, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true just like real facts. But anyway, this story is true. It happened to me, so I know it is true.
Back in 1974, I rented my first apartment above a camera store in a turn-of-the-century, downtown-LaGrange building. The prior tenant took off hurriedly and left all her things behind. Because I helped clean the place out, I got a great deal on the rent.
During one heavy rainstorm, a leak developed in the old ceiling tile in my living room. I blurted out a naughty word, then placed my biggest cook pot on the floor to catch the drops, grabbed a flashlight, and went into the bathroom, not to use it for the common things, but the windowless bathroom received its light from a skylight over the bathtub, which in turn got its light from an attic skylight in the roof above. A short wall separated the end of the bathtub from the commode, so I stepped on the tub then up on the wall. I pushed open the skylight and pulled myself up into the attic. I could do that in 1974, and was surprised at what I saw in the flashlight beam.
I’d figured my apartment had a lower ceiling installed some time in the past, judging by the late 1930s cork tile used. But in that four-foot high attic space were the remnants of the original apartment, complete with faded flowery-striped wallpaper, fancy crown molding, a ceiling medallion, and gaslight fixtures all around, just waiting for someone to turn the handles on each and light them up. If floorboards were added, it could have been a quaint living space for a dwarf.
Unique to the apartment was the fact that I never felt alone, even when all the stores below were closed. It was not a creepy feeling, but one as if a family member was just out of sight in the next room. A quite comfortable feeling.
I got married, and my wife moved in. She worked some 40 miles away, usually until 9 p.m., and afterwards some times stopped to see her parents, so it would be midnight or later by the time she showed up, after I had gone to bed. Some nights I’d work late and she’d be there and in bed before I came home.
One night, I awoke about 12:30 a.m.. I was facing away from the bedroom door, but I could tell she’d just arrived. I called her name, but no answer. I rolled over and said it again. To my surprise, she wasn’t there. She had to be, because I could sense her standing right there three feet away in the middle of the bedroom doorway. But I could see the outside stairway light shining into the kitchen through the transom, and no one was in the doorway. I stared at the spot for another few seconds, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
A couple of years later after we’d moved into a house, we sat together watching a PBS program on the supernatural. I said, “I never told you about what happened one night in our apartment.” I said how I never felt alone, and how, one night, I thought she was standing in the doorway. About halfway into this part of my story, she started trembling and pulled away from me. Tears formed in her eyes. She got up and ran into the dining room. I got up and followed her. She was at the table crying. “What’s wrong?” I asked. She shook her head and indicated that she couldn’t talk just yet. I sat and waited until she calmed down. In a shaky voice she said, “I never told you, but I had the same feeling there, like I wasn’t alone. Then one night when you worked late and I was in bed, I could sense someone standing in the bedroom doorway. Not a threatening person, but a kind one, like a grandpa. I thought I saw him standing there in his undershirt, smiling at me.”
Now I was creeped out. She actually had wrapped flesh around my feeling. I didn’t know what to think. We looked at each other for a minute, then I said some day it would be interesting to go back and find out the history of that building and those who had lived there, maybe find some old photos to see if any former inhabitants looked like the man standing in the doorway that she had seen. Some day.
Some day I should do that. But I might discover it was the ghost of an insurance salesman, waiting to sell us a term afterlife policy.
Maybe I won’t do that after all.