I have to start this story the way I always do: by telling you right up front that I do not believe in ghosts. That said, this is a story about how I lived for a summer in the attic of a haunted house, where I experienced all kinds of ghostly occurrences - footsteps after dark, doors opening, taps running, couch cushions flying in the night.
I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe in inexplicable occurrences, and surely the things that happened to Toby and me that summer of 1994 in Columbus, Ohio, can't all be explained away. (Although Doug thinks they can.)
Toby and I were living in an apartment in the attic of James Thurber's childhood home--a brick Victorian house on a quiet, tree-lined street--where I was the summer's writer-in-residence. The two floors below us were the James Thurber museum—a small gift shop, and then the rest of the house preserved just as it was when the Thurber family lived there in the early 1900s.
The first time the ghost made its presence known was on a Sunday afternoon just three days after we arrived. I was sitting at my computer, and Toby, who had been sleeping at my feet, awoke and wandered out of the room. Almost immediately, I heard him growl.
He was standing, frozen, in the middle of the apartment’s living room, growling at an empty chair. The white room was suffused with June sunlight. The pictures were straight on the walls, the couch tidy, the table bare except for a bouquet of flowers. There was no reason for him to be wary.
But there he stood, fixated on an empty chair - a plain wooden chair with a padded vinyl seat - baring his teeth and growling a low, rumbling growl. Clearly, he saw something I didn't see.
I tested the air but felt nothing - no ghostly presence, no eerie sensation, no chill from beyond the grave. Still, Toby's strange behavior was unnerving, and, to snap him out of it, I tossed a tennis ball down the hallway.
When I told this story to one of the house's staff members later, her eyes widened. At the Thurber House, they believe in the ghost. They've heard it walking around, and some of the previous visiting writers have heard it, too. A couple of them claim to have seen it - looking out the attic window, or sitting in a chair beside the bed.
The ghost had been quiet all winter, the staff woman told me, but it had been lively the summer before, opening cabinet doors, moving the clock radio every morning and appearing as a reflection in the glass of the framed prints on the walls. She spoke of the ghost as though it were unquestionably real.
These stories were entertaining, but they had a nasty way of coming back to me late at night. It's easy to dismiss things in the daytime, but it was a different matter after dark when the house was closed up and the staff had gone home and Toby and I were squirreled away in the attic, like Thurber's mad grandfather who lived up there 80 years before.
This was a summer of tremendous thunderstorms, and many midnights I was jolted awake by torrential rains and crashing thunder. I would lie in bed, my eyes wide open, listening to the rain drum down, and straining my ears for the ghost.
The Thurber House was built in 1873 and refurbished in 1984, when it was turned into a museum and writers' center.
During the day, the house is busy; phones ring, staff members chat and visitors pop in and out of the rooms, plunking the keys of the typewriter Thurber used at the New Yorker and staring at the family photos on the walls. But at 5 p.m., the house empties. The other commercial buildings along the street also close, and after dark Toby and I were the only living souls on the entire block.And it was usually after dark when I heard footsteps, treading one floor below.
The ghost is not Thurber's; as a matter of fact, Thurber heard footsteps, too, and wrote about them in his story "The Night the Ghost Got In."
Legend holds that the ghost is the original owner of the house, a businessman who received a phone call one day at work. "If you go home at a certain time," the caller told him, "you'll find your wife in bed with her lover."
The businessman did go home, and he paced in indecision around and around the dining room table. Finally, he bolted up the back stairs and burst through the bedroom door - and did, indeed, find his wife with her lover. Shortly after, in despair, the man killed himself.
By 1913, when the Thurbers moved in, the house was solidly haunted. Thurber and his brother heard footsteps tromping around the dining room table and running up the back stairs. Over the next 70 years, the house was sold a couple of times and then carved up into apartments, but the ghost remained. Sooner or later, everyone who lived there heard footsteps.
I heard them, too. Every night, when I shut off the lights and crawled into bed, I left on the air-conditioner so I wouldn't have to hear them, but I heard them quite often anyway. At first it was only occasionally, but for a stretch of about two weeks in July I heard them every night, walking briskly up and down the hallway one floor below.
One night I leashed up Toby and crept with him down the attic stairs to see if we could find the source of the noise. We peeked into the silent bedrooms and the cool white bathroom on the second floor and then, spooked by nothing more than the darkness, dashed back up the stairs to the attic apartment, where I had left all the lights burning and the TV blaring, and slammed the door.
Later that month, my sister Kristin and her husband drove out from California. During their stay, we kept finding odd things out of order - couch cushions tossed onto the living room floor when we had all been sleeping; faucets suddenly running for no reason; windows that had been shut and locked somehow opened wide to the muggy July afternoon.
One afternoon I walked past a bifold door that I never used - it led to air-conditioning ducts and not much else - and found it had opened, inexplicably, since I walked past minutes before. It was the kind of door you had to pull with a jerk to open, but I hadn't heard a thing.
All of those things - cushions, water, windows, doors - I could have dismissed, had it not been for the footsteps steadily tromp-tromp-tromping on the second floor midnight after midnight.
I began soliciting guests to keep me company, and in August, my friend Joey flew out from Minneapolis. She slept in the spare bedroom at the top of the attic stairs. But at breakfast the next morning she looked rumpled and unrested. She hadn't had much sleep. She'd awakened in the middle of the night because something was violently shaking her bed.
Toward the end of summer, Toby saw the ghost again.
It was evening, and the house had been shut up for the night - the shades drawn, the lights turned off, the doors securely locked. This was my favorite time to prowl the museum. With golden late-afternoon light through the windows, the house seemed
friendlier at this quiet time of day.
I wandered into little gift shop, and Toby meandered down the hall. And then, just as before, I heard him growl.
He was two rooms away, in the museum's front parlor, staring at a velvet couch beneath a leaded-glass window. The sun was setting, and the sky outside was a dark pink and gold.
Just as before, Toby was tense. And just as before, he growled, though this time with more certainty.
I tried to walk past him to see what was alarming him, but Toby wouldn't allow it. He moved in front of me, blocking the doorway, keeping me from the couch and whatever invisible thing was on it.
It was almost a full minute before he stopped. His snarls trailed off into silence, and then he walked hesitantly to the couch and sniffed it all over in puzzlement.
It was as though whatever had been there had disappeared.
I haven't come to any great conclusions about what happened in that house that summer. I talk about it pretty freely, but whenever I do I always preface my story with the statement, "I don't believe in ghosts," before going on to mention the ways I experienced the ghost. Somehow, that doesn't feel like a contradiction.
The interesting thing is, other people don't seem to find it a contradiction, either. Invariably, they say two things. The first is, "I have a ghost story, too." And the second, which follows quickly, is, "Of course, I don't really believe in ghosts."
And that may be the only lesson here - that all of us feel both a prickle of recognition and a nudge of reassurance at our friends' supernatural stories. It was comforting to know that I wasn't alone in my experiences; my guests (except for Doug) also heard the ghost that none of us really believed existed. That made me feel sane even as I lay awake, tense and listening, night after night.
Although I still don't know what, exactly, I really heard those evenings, and though I still don't know how those windows opened or why those faucets gushed or who or what shook Joey awake, I do know this: that a lot of what happened that summer will remain unexplained and impossible to understand. And that the things we cannot understand are always the things that trouble and interest us the most.
