I
think I have lived in two different
"haunted" houses in my life and I never get tired of telling about them. But I'll
just tell you about the first one right now.
When
I was a child, we lived in an old white house in a
small community about 15 miles north of
the city of Cincinnati. When I was 10 we moved two doors down the street. The people who
bought the house and moved in naturally became our neighbors. They had a boy name
Alan who was my age and a girl named Barbara who was 4 years older than we
were and much too sophisticated to mess around with us. But Alan and I became
good friends even though he was a boy and I was a girl because there just
weren't any kids in the neighborhood. The mother of the family worked and during
the summers it was Barbara's job to "watch" Alan -- babysit in
other words.
One
summer when Alan was 11 and I was 13, Barbara, now 17, got an invitation
from one of her cousins to come and spend two weeks with them . While she was
gone my mom was going to "watch" Alan. The usual routine was for him to
get up, eat breakfast, dress and come over to my house. We then would play
monopoly on the sun porch and after lunch we would usually jump on our bikes and
head to the local pool for the afternoon.
But
one morning he came over and we didn't feel like
Monopoly so we decided to ride our bikes
down to the woods. By the time we got back we were drenched in sweat and so thirsty. Now, of
course, there was no air conditioning, but we knew that Alan's mom
always kept a bottle of cold water in the refrigerator and it seemed like a
very inviting thing right at that moment. So we parked our bikes and went
into the kitchen. After pouring our water we sat down on the basement steps
where there was a nice cool draft. All of a sudden, we heard the front door open
and slam shut and someone walk up the stairs right over our heads! Alan
said, "Who could that be? The front door's locked!" We just about killed
one another getting out of there. At my house we poured this story out to my mom,
who seemed unimpressed. She just told us to stay there because she was
going to have lunch ready in a few minutes.
On
my twenty-first birthday Mom and Dad had a big party
for me with lots of relatives and
when they all left, Mom and I sat on the porch and talked about the neighborhood and how
things had been changing. I found myself retelling the story of the ghostly
footsteps I'd heard as a kid. "I know you didn't believe us, Mom, but it really
happened. I swear." She was quiet for a moment and then said, "Oh, I
believed you. I can't tell you the number of times I went down to do laundry when we
lived in that house and heard the front door open and someone go up the
front steps." Turns out she was often so spooked that she wouldn't go back
upstairs, instead she used to go out the basement door to the backyard and sit in
a lawn chair until my brother and sister came home from school.
Cecilia Westrich
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