Our Haunted House

 I didn’t become aware of the sounds until I was old enough to baby sit.  I already knew that every house produces its own sounds; air ducts thump, old heating pipes and radiators hiss and clang, while siding cracks and moans as it expands and contracts with the various heating cycles.  Yes it truly is, “The hole in the ear that lets in the fear”, as the old saying goes. I knew all of this and I also thought that I was familiar with the individual sound signature of our house.   That was until I sat alone that first night being left in charge of the safety of the house and my sister.

  This was not the first time that I had been frightened in the house.  As a teenager it seemed to be a rite of passage to spend time at the movies trying to get scared half to death.  Most movies of my teen years really didn’t do the trick as they usually involved lame costumes and weak plots about invaders from outer space and some sort of fire breathing, city stomping creature.  Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” came along and changed all that. True fright had arrived.

  I saw “Psycho” as a matinee and returned home in a state of wide eyed paranoia just as my parents were heading out the door to see the same movie.  By some cruel twist of fate, my father started going on about how it seemed that I had been avoiding soap and water lately and that it was high time that I made use of the shower. I baulked at the suggestion but never bothered to explain that the last person I had seen taking a shower got cut to ribbons.  My father was piqued at my stubbornness and insisted that a shower was going to take place right at that very instant. After the front door closed I headed off for what was going to be the quickest shower of my life. I barely got wet because I couldn’t stop imagining that there was someone lurking on the other side of the opaque shower curtain. When my parents returned, my mother was still so scared that it seemed like she wouldn’t let go of Dad’s arm for about a month.

  You could say that after “Psycho”, I was primed to be anxious about being alone and perhaps you could assume that I was just a little too alert to noises. This I would accept if it wasn’t for the fact that the noises were both repetitive and as regular as clockwork.

  The sequence never varied.  It would start at the back door entrance to the cellar.  The door looked like it had been hastily cobbled together with discarded lumber from a derelict barn.  The thin, slightly warped boards had spaces between them. The whole rickety affair featured a rusty thumb latch.  From the outside a thumb latch looks like a spoon has been shoved into a key hole. When you press your thumb down on the spoon, it lifts the metal bar from its holder on the inside.  There is no lock. The thumb latch would begin to rattle and the door would shudder back and forth on its own like there was someone trying to get in.  On a quiet sleepless night the sound would carry clearly to the top floor.

   After the outer door, came a set of wooden steps that led down to the basement. It was important to be able to count the eight treads as you stepped, for when you closed the outer door behind you, there would be no hope of light.  Directly after the door had finished its peculiar sounds, the treads would creak in order from top to bottom.

 At the bottom landing there was another door that led into the basement. The landing itself was home to a great number of the strange little creatures of the dark that we called pill bugs. These were small greyish millipedes that rolled into a ball when touched and crunched loudly when you stepped on them, while milling about in the dark searching for the door knob that would let you into the basement. This basement/landing door was in better shape than the one above, but it too would rattle briefly in its turn.

  Next there came a brief period of waiting as if the intruder was inspecting the grey geography of the cinder block basement with its oil furnace,  cement laundry sinks, cold cellar, and light bulbs on pull chains. The wait was over when the steps leading up to the kitchen door began creaking.

  I would make a point of making sure that the kitchen door had been firmly shut but it didn’t help.  After the creaking had reached the last tread leading up from the basement, the door would open slowly and smoothly. You could stand there and watch it happen or as I did when I baby sat, you could sit parallel to it in the green armchair in the living room that was only a few steps away.  Either way, the door was going to open, leaving you to wonder if anything was going to appear from behind it.

  Once in the family room, the invisible intruder would cause the lead weights which were sewn into the fabric at the bottom of the drapes, to begin to sway and leisurely knock against the wall of the large front window.

 After that it was a waiting game again until whatever force I was dealing with toured the remainder of the main floor until it found the staircase that led up the second floor and hence my bedroom.

  “Creak,..creak,…creak,…” as I lay in my bed I could hear those stair treads being tested one after another, as whatever it was journeyed up the first section from the main floor to the landing and then after a brief pause continued to the second floor.

  Just as the last tread strained under some unseen weight, there was the briefest of pauses and then the energy was thrown at my door with its full force.  My closed bedroom door would shake like someone was trying desperately to get in. The handle would be visibly forced in and out at rapid speed.  How long did it last?  Two seconds?  Three seconds?  Who can tell time in a panic? Then it would stop. Dead silence. Just like that.

 The cycle would repeat itself with machine like accuracy well into the night.  If I wanted to pack it in before my parents came home I would try to get to sleep between episodes.

  Of course living with this odd rhythm of sound and movement fostered a bit of paranoia.  Whenever I had to babysit I took to comforting myself by skulking through the house with the largest knife that I could find from the kitchen drawer.  I would start at the bottom of the house and inspect the cold cellar. Then I would go to each room and throw open each closet door with the breathless anticipation of lunging at some hidden intruder. After a full house inspection I would park myself in the green armchair near the kitchen. There, knife in my left hand, junk food in my right, I would simultaneously watch the TV and the kitchen door.

  At some point I shared my burden of fear with my father in an attempt to gain insight into the hauntings.  I was expecting to be told something wondrous like that the house had been built on an old cemetery or that it been cursed for some terrible reason.  His answer came with little hesitation and with no mention of the supernatural.   The house had been built on farmland and the foundation dug by horse and plough scoop.  Dad had built a good deal of it himself and the only curses were the type heard when he hammered his thumb nail or ran short of money for building material.  The house did what it did because newly build houses take some time to settle in the earth.  Certain kinds of soil prolong this settling activity and our house was still settling. Add to this that we had a new bus route that went in front of our house and you had the answer.  Each time that the bus went by it would send vibrations into the soil which would cause the house to twist as it settled.  The twisting would set off the sequence of creaking staircases and vibrations. It was an adult answer. There was comfort in its logic.  However until the day we moved away I always babysat from the green armchair with a knife in my hand.  Ken