Ghosts along the Texas Coast (23 page)

For the first year and a half that we lived here, Beaux and I were quite content in our home. My only complaint was a shortage of closet space in my bedroom. It finally occurred to me by taking out the folding door closet that ran along the bedroom's east wall (the wall between the bedroom and the kitchen) and building a walk-in closet off the north wall (the back of the house) I could increase the size of my bedroom and my closet space. Since I am a contractor, it was a simple matter of bringing my carpentry crew in and lining them up.

First, we built the addition onto, but not yet accessible to, the bedroom. Then we took down the wall of folding closet doors and finished the former closet's interior. After a week or so of work, we were ready to cut a doorway through the north bedroom wall into the new closet. The carpenters pulled my bed out to the middle of the room in preparation, with Beaux's dog bed a few feet away from the right side, as usual. That night, actually about 2 a.m., I was jarred out of a deep sleep by a violent shaking of my bed. Beaux and I jumped up at the same time. For a minute we just stood there, stunned. I fully expected a “boom!” The last time I'd experienced such a tremor was during my childhood when the Texas City refineries blew up! There was no sound to follow. Beaux laid back down. I stayed up, looking out the windows for the glow of a fire from one of the Port Arthur refineries. There was nothing but darkness outside.

The next few days I asked everyone I encountered if they had felt any sort of tremor that night. No one had. Meanwhile, the carpenters finished the doorway and moved the bed to the east wall. We looked over the bed, the floor, and even under the house for any clue to what had caused the bed to shake. There was simply nothing to explain the event. After a week or two, I decided it was just some sort of a freak one-time occurrence.

And then it happened again . . . and again . . . and again! Just about every week, and sometimes twice a week, the bed would suddenly start shaking violently for five to fifteen or so
seconds. I literally tore the house apart trying to find a reason, any reason. There was none. Eventually I realized that it wasn't the house shaking, for never did glass rattle or pictures shift during these occurrences. I started sleeping (when I slept at all) with one eye open and the lights on. But I never saw a thing. Beaux, after the first time or two, slept through the rest, just a few feet away, undisturbed. Not me! After four months, I was a wreck. The bed-shakings were now occurring two to three times a week, happening most often right after I fell asleep, no matter what time of night. I continued to explore every possibility with no results. Finally, I simply left the house for two weeks.

When I came back, things eased up somewhat. The bed-shakings now were only happening two or three times a month, then once, or twice. By fall of 1989 I had acquired a second dog, a female named Char, and it seemed as though the bed-shakings lessened in frequency when she started sleeping at the foot of my bed, under a bench I have there.

After a few months of relative peace, a new and terrifying event took place. I was in bed watching TV. The lights were on and both dogs were asleep in different corners of the room. Suddenly, something hit the side of the bed, eight times in succession. It was like a giant fist hit the side of my mattress! I had time to sit straight up and clearly look in all directions while the bed jumped from the invisible blows. There was absolutely nothing to see. That was sometime in 1990. The bed wasn't “touched” by unseen hands again. But I was.

One night about a year after the eight “bed-thumps” I was lying crossways across the bed on my stomach, reading. Suddenly, someone tapped me on the shoulder . . . hard! I leapt up in absolute terror prepared to face an intruder. I was even more terrified to see no one there.

Last year, I was again in bed, reading, wide awake. I was sitting, my back against the pillows and my hair had fallen over my forehead, almost in my eyes. Gently, very gently, something lifted my hair off my forehead and brushed it back into place. I froze for a second and when I finally got the courage to lift my eyes I saw, for just about two or three seconds, a faint, white mist. That is the only time I have seen anything.
Occasionally there is a loud thump or crash that I can't explain. Then, again, there are those I can explain.

The most awesome event took place in the living room. The previous owners had installed brass wall sconces with glass chimneys on each side of the fireplace. I had inspected these very closely to see if they could be moved, but found that they were each held by two sturdy screws through the sheetrock into the solid wood wall behind. One day, the dogs and I were outside when I heard an enormous crash in the house. I ran inside to find one of the sconces on the floor, with glass everywhere. I couldn't believe my eyes. There was no way it could have simply come out of the wall. I looked at the wall. If the sconce had fallen downward, the bottom hole through the sheetrock should have been elongated by the screw pulling loose. But it was the top hole that was elongated, upward! The sconce had been pulled upward, and out, by some tremendous force!

Then there was the night I came home to find no hot water at any faucet in the house. But when I checked my gas water heater it was running fine. I called several people, including a plumber, and no one could give me any possible reason. After making arrangements for the plumber to come out the next morning, I shut the hot water heater completely off, figuring something had to be wrong with it. Two hours later, I went to the kitchen to fill a pot to heat water to wash up in, and the instant I turned the faucet on, hot water came out! The plumber found nothing wrong. There was no possible explanation!

The most recent incident happened only a week or two ago. [Note: This would have been in March 1993.] The dogs and I (I'm up to three now) were in the den one evening when I heard a crash in the bedroom. I ran in to find a heavy, nearly solid crystal perfume bottle smashed on the carpeted floor. This bottle had been on a tray on my dresser surrounded by a dozen or so smaller, more fragile perfume bottles. But all the other bottles still sat undisturbed. I cannot possibly explain how one bottle in the middle had fallen, or how such a sturdy bottle could shatter on . . . thick carpet. Actually, I can't explain any of this.

Char, my female dog, now weighs fifty pounds, about the same as Beaux. She sometimes wakes me up in the morning by jumping up on my bed. And a fifty-pound dog jumping on my bed does not shake it with near the force of the unexplained bed shakings.

While the dogs don't appear to sense anything, there have been many times one of them, usually Beaux, has suddenly yelped, jumped, and slunk away to hide in a corner and look at me with hurt eyes, just as if to say, “Why did you hit me?

The bed-shakings seemed to have stopped about the time that Joe Lee's granddaughter visited. When I told her about all my incidents she did not seem at all surprised. She simply nodded and said “Paw-paw's still here. You need to tell him to either behave himself or leave.” I did. And at least I can get a decent night's sleep now.

The only pattern I have been able to think of is that the events have happened, or at least started, after men were in my house. The bed-shakings started while the carpenters were here; the wall sconce crashed the day after a party, the perfume bottle fell after a young man had dog-sat for me for a week.

As I said, I don't “believe in” spirits. I don't talk about this often because people often act like they expect me to try to convince them there are such things. I've found it's not a matter of believing or convincing. It's simply a matter of realizing and finally accepting the fact that Joe Lee (or someone else) lives with me at 1616 Elgin in some form or another. I don't like it, and I don't want it. But, whoever, or whatever, it is here.

Debbie Sandifer read in the
Beaumont Enterprise
that I was seeking ghost stories. She telephoned me right away with her story!

During the two years, from 1971-1973, that Debbie and her husband, Jim, rented a small four-room house in Nederland, so many unexplainable things happened there they are convinced they played host to a poltergeist!

As is typical of many homes in the coastal area, this small dwelling was built up on piers. From the first night the Sandifers resided there, strange manifestations began. There was a small dining area, no larger than 4 by 6 feet, off the kitchen. As the Sandifers and another couple sat around the table chatting after dinner the first night they spent there, they noticed a small copper pipe which was located on the floor start to move up and down, coming up about one to 1 to 1 1/2 inches from the floor level. It was the type of tubing that would have been used for an icemaker, only their refrigerator had no icemaker. Astounded, they decided there must be an animal under the house, and it had caused the pipe to be pushed up through the floor. They went outside, taking their big German shepherd dog, King, with them. King showed no interest in the area under the house from which the pipe had emerged, and a good look under the house turned up nothing. The two couples went back inside, and several times during the evening the small pipe would move up and down in the floor!

Debbie told me during their two years of living in the house “things moved around a lot.” A neighbor who lived across the street was bodily pushed through his open patio door, also. This neighbor believed at times the Sandifers' ghost visited his house as well!

The gas heater the Sandifers used to warm the house during chilly weather would sometimes turn itself off at the wall after it had just been lit. When they questioned their landlady, the Sandifers said she was very reluctant to discuss the possibility that the house might be haunted, even though the neighbors assured Debbie that previous tenants had
also experienced peculiar things at the house and the landlady was well aware of it.

When the Sandifers took a trip to Lubbock, in West Texas, they arranged for Jim's parents to have a house key so they could come in and feed and water King while they were away. Debbie left a note of instructions on the kitchen counter as to what to feed the dog. When they returned from their trip, they were astounded to find this note firmly glued to the kitchen cabinet with a “white, milky-looking substance,” some of which had trickled down the cabinet. When Debbie questioned her mother-in-law about why she had pasted the note on the cabinet, she was so shocked to hear this that she came right over to Debbie's house to see for herself how the note got stuck to the cabinet!

Once, to surprise her husband, Debbie purchased a small model automobile kit. Since it was like the car they owned, she thought he would enjoy having the model. Her sister was with her when she bought it, and both ladies agreed the kit was well wrapped and sealed up, all parts intact, at the time of purchase. When her husband got home that night, Debbie asked him if he had seen her surprise. He had not, so she went to where she had left it and was shocked to find the package all unwrapped!

In a similar vein, Debbie said she liked to sew and often had projects going. Once when she had worked all day on a dress, she laid the finished product out to show her husband when he came home from work that night. She had it all finished except for sewing on the buttons, so she just placed them where they would go on the dress. Then she left the house and drove to pick Jim up from work. As soon as they got home, she took him to show off the fruits of her day's labor . . . only to find the new dress she had so carefully laid out was “all rumpled and wrinkled, and the buttons all scattered about everywhere.”

Several times Debbie saw what she believed was a dark, shadowy form in the hallway, but she never found anything there upon checking closely. She got to the point where she was even afraid to sleep on her stomach because “it” might come up behind her. She said once when her sister spent the night with them, she asked Jim, Debbie's husband, why he kept calling “Debbie . . . Debbie” all night. He said he had slept soundly, and never once called out to Debbie. In fact, Debbie said he never did call her by her name at all, preferring the more affectionate term of “Honey” when he spoke to her.

Once when the Sandifers were having a plumbing problem, Jim went out in the backyard and dug up a portion of the sewage pipes. He had just uncoupled the pipes when a tremendous gush of water came through the pipe! Someone, or something, had obviously flushed the commode, and Jim knew there was no one in the house at the time. He rushed inside in time to hear the commode still running!

On other occasions, Debbie said she heard the clothes dryer running. She would go in to check it, and it would immediately shut off. It was never warm inside, as it should have been, after running.

As disturbance followed disturbance and the sleepless nights began to add up, Debbie finally discussed their problem with the parish priest. She said she went into great detail. The priest did not laugh at her or question her veracity, but he did tell her since the spirit had been only “mischievous” and had done nothing really evil, he believed it would be best to let well enough alone and not tamper with the status quo. From questioning a number of people who were familiar with such manifestations, Debbie said she and Jim came to the conclusion that the spirit they shared their home with may have been that of a child or young person, because it did only mischievous things, not really cruel ones. But child-spirit or no, Debbie said she was more than relieved when they at last decided to purchase a home in Port Neches and moved from the haunted property.

I also talked with a former neighbor of the Sandifers who is a contractor and did some renovations to the place after the Sandifers moved out. He reported he would turn off all the lights in the evenings when his work was done and lock up the place. When he would arrive the next day, he would find them all turned on! He also said that the phone company had come in and installed a new telephone. He did not know how they got in, because he had the only key to the house and he kept it locked up except when he was on the property! He said one hot summer day, he was working in a back bedroom. He was very uncomfortable and asked his wife to go to the store to buy him some cold beer. A short time later the front door opened, and he heard footsteps in the hall. He put down his hammer and walked out of the room, fully expecting to see his wife and a cold six-pack! Imagine his disappointment . . . and utter shock . . . when he realized his wife had not yet returned from her errand and he was completely alone in the house.