Haunted (7 page)

“No, we've put it away and replaced it with a new one that operates with a switch,” I told her.

“You said the pattern it flashed out was fast, fast, fast, slow, slow, slow, fast, fast, fast, right?” she asked.

I affirmed the pattern of the lamp's activity for her, but wondered, given all the bizarre events I had told her about, why she was so interested in it.

“I looked up Morse code on the Internet...” she began. Upon hearing these words, I immediately felt uneasy. It had not even occurred to me that the pattern of the blinking light could be a coded message of some kind.

“What does the pattern mean?” I interrupted.

“Ready for this? Fast, fast, fast would be ‘S.' Slow, slow, slow would be ‘O.' And, then fast, fast, fast again for another ‘S.' SOS is the message,” she told me.

“God,” I said nervously. “How are we supposed to help?”

That conversation soon receded from my mind, however, when everything remained calm within the house. I only hoped it would stay that way.

With all that had taken place over the summer, I had forgotten to send out the photographs taken at Matt's birthday party. When I received the developed photos back in the mail, I sat down to glance through them. I could not help but smile at the cute, happy faces of my own children and the other party guests enjoying the funny antics of Klinky the Klown, whom we had hired to entertain everyone. One particular photograph, though, made me pause. I asked Ted to have a look at it.

The picture showed Klinky the Klown doing a magic trick with Matt assisting him. Several children could be seen seated on the sofa and floor around those two, all laughing at the funny act. But unlike the other photographs, taken from the same angle, only seconds before and after, in this one there appeared to be two bright bubbles of light hovering over the seated children. One was approximately the size of an adult's head. The other was smaller in size, much like the head of a child. Ted and I examined the photograph carefully, trying to determine what could have caused the orbs of light to appear. As no explanation was evident, we eventually shuffled the picture back in with the rest. I wondered, though, about a camera's ability to capture on film what the human eye could not see.

With that in mind, I went out and purchased a new roll of film. The next time I found myself alone in the house, I walked around the rooms with my camera in hand, taking pictures.

“If you're here, could I take your picture?” I called out as I entered Matt's room, but felt foolish doing so. It had not occured to me to ask permission in any other room. There had not been any unusual activity for some time, and I had no reason to think a presence might be nearby. Still, I thought it might be a good opportunity to see if anything out of the ordinary could be captured on the last shot left on the roll of film.

I took the film to a local one-hour developing lab and waited anxiously to see the photographs. All the pictures were ordinary shots of empty rooms except the one I had taken in Matt's bedroom. In the centre of the photograph, on the north wall, several feet above his bed, I could see a semi-transparent face staring straight at the camera.

When I arrived home, I hurried to locate a magnifying glass. I then lit the photograph with a bright light and examined it again through the lens of the glass. The face was now much more obvious. I studied the eyes, eyebrows, and nose, trying to determine if the face was male or female. Although it was hard to determine, I thought it was a woman. When I remembered the “church lady” Matt had seen in his room, I also thought that the face appeared to be framed by a headdress.

When Ted arrived home from work and we had a moment alone, I showed him the picture and asked him if he noticed anything unusual about it. He immediately pointed to the face.

“What the hell is that?” he asked, taking the photo over to the better light near the window.

“Does it look like a face to you?” I asked him. He nodded and handed the picture back to me in silence.

The idea of that image being so close to our little boy's bed unnerved us both.

We continued to study the photograph closely for a few more minutes, trying to determine if the image of a face might have been caused by a flaw in the negative or a problem during the film's processing. Then I scanned the photograph into our computer to see if I could enlarge the image, but the impression was so faint that it was not possible to see it clearly at all. As we had no way to enhance the image, we could not really be positive of what the camera had captured.

Even though Ted and I had convinced ourselves that the image in the photograph was too faint to be identifiable, at dinner that evening we again casually raised the subject of Matt moving to a different bedroom. As in the past, he pleaded with us to let him remain in his current room. Because nothing had recently frightened Matt and he obviously wanted to stay there, Ted and I later privately agreed not to bring that up with him again.

Autumn passed into a very cold and snowy winter. Everything inside the house remained quiet and seemingly ordinary; even the heat in Matt's room had been restored. It had been so long since anyone had been awakened in the night that it was easy to forget how difficult those experiences had been. I remarked to Ted that it seemed incredible that something so simple as putting up a cross and pictures of angels in the children's rooms had solved all the “haunting” activity we had endured. He said he was happy if the pictures made us all feel better, but I could tell he did not take the effectiveness of those items as seriously as the rest of us. I did not bother to ask him why he thought the activities had stopped as suddenly as they had begun; I was so relieved that everything was peaceful again that I just wanted to forget they had ever happened.

Later that month, we visited a local museum with the children. We were wandering through the building looking at the artifacts when we rounded a corner and almost walked right into a mannequin. It was part of an early medical exhibit, on loan from the museum of a nearby town for a short period of time. There were many photographs of various local nursing staffs from the late 1800s onwards lining the walls, dressed exactly in the traditional white dress and cap. The mannequin, however, was dressed like the figure of the woman I had seen in our bedroom doorway, and judging from the startled look on Matt's face, like the woman he had seen sitting on his bed. He studied the display intently and then looked over at me. I smiled at him and nodded to indicate that I knew he recognized what he saw, which brought some relief to his face.

The flowing cape and headdress resembled a nun's habit more than a recent nursing uniform, but the information plaque beside the display explained that nurses had worn that uniform many years before the more contemporary dress shown in the photographs. The only difference between the petite mannequin before me and my memory of the apparition I had seen was in their size. The spirit, although similarly dressed, had been very much larger, especially in height.

OUT OF THIN AIR

W
hile
leafing through a Victorian interior design magazine one day, I happened upon an advertisement for a studio that specialized in reproduction vintage portraits. They transferred the faces from a favourite picture to an actual antique portrait and, by using computer technology, transformed it into a turn-of-the-century photograph. A large antique wedding portrait of Ted and me would serve as the finishing touch in our master bedroom, so I chose a picture from when we were first married and selected one of their vintage photos for the transfer.

After several weeks, I received the beautiful portrait in the mail. From the style of clothing and hair, it appeared to have been taken well over a hundred years ago, and I had bought an antique-style frame in which to hang it.

The day it arrived, I had to take Rosa to a doctor's appointment and had only a few minutes to spare before we had to leave the house. As the frame was waiting in our bedroom, I decided to place the picture in it to see how it would look. Once I had admired it for a moment, I was eager to see it hanging on the wall. I thought it would only take a minute to do that, so while Rosa waited at the front door, I rushed to get the hammer, and the picture hanger and nail that I had bought with the frame. After determining the best spot to hang the portrait, I started to strike the small nail through the hanger and into the wall. In my haste, I dropped the hanger, and it, along with the nail, fell with a clatter onto the hard wooden floor in our bedroom.

I did not want us to be late for the appointment, so I impatiently got down on my hands and knees to retrieve the dropped items as quickly as possible. The picture hanger was on the floor directly below where I had been hammering, but the small nail was nowhere to be seen. In my frustration I thought to myself, “I need that nail,” as I searched all over the floor for it. It should have been near the hanger but it had completely disappeared.

Suddenly I heard the clink of something fairly heavy hitting the wooden floor directly beneath me. At first I could not understand what had caused the sound, because I knew nothing had dropped from my body. When I looked down at the floor, I saw a large and rusty nail. I stared at it in disbelief. Where on earth had it come from? It certainly had not been in any of my pockets. And I kept our home clean enough to have noticed a large nail like that lying in the middle of our bedroom floor.

I picked up the nail and tried to understand what had happened. The smaller one that I needed to hang the picture had fallen to the floor and completely vanished. While trying to locate it, I had concentrated on a “nail” and one had materialized right beneath me. I thought that was the most bizarre event that had happened in the house, because it had produced a tangible item I could hold in my hand. Obviously it was not just a product of my imagination, and yet there was no plausible explanation for its appearance.

The nail was much bigger than the one that I had lost; I thought I could not possibly use it to hang the portrait. Still, someone or something had known I was looking for a nail and had made one appear. I put it away in Ted's tool box until I could show it to him. Even he would not be able to explain the incident away with logic, and it was concrete proof that something extraordinary had happened even though he had not been there to witness it for himself.

When Rosa and I arrived home after her doctor's appointment, Ted was already there. I quickly got the nail for him to examine.

“What are you doing with this?” he said.

“How old do you think it is?” I asked, before telling him my story.

“I'm not sure, but it's pretty rusted. They used nails about this size for the footings, I think, when they were building the addition. Maybe it came from there. Where did you find it?” he asked.

I proceeded to tell Ted every detail of what had happened that morning. When I described the sound I had heard beneath me and how I had looked down to find the nail lying on the floor, Ted looked at me strangely and then started to laugh. That was not the reaction I had expected.

“What's so funny?” I demanded.

“Well, if this is something the ‘ghosts' did, they must really be trying to drive you crazy,” he said, laughing again.

“What do you mean? They were trying to help me,” I insisted. “They knew I needed a nail and they gave me one.”

“If the picture hook nail really did disappear and this was given to you to replace it, don't you think that's funny? You don't help someone by taking away the nail they need and replacing it with a huge one like this that you can't even use for hanging a picture,” Ted said.

I had not thought of it that way at all. I had believed that somehow someone had known I was in need of a nail and had made one materialize to help me. But why had the small nail disappeared in the first place? Maybe Ted was right. Maybe it had not been intended to help me, especially if it was the same kind of nail that had been used in the building of the new room that had caused us so much disturbance.

Ted maintained that it was a joke on me that such a huge nail had appeared when I was trying to hang our portrait. Several months later, though, we heard a loud crash and hurried into our room to find that the large portrait had fallen onto the floor. The nail I had used to hang the heavy frame was not strong enough and had dislodged from the wall. Why the fragile glass covering the portrait did not break upon impact was a mystery to us, but when I picked up the frame, I realized that it never would have fallen if I had used a larger nail. Perhaps the one that had materialized beneath me that day had been meant to help me after all.

Although nothing unusual had occurred in our home for many months, I somehow sensed that the appearance of that large, rusty nail was the beginning of the end of the quiet period we had enjoyed. Thinking back, I realized that all the nightly disturbances we had experienced occurred within a ten-minute window of time, between 3:00 a.m. and 3:10 a.m. What better way to get our attention than by constantly awakening us in the middle of the night? We had been disturbed by smoke detectors, footsteps, strange appearances, and the melodies of the glass globes. It seemed that interrupting our sleep had been the main objective of those incidences.

It did not make sense to me that there should be a long period when nothing unusual occurred, followed by a renewal of such activity. But whether the appearance of the nail had been an isolated occurrence or if things were going to begin anew would soon become clear.

One evening, shortly after I had found the nail, I lit a tea candle in a decorative glass holder. The holder sat upon a small table beside an antique rocking chair in the living room, and the flicker of the candle light etched the image of the decorative glass against the nearby corner walls. We all thought the effect was pretty, especially Rosa, who delighted in watching it. The candle was small, and if left to burn, would have lasted only a short period of time. About an hour after lighting it and several hours before bed time, I blew out the flame. As a further precaution, I glanced into the holder before I went upstairs that night to ensure the candle had been completely extinguished.