Anonymous
(Just in time for Halloween, here is some guest content from a professor, friend, and mentor. See also, this author’s memoir)
I remember the first time I heard the footsteps. I was alone in the house, sitting at the dining room table and heard someone walking on the stairs which ran behind the dining room. I just sat there for a minute, frozen, trying desperately to figure out whether or not one of the children was home. I knew that they were all in school and that my husband was at work, but part of me wanted someone other than myself to be home.
Then I stood up, my heart in my throat and pounding so loud I knew that the intruder must hear it. I walked quietly over to the door that connected to the enclosed front porch and went to the phone that hung on the wall. Picking it up, I dialed the number of my friend who lived a few blocks away.
“Diane, I think that there is someone in my house. I don’t know what to do.”
She told me to call the police. Instead, I told her to come over and help me check, that I would wait for her in the driveway. I stood out front with my sweater hugged close to my body. It was cold outside since it was February in Colorado and as I shivered, I kept looking back at the house. From my vantage point I could see both doors that led to the outside and no one came out of either one of them.
When Diane arrived, I ran to her car and jumped in. My teeth chattering, I said thank you. She asked me what I wanted to do. I had no clue, but relying on safety in numbers, I told her that I wanted us to go into the house and investigate. A supremely stupid move, and we both knew that, but we decided to do it. She parked the car, and we got out and walked in the front door. We were both scared and we quietly armed ourselves with knives from the kitchen as we began to walk through the house.
Nothing! There was no one there except my dog, a cocker spaniel cowed in the corner of the dining room. She was great with the kids, but no watchdog, so I had no expectations there. When she saw me, she jumped up and greeted me as if I had been gone for months, not just a few minutes. Diane and I sat down in the kitchen and talked, and I convinced myself that it must have been the wind, or since it was an old house, just creaking stairs. She agreed with me that I must have let my imagination run wild. We felt stupid holding the knives and I put them away.
But, while sitting there listening to Diana talk about her latest boyfriend (she was divorced), I ran over the footsteps in my mind, and I just could not believe that they were innocent noises. I slowly began to be convinced that they were indeed footsteps and those of a heavy man or woman. They had seemed to be carefully making their way up or down the stairs, I could not tell which way. Counting them off in my mind it seemed as if there were at least five or six steps, which did not make any sense. I had been up and down those stairs hundreds of times and aside from the thick carpeting on them there were 15 steps altogether.
If they were headed down, they must have been at the top of the stairs, if they were going up they must have been downstairs… a frightening thought.
My name is Susan Williams and my husband, and our five children, bought our house, an old farmhouse, when we moved out of the mountains. We had been doing the hippie thing until I got tired of the snow and constant wind, heating with wood and coal, and my husband got tired of the commute. We moved to a town on the Colorado Plains called Longmont. It was not a large town, but not a small one either and it seemed that the people who did not want to pay the high prices for Boulder houses settled for Longmont since it was only 12 miles away and an easy commute.
We loved the house the first time the real estate agent showed it to us. I do not like new houses, I love the older ones that have been lived in and have lots of space. The house, built in the late 1800’s was built in the shape of an “H” with a large section on each end and the smaller section in the middle. At one end there was a large farm kitchen with a bathroom behind the kitchen, the only one in the house, which I regretted, but managed to deal with eventually. At the other end of the “H” was a living room and a bedroom. In-between there was the dining room and the enclosed porch. Upstairs there was a huge master bedroom with a walk-in closet and at the other end were two bedrooms, one large and the other smaller. In-between there was a generous hallway lined with closets. The stairs ran up the back of the house emptying into the kitchen/bathroom area.
The backyard was huge, a half an acre, lots of room for the kids and dog and a large garden. The side yard was a huge, paved driveway, although there was no real garage, there was what my husband called a “Model T” garage, which meant that it was too small for a modern car.
We settled in, the kids started school although my youngest was only three-years-old at the time the others were all gone during the day. My husband, Les, worked in Boulder and he left early in the morning and came home around 5:30. He was a mechanic, and I had a small dog grooming business that I operated out of the house, on the enclosed porch. I could work while caring for my daughter who often tried to help me.
Since my daughter was home and I had my business, the house was seldom quiet and after the kids got home it was certainly not quiet. I am sure that there may have been “weird” things happening, but with five kids, a dog and a husband who loved his sports on television I don’t think I would have heard anything.
Although there were some things that made me wonder. One day Shelly, my daughter, was playing with a new ball, it was about the size of a basketball but made of light plastic material. I heard her arguing in the living room and went in and heard “No! It’s mine!” and saw her pull the ball towards herself only to see it pop before my eyes. She began crying immediately and I picked her up and she said, “It’s my ball!” and cried even louder. I wondered but chalked the incident up to her imagination.
The other thing that was not so easy to dismiss happened one morning at breakfast, when Shelly asked me why I was walking around with the light around me at night. I asked her what she meant, and she said that she saw me walking in the hallway when she woke up in the middle of the night, I had lots of light around me. I had not gotten up that night.
Finally, one day my husband was home sick recovering from the flu, Shelly was napping on the couch in the living room while Les sat on the other end of the couch reading. I was sitting in the armchair, also reading. Then we distinctly heard footsteps in the bedroom overhead. I looked at Les and he looked at me and he said, “What do you expect? It’s an old house, probably still settling.”
Two years later Shelly started Kindergarten and for the first time in ages I had the house to myself. Once I had taken her to school and the other kids left to walk to school I could sit and enjoy the silence before getting busy with housework. Occasionally I booked a dog or two to groom, but that was only two days of the week and sometimes three. Otherwise, I could sit and write or paint. I had decided that I needed a hobby and was trying both out to see if I liked either one.
Since this was in the late 70’s, there were no computers and I did not have a typewriter, so I wrote by hand and filled notebooks with notes and ideas. When I painted it was with oil paint, which was rather smelly, so I had to do it in the morning and then air out the house before Les came home. He did not like the smell at all, even though as a mechanic I am sure that he had smelled worse. Thus, I spent many happy hours sitting or standing at the dining room table in solitary quiet. I was not the sort of person who turns on the radio or listens to a record.
So, when I heard the footsteps on the stairs it scared me. We never locked the house since the area was safe, so I wondered about an intruder. But where was he? Diana and I searched the house completely and did not find anyone. I say “he” since the footsteps were definitely male, I have no idea how or why I knew this, but I did.
After that first time, I began to hear them intermittently and often ran out front and stood in the yard feeling silly while trying to talk myself into going back inside. I had begun locking the doors when I took Shelly to school in the morning so I knew that no one could be in the house. I had not seen anyone or anything, but just heard the footsteps. They never seemed to happen at night when everyone was sleeping, but then our bedroom was a bit of a distance from the stairs so I may not have heard anything.
Then one day I had a brilliant idea, I would set up a tape recorder when taking Shelly to school and see what I could hear. I left the back door unlocked just in case it was someone getting in the house, I still thought that it must be a person who was good at hiding. I set the recorder up in the kitchen and put the dog on the front porch and left to take Shelly to school.
When I got back, I was supposed to go for breakfast with a friend, Nancy, so as I rewound the tape, I was in the bathroom fixing my hair. After it was rewound, I played it and for the first few minutes I could hear myself and Shelly leaving, the back door closing, and my car doors opening. Otherwise, there was nothing on it for a few minutes. Then, I heard a footstep, then another and another! Meanwhile, I could hear the dog begin to howl, something I had never heard her do. The footsteps got louder and louder and the dog kept howling, almost frantically screaming. Then when the footsteps were at their loudest, I heard my car door slam and suddenly everything was quiet.
Needless to say, when Nancy arrived a few minutes later I was severely shaken. She asked what was wrong and I played the tape for her, the color left her face. I had already told her about hearing the footsteps, but I think that she thought it was my imagination. This was proof that it wasn’t, and she clearly could not deal with it at all. She insisted that we leave and discuss this at breakfast, telling me to not talk about it until we got to the restaurant.
I don’t remember where we went or what we ate, but I do remember Nancy telling me that I probably had a ghost and that it was no big deal. Of course, she did not have to live there.
“It’s an old house, I am not surprised,” she bravely announced. All of a sudden, she was an expert and began to tell me that I needed to communicate with it and tell it to “go into the light”!
“What in the heck are you talking about Nancy? What light?”
“I’m not sure, but I saw a show on TV a few weeks ago and there was a ghost and they told it to go into the light and it did, and it was gone. It was a show about a real ghost.”
I didn’t answer. I just asked her about her daughter, always a good topic to get her going and as I listened to her, I wondered about ghosts. How to deal with one, how to get rid of it, or how to, perhaps, live with it. The last a result of seeing the old movie The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and thinking of how romantic it could be…
When I got home, I hid the tape recording and behaved as if everything was normal.
Determined to never, ever listen to that tape again. This is not to say that I did not hear the footsteps again, in fact I heard them about once a week and began to notice that they happened when I was very engrossed in writing or painting. They interrupted my train of thought and began to annoy me, although I was still frightened and stopped running into the front yard, I only went as far as the front porch and stood there working up my courage to go back in and resume writing or painting. The dog never howled when I was home, but she did stick very close to me, as if I could help her.
I talked to a friend, Norm, who had some experience with the paranormal and who I had always dismissed as being silly – now, I listened to him with bated breath. He said that if I could imagine that I had a baseball bat and when to the stairs when the footsteps began, I could threaten the ghost and tell him to go away. Sure, that would happen… not! But I did not tell Norm that I was a chicken and said that I might try it, but that I certainly did not want to make the ghost mad.
Meanwhile, when Shelly got home from kindergarten, which was about two hours earlier than her brothers and sister got home, she often told me that she had a friend who played with her in her bedroom. Of course, lots of kids have imaginary friends and in fact my brother had had one for ages. So, I went along with her and let her talk about what they had done when playing. Apparently, they argued a bit, which I found amusing and cute when Shelly told me that her friend did not want to share sometimes. Shelly liked to talk and often I would just nod my head and sometimes say things like, “how interesting” or “really!” She would tell me that “her friend told her that broccoli was horrible and so she did not want to eat it” or that “her friend got to stay up late and watch TV.”
After a while this became a joke between my husband and me when I would tell him that, “my friend told me that I didn’t have to do laundry today.” We would laugh about it, but never said it in front of Shelly. The other kids caught on and began to say the same things and found it to be a huge sort of joke and joined in laughter. Shelly never seemed to understand and actually joined in the fun occasionally.
A few weeks later my friend Diana dropped in to visit and brought two friends with her. She told me that one of them used to know the people who lived there 25 years ago. They told me that the previous owner had their four-year-old daughter killed in an automobile accident and that they had the funeral in what is now the dining room. Apparently, it had been the custom to hold funerals in the front room of the house where the family lived. They told me the name of the family and the child, they were the Schmidt’s, and their daughter was named Milly, short for Millicent.
She described the funeral and showed me exactly where the coffin had been placed, of course it was an open casket, which really grossed me out. I could not imagine having one’s dead child on display in the front room of her former house. However, chilling their story was I could not help but think about my daughter and her “imaginary” friend and the next day when Shelly got home from school and was eating her snack, I casually asked her what her friend’s name was. She answered “Illy” I repeated Illy?
Okay, so perhaps her friend was not Milly, or perhaps the child had not been able to pronounce “M’s” correctly and so Milly came out as Illy, or perhaps, or perhaps… I asked Shelly what she looked like, her answer was “a girl!” I left it at that. So, what if my daughter’s friend was a ghost, perhaps. At least they were both entertaining each other, I told myself and thought about Casper the Ghost. He had been a friendly ghost…right? But I was not going to ask Illy to stay for dinner, in fact I was going to do what many good mothers do, when need be, ignore the whole thing. I went over it again and again in my mind and decided that without proof that that was the best thing I could do. She would grow out of it, eventually, I told myself.
So, life went on. I got used to the footsteps, somewhat, and ignored Illy as best as I could and worked hard to play ostrich. However, it seemed that Illy had other ideas and soon she began acting out when Shelly was in school. Added to the footsteps I heard a ball bouncing upstairs in Shelly’s room occasionally and one day while getting something upstairs I heard a sound and looked into the hallway and some keys that were always kept in the lock in one of the closets were moving back and forth like someone was hitting them with a small finger.
I just stood there with chills running up my back. Then, summing up my courage as a mother I said “Illy, stop it.” They stopped. More chills. I practically ran downstairs. Okay, so now I had another child to contend with and this one was rather elusive to put it mildly. I had no idea what to do. Have pity on this poor little girl? But wouldn’t that encourage her? Keep ignoring her but wouldn’t that encourage her to act out. I knew children, especially little girls, and there is one thing that they love, it is attention, the more, the better.
However, I did not want to either encourage her or to ignore her, so this was a dilemma.
Thankfully, Christmas break happened the next day and this meant that the kids would be home for almost three weeks, and I could ignore her. Silly thoughts ran through my head regarding Illy…what do you get a ghost for Christmas? Would she know it is Christmas? Would she miss her family?
Meanwhile, the footsteps on the stairs continued and they also continued to puzzle me, I could pretty much guess that those heavy male footsteps were not being made by a little girl. Then who made them?
Since the kids were home, I did not hear them except when they were outside playing once in a while. They apparently did not hear anything, especially since they ran upstairs and downstairs like a herd of buffalo most of the time. When the weather got really cold, and they had to stay in the house, I never heard anything untoward and could almost believe that it was all my imagination.
Shelly turned six in January and pretty much stopped talking about Illy except for the occasional story about her. I kind of felt sorry for Illy, she was losing her playmate as she got older and in the next year of so she would lose her for good.
Once the kids went back to school the footsteps resumed and sometimes, I thought that they were louder than ever before, to make up for the fact that they could not be heard over the winter break. Or that they could not compete with the boys running up and downstairs. I was still frightened when I heard them, but since it was so cold and I did not want to go outside I began yelling at whomever or whatever, to “shut up!” The first time I did it and they stopped, I nearly had a heart attack!
“Holy Shit!” This was proof that it was someone or, or…. After that, I just kept quiet and just went out and sat on the cold front porch until I summoned the strength to go back inside. The fact that I had gotten a response of sorts scared me more than the footsteps themselves.
They never happened when Les was home. I could not figure out why. I wondered if the guy – I was pretty sure it was a guy – was afraid that Les would get mad or beat him up. Silly thoughts I know, but the whole situation was beyond silly. I was held prisoner by a ghost, in my own house. My movements were limited during the day, and I began to resent it, a whole lot.
Finally, I got mad and decided to yell at them again and again and perhaps they would stop altogether. I did and I stopped freaking out when they stopped after I yelled. This happened about four or five times, then one day they stopped for a few minutes then suddenly got louder, as if the person was mad. I really freaked out and grabbed my coat and car keys and went to sit at Diane’s house then picked up the kids from school.
Occasionally I would hear a soft little giggle, usually fairly near me. When I turned around there would be nothing there. I would often hear myself saying “Illy, are you there?” I never got any sort of response. Apparently, the only person in the family that she would talk to was my youngest daughter. She did not frighten me, other than the fact that I got goosebumps and the hair on my neck would rise, I was not concerned overall.
If you have been enjoying this story, do show your appreciation and extend your experience by ordering the author’s memoir here.
A few weeks later something new happened. As I was lying in bed, in my bedroom upstairs, I felt someone stroke my arm. It was late at night, and I often went to bed an hour after my husband who was a morning person and liked to go to bed at 9:30 pm. Often, I had trouble sleeping and thus stayed up until I got tired. On this night I had gone to bed around 11:00 and was laying on my left side with my right arm above the covers and suddenly I felt someone stroking my arm. At first, since I was half asleep, I did not think about it. Then suddenly I realized that it was happening and that my husband was snoring away on the other side of the bed.
I woke him up and insisted that someone, probably a sex freak, was in the house. I made him search everywhere upstairs and downstairs, he kept insisting that I had been dreaming. But I knew that I hadn’t been dreaming or imagining what happened. Of course, he did not find anyone, and we went back to bed. I kept rubbing my arm where I had felt it and finally fell asleep.
Two nights later I felt someone stroking my arm again. In my half sleeping mode I rolled over and swatted at the motion. Then I woke up fully and realized what had happened. This time I did not wake Les, I just laid there with my eyes wide open and watched and watched until finally I fell back to sleep.
Nothing happened for about a week, and I decided that I must have dreamed it. Then a few days later it happened again and the next night it happened again. I was really frightened and annoyed at the same time. Les kept insisting that I was dreaming, and I kept insisting that I knew that I was not, it was real. Finally, I convinced him to change sides on the bed and even thought it was a pain in the neck since I had to remember to walk to the other side of the room it was worth it since my sleep was uninterrupted.
Les, on the other hand, woke up several times saying that someone was “pawing” at him. He never defined pawing, but I took it to mean that they were trying to get him to move. “Too bad,” I told him, “you must be dreaming.” Needless to say, I stayed on that side of the bed and listened to Les occasionally complaining that his sleep was interrupted once in a while by someone pawing him. There was no way that I was going to go back to the other side of the bed, especially since I was aware that whoever it was was not going to give up.
Then things began to escalate once again. Les complained that I needed to stop breathing in his face while he was sleeping. This really scared me! Whoever it was apparently had breath in their body and could breathe! I asked Les to describe what happened and he said that while sleeping – he often slept on his back, the better to snore and annoy me – he felt someone blowing on his face. He got up, thinking that a window was open and although he was now sleeping on the side of the bed where there was no window, he was convinced that there must be a window open. He got me up and we both looked for some breeze coming into the house but could not find anything.
The next night we slept all night with no problems, but the night after that the “breeze” was back and this time Les said it was someone breathing in his face. He said he could hear the exhalation right before he opened his eyes. Not only was I frightened, but I was deliriously happy that I had switched sides on the bed. Now Les had to come to grips with the fact that we actually had a ghost, something that he had scoffed at for ages.
We talked about it and Les decided that since he was a Catholic that he needed to hang a cross on the bedroom door and that would take care of that. So, he went out and bought a cheap crucifix and nailed it in the center of the bedroom door. The kids thought it was funny, they had heard “things” but were not convinced that it was really a ghost and anyway, dad was overreacting. I thought so as well, but then, I was not sleeping on the side of the bed anymore.
Les tried to talk me into switching sides on the bed once again and I refused. He resorted to the only prayer he remembered, which was “Now I lay me down to sleep…” before bed. At any rate the combination of his childish prayer and the crucifix seemed to work since he was not bothered at night anymore.
The footsteps kept up.
One winter morning, Nancy called me to say that her daughter had to stay home from school
since she had been suspended for a day since she was caught smoking in school and could she stay with me. I said yes and a little while later Nancy brought Lily over. She had her schoolbooks and was supposed to work on her homework, which her mom said she hadn’t done for yesterday.
Lily was a typical rebellious teenager of fourteen who just knew that she knew everything there was to know about life. She parked herself at the dining room table and just for the heck of it I had the tape recorder going since I had been trying to figure out if there was any specific time that the footsteps happened. I did not think that I would hear anything since I was not alone, and Shelly was home as well since she had had a cold.
Around 11:30, Lily’s boyfriend called on my phone and I handed it to Lily. I heard them begin to fight, or at least I heard Lily accusing him of cheating on her and she kept insisting he was an idiot. Finally, she slammed the phone down and just to make her call final the tape machine stopped a minute later. I decided to play the tape and I rewound it, and you can hear papers shuffling, small talk happening between Lily and myself, Shelly asking for a snack and me fixing it and settling her in the living room with Sesame Street on very low. Then I heard the phone ring and me answering it and telling Lily it was for her. As the fighting between Lily and her boyfriend began, I could hear breathing on the tape begin and then the breathing became louder and more rapid and raspy until finally it reached a crescendo and stopped as the phone was slammed down, then the tape ended.
Speechless, both Lily and I looked at each other. “Enough,” I said. “We are not taping anymore.” I picked up the recorder and pulled out the tape, I started to throw it away, but had second thoughts and both the recorder and tape in a desk drawer. We did not discuss it.
When Lily’s mom picked her up, I told her what had happened and gave her the tape to listen to, when she got home, she listened to it and called me. “I agree, no more taping,” she exclaimed, “Enough is enough.”
We did not talk about it again. She did bring the tape back the next afternoon and I put it back in the desk drawer and left it there. I had absolutely no wish to ever hear it again. We never discussed it again, neither one of us had any desire to bring it up, but I did think about it. Over and over again I ran though it in my mind and could not make any sense of it, why did it sound for all the world like someone “getting off” on listening to the argument. It was obscene. Horrible!
As the years passed the footsteps lessened and finally, I only heard them occasionally. They ceased to frighten me and perhaps the person making them decided that if they couldn’t scare me any longer what was the point.
Shelly grew older and stopped talking about Illy altogether. The house was, for the most part, quiet except for the random noise which I chalked up to the fact that it was over 100 years old. All the kids, including Shelly, were in school all day long and I was working and teaching classes and taking yoga so I was seldom home.
Then one chilly spring night I was sleeping, back on my side of the bed again since the “problems” had stopped and suddenly I woke up. I opened my eyes and, standing next to the bed, was a lovely little girl, covered in light with tears streaming down her face. She was holding a ball and held it out to me, but I couldn’t touch it. She realized that and smiled and then faded away and was gone.
Then I knew that Illy had left for good. Shelly had grown up enough to not see or hear her anymore and she had no one to play with any longer. I whispered, “Good-bye, Illy” and went back to sleep.
If you have been enjoying this story, do show your appreciation and extend your experience by ordering the author’s memoir here.
As a bit of a footnote, I have to say that a few years later Les decided to dig up part of the footing on a corner of the house that seemed to be caving in and could cause problems. He came into the house after a little while and told me to come outside with him, he grabbed two flashlights, and I went out to the back yard with him. Then, he showed me that the bricks at the base of the corner which he had removed seemed to cover a hole. We shined our flashlights in the hole and could not see the bottom, although we could see that part of the walls were made of brick. We decided to close the hole and not say anything to anyone, telling ourselves it was probably a cistern, but we wondered why they had built that section of the house over it.
I divorced Les about a year later and over the years learned that he moved downstairs and refused to even go upstairs. Even when my oldest daughter moved in for a brief time with her two children. They stayed in the living room. In that large old farmhouse with three large bedrooms upstairs no one wanted to sleep up there.
The house was sold and had many owners and renters, and no one stayed for very long. The last time I saw it, it had been condemned, the windows were boarded up and it looked lonely. As far as I know, it still stands there, all alone with a large yard and no children playing in it.
If you have enjoyed this story, do show your appreciation and extend your experience by ordering the author’s memoir here.
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