This is the ghost story collected at the time my Dictaphone recorded a ghost sneezing. I found out about it because there was another, more disturbingly haunted house in Fair Haven, whose residents knew Wendy X. and Chris Y.  This is not as interesting as the Belfry, because we can only guess who the ghosts were.   But it's a classic true ghost story, weird and inexplicable. 

There are, or were, at least two ghosts in the Y family’s house in Fair Haven, Vermont.  Come to minister to the large population of Welsh quarrymen working in Fair Haven’s slate industry, the Reverend R. L. Herbert built the house in 1861, just across the street from his Welsh Protestant church.  He chose a slightly avant-garde style that was the antithesis of Vermont's all-time favorite  Greek Revival - the Gothic cottage, all steep roofs and gingerbread.  The Reverend Herbert built his cottage in the extreme style, twenty years after the fashion had been introduced, and he went heavy on the encrustations up the gables and along the wraparound porches.  It is now totally cute, in wedding cake fashion,with everything painted in a terribly inappropriate gleaming white.   I doubt if it looks like what the Reverend had in mind, but it is and has been loved and beautifully cared for.  Herbert only lived there for a decade, but the next owners kept it in the family for over 70 years.

We don’t know much about the Parkers, except that they were attached to the house.  In 1958, the Y. family bought it and moved it with their young children.  George Y. turned the first floor side room into a beauty salon, and would later imply that this room had been “Granny Parker’s.”  Because the children always disliked going in to the shop by themselves when it was empty, a little family folklore developed about its reputed owner, perhaps George Y.’s way of acknowledging his children’s complaints about other house oddities without actually admitting there might be a ghost.  “Granny Parker” was said to be not a very kind woman, and so rigid a housekeeper that she would crawl on the floors to make sure they were clean after her eyesight started to fail.  Therefore she didn’t like people interfering with her room.  The beauty salon had such an uncomfortable, watchful atmosphere that all three kids went in only reluctantly to use the hair dryers, especially at night. 

The rest of the house was not at all unpleasant, but from the time they were very little, Lisa, Chris and Wendy were aware that there was something very peculiar about it which, as adults, they would call a “presence.”  It was this presence that Chris thought the house had now lacked for several years when I visited.  The Y. parents had stoutly denied whatever it was all the while the kids were growing up, and they passed off all unusual events as imagination, or coincidence.  The kids themselves finally came to view the happenings as almost normal.  The peculiarities became so ingrained in their life there that Wendy thought it was like dealing with the weather – unavoidable, changeable, and always coming through.

Wendy grew up to find herself unable to be in a house without automatically turning the television on to drown out extraneous noise.  This habit started years before when she was plagued by the sounds of nonexistent parties floating upstairs when she was by herself.  Until she found out that her sister Lisa had heard the same clinking of glasses, piano music, and drone of voices, Wendy had thought she was imagining things.  She became less sure after she found out Lisa had also hear a music box playing more than once, when there was none in the house.

But it was the persistent pattern of footsteps that formed the framework of the house haunting.  While Lisa, whose siblings viewed her as the most psychically inclined, had a greater variety of experiences, it was Chris who had the worst of it, because the footsteps always came to his room.  As a child, night after night Chris would be lying in bed in the front bedroom overlooking Main Street, listening to the footsteps downstairs as they crossed the kitchen at the back, passed through the dining room, into the living room and up the stairs.  Here, the footsteps made the short turn from the hall into his room, and crossed to the right-hand window.  There would be a clinking of the metal Venetian blinds as whoever it was seemed to peer out the window.  Then the footsteps would move to the twin bed Chris was not in, fortunately.  The bed springs would squeak briefly, as if someone had sat down.  Shortly, the footsteps would continue out into the hall again, where they would fade away. 

Wendy, in the room directly across the hall from Chris’s, heard the same pattern of footsteps, from the time she was very small up through the period when Chris had gone off to college and the Air Force, and the room was empty.  Later the floors of the house were blanketed with wall-to-wall carpeting, but at the time the kids were growing up, the hardwood floors were exposed.  On the stairs was an ancient runner dating from the Parker era, too thin to dampen footsteps.  Both Chris and Wendy remember them as the characteristic creaking of floorboards under the weight of an adult, rather than sharp footfalls (with a couple of marked exceptions).  Mr. and Mrs. Y. pooh-poohed any complaints about night visitors, and the kids gave up griping about the phenomenon, which was too persistent not to be accepted as part of the household routine.

The exceptions to the ghost’s typical creaking walking through the house occurred in the early 1980’s, with Wendy and Chris each experiencing something different. In the summer of 1981 or ’82, Wendy was staying by herself while her parents were visiting relatives in St. Louis.  Sitting downstairs in the central part of the house one evening, Wendy heard distinct heavy footfalls of a man walking in the back hall overhead.  Despite her custom of disregarding most strange house noises by now, she found these too convincingly like those of an intruder.  Frightened, she called a neighbor to come over and calm her nerves.  They found no one upstairs.  On another solitary evening, she sat down in the living room recliner to find that the seat was extremely warm, like someone had just gotten up from it.  Wendy shot out of the chair and went somewhere else. 

Chris’s experience was a unique variation on his usual one.   Home on leave from the Air Force in 1981, and about to go to England, he woke up on the next to last night of his stay to the all-too-familiar sounds of footsteps approaching his room,  These, though, were more clearly the footfalls of a woman than the typical creakings.  Still groggy with sleep, he sensed a warm, kindly presence which did not give him a reason to sit up and take notice.  The woman walked to the windows, then came over to the bed and put her arm around his shoulders in a comforting way.  Lying on his stomach, Chris had a peaceful feeling for a number of seconds, until his brain had processed all of the available information and suggested to him that perhaps no one was actually in the room.  He rolled over, and found this was true.  Believing he had imagined it all, he quickly fell back asleep, and by the next morning, had forgotten the entire episode.

It remained forgotten throughout the next - his last - day at home, having been too innocuous to make an impression.  That last night, Chris went to bed while some of the family were still up.  His room and the hall outside were dark, but some light filtered upstairs from the living room.  As he lay in bed, starting to drift off to sleep, he noticed the figure of a woman appear in his doorway.  “It’s Mom, come to look in on her son his last night home,” he thought to himself, and closed his eyes again. The woman had looked to be the same size as his mother, and this seemed like a natural thing for her to do.  He listened to her walk across the room toward the windows.  Then he felt his bed go down, as she sat on it, and an arm was put around his shoulders.  “At that split second I knew it was the exact same feeling I’d had last night,” said Chris.

He shot bolt upright at that thought, and found himself alone in the room.  Today, Chris asserts that he does not like scary movies, and never understands why the idiots trapped in the haunted house don’t just jump out the window.  But that night, after puzzling a minute about the odd hug, he went back to sleep.  He is still not sure why it didn’t bother him more. 

Chris’s extraordinary visitor on the eve of his departure was actually part of a pattern the ghost (or ghosts) had established over the years.  The phenomena tended to increase, sometimes to almost fever pitch, whenever there were a lot of comings and goings in the house, either by family or guests.  Wendy recalls that just before Chris was due back from England in 1983, that night his room was “just wild,” the noisiest night she can remember.  The creaking footsteps repeatedly paced to the window, the blinds clinked again and again, and she could hear the bed squeaking slightly in between.  She remembers thinking it was just abuzz in there, but investigation was pointless.  The family later referred to it as “Mrs. Parker cleaning up,” in preparation for Chris’s arrival.

One of the weirder vacation upsets occurred in July of 1977 or ’78.  Mr. and Mrs. Y. had gone to St. Louis, leaving Chris, then 20, and Wendy, 17, at home on their own.  One weekend Wendy invited her friend Lauren (who had lived in another of Fair Haven’s haunted houses) to spend a few days with her.  One night, the kids had a party, inviting a lot of friends.  The house ghost then had something of a small nervous breakdown, what with the absence of the Y. parents and the influx of all the visitors.

 

To be continued...