This is a very small story from the Dogpatch Vermont ghost story files.  It doesn't have any bells and whistles, but I'm fond of it because it is a classic in its inconclusion.  I think most encounters with ghosts are exactly like this.  Happy Cabbage Night.

Most people don’t like loose ends.  They like their shoes tied, their checkbooks balanced, their garbage taken out, and their stories with endings, happy or not.  Ghost stories don’t fit well into this system – they are too open-ended.  That, I think, is why many people don’t allow ghost stories into their lives as more than a sort of occasional party treat, to be stored away and forgotten as quickly as possible.  The permanently unexplained makes us a little queasy.  We look into the abyss, exclaim at the view, and back away.  Fictional ghost stories are very different from real ones, because they invariably offer an explanation, whether it’s Aunt Matilda still looking for her lost engagement ring who’s causing the commotion, or Beelzebub.  True ghost stories are frustratingly pointless.  Why does a ghost turn the same damn light on over and over?  Doesn’t it get bored?

At least some ghosts are consistent, or insistent.  More baffling are the ones that make a single, brief, mysterious detour through someone’s life, never to return.  James Thurber wrote, for me, the quintessential account of this type of haunting in “The Night the Ghost Got In.”  The story presents the bare bald facts of the ghost’s intrusion, quickly and precisely.  The ensuing chaos that forms the bulk of the tale is, of course, caused by the human beings.

The Thurbers lived undisturbed in a  Columbus, Ohio house from 1913 to 1917, with one exception.  One November night, up late having a bath on the second floor, Thurber heard footsteps in the dining room at the bottom of the stairs.  Seeing nothing below in the available light, but distinctly hearing a man walking around the table, he retreated to wake his younger brother.  They both stood at the top of the stairs, listening to the footsteps, until the footsteps started running up the stairs towards them.  They could see nothing.  Thurber’s brother fled.  Thurber, being in front, had to take more positive action.  “I slammed shut the door at the stairs top and held my knee against.  After a long minute, I slowly opened it again.  There was nothing there.  There was no sound.  None of us ever heard the ghost again.”

Interestingly, until the ghost forced the issue by running up the lighted stairwell, Thurber assumed it was a burglar.  For all the notions that people usually conjure up hauntings out of events that have “normal” explanations (subsidence, wind, noisy mice, spirits in a bottle, old wiring), the reality is that most people try to rationalize away odd happenings, and are quite successful at it.  When things get out of control, they slam the door.  I, myself, despite a near-obsessive interest in the supernatural, fervently hope never to have uninvited feet pacing my own floors.  I don’t mind the salt and pepper shakers being rearranged once in a while, but I’d prefer it to be left at that. 

This story offers the reader no ending.  Was it a ghost?  Perhaps.  I’m pretty sure it was.  But we’ll never know, because the person involved did what a lot of us would do in the circumstances – she hid under the bed covers and refused to look.  Make up your own mind.

Mary C. is a registered nurse, mother of two, practical, reasonable, and as evenly keeled as anyone I know.  A long-time friend, she was listening to me go on about the ghost stories I was collecting in the 90s, when she started looking peculiar herself.  The idea that ghosts were not necessarily pale spectres melodramatically crashing around and groaning, but, more often, ordinary footsteps and doors opening and closing, was new to her.  Mary proceeded to tell me a story about something that had happened to her twenty years before, which she had never understood, and which she had filed far back in the memory banks because it made her so uncomfortable.  She had never applied the word “ghost” to the experience in all the years since, but now she was beginning to wonder. 

In 1971, Mary graduated from nursing school at the University of Vermont, married her first husband Rick, and moved with him into an apartment on Loomis Street in Burlington.  Rick worked at a branch bank several miles away.  Mary’s first job as a surgical nurse at the Medical Center up the hill was on the night shift.  She would walk home in the morning and go to bed at 8:00 or 8:30 a.m., after Rick had left for work.  Mary had grown up in Morrisville, a much more rural town, and this was her first real home in the “big city” after college dorm life.  Because their apartment was on the ground floor of a house, in “not the nicest part of town,” and because of Mary’s general distrust of city people, she made a point always to lock and bolt all of the doors, all of the time.  A young woman had been mysteriously murdered not far away a few years before, and while this was an extraordinary event in the Burlington of the 1960s, such precautions did not seem unreasonable.  

The house in question is on the corner of Loomis and Greene Streets, and looks to have been built as a duplex, with two front doors.  These doors had a common dividing wall between them, so that one-half of the apartments later carved out of the duplexes did not share entry halls or stairs with the other half.  The house, like most of the neighborhood around it, is working-class Victorian, probably Civil War era, built in the days when the area north of Pearl Street was filling up with modest dwellings for laborers in the city’s mills and factories.  Now made faceless and anonymous by white vinyl siding, the only trace of the building’s age is in those front doors, with their round-arched, patterned glass lights.

At the time Mary lived there, from 1971 to 1975, the side of the house nearest Greene Street was occupied by the landlords.  The attic was being renovated for their son, who was living out west then.  Mary rarely saw the owners, and remembers them as being elderly and quite sick, the wife being in the process of dying from her ailment.  Mary’s side of the house was occupied on the second floor by Muriel, a widow in her 80s.  Because these two apartments had been cobbled out of a single half of the duplex, they had a rather casual entry arrangement.  The front hall included the stair open to Muriel’s rooms.  Mary’s apartment was entered by a door in to what had probably been the dining room, at the center of the house. The original front parlor, now a bedroom, opened off this room via large double doors, and its earlier door into the front hall was permanently closed up.  The door of the dining room (now Mary’s living room) to the front hall had no lock – it could only be bolted from the inside. 

Because Muriel’s apartment upstairs opened directly onto the stairwell and front hall, with no dividing door, the front door of the house was always kept locked, and Mary automatically bolted her inside door when she was at home alone.  There were locked back doors in both kitchens, leading to a two-story enclosed back porch that was also kept locked.  A door to the basement from the front hall was kept locked all the time as well.  Mary remembers all these arrangements precisely, because they formed the framework for her mystery. 

One cool day between fall 1971 and spring 1972, Mary came home from work in the morning as usual and went to bed, piling on the covers.  She fell asleep, but woke some time later to what she thought was the sound of the front door being closed in the entry hall just outside her bedroom.  She then heard footsteps in the hall, and thought for a moment that her husband had come home, because they were too heavy to be Muriel’s.  The footsteps continued to her apartment’s own door, which opened.  Hearing this, Mary wondered confusedly how Rick had gotten in, because she had bolted the door.  The footsteps proceeded through the living room to the double doors that opened onto her bedroom, and paused.

At that point, Mary was sure it was a burglar, and that she was about to be murdered.  She was lying on her back, frozen like a hypnotized rabbit for a moment, frantically thinking about her options.  She felt the intruder looking at her.  Remembering advice about how to behave in such a situation, she decided to pretend to be asleep, so that whoever it was might leave her alone.  Since sleepers can’t be motionless, she turned over on her stomach, keeping her eyes firmly closed.  She had broken out into a profuse sweat, and was in a silent panic wondering if the sweat could be seen.

After some indeterminate interval, which seemed like hours, the footsteps went back out of the apartment.  The door closed, and the footsteps went through the hall and up the stairs.  As soon as Mary could hear the intruder crossing Muriel’s apartment above, she leaped out of bed and ran to bolt her door.  She could hear the floor creaking above, as the footsteps went through Muriel’s bedroom, then kitchen, then out to the back porch and oblivion.

Mary called Rick at work, and told him someone was in the house.  Rick raced home, and together they toured their side of the building.  Rick found the front door locked.  Muriel was not at home.  Her back door to the porch was locked and bolted from the inside.  The only way into the dirt floor basement, besides the locked door in the entry hall, was a bulkhead collapsed too far to let in anything bigger than a cat.  Mary asked Rick if they should call the police. Rick thought not – there was nothing to tell them, really, since obviously no one was there, and there was no way anyone could have gotten in and out, given the circumstances.  Mary subsequently didn’t bother to approach the landlords on the matter, because she considered them too sick, and weird enough already.  She never had a thought that it might have been a ghost, and passed it off as just one of those inexplicable things.  She and Rick did, however, change the front door lock after Mary’s father pointed out that it was a skeleton key type, which any number of people might have keys able to unlock.

This is where the clouds of reason start to gather. Did a real person, maybe one of the elderly landlords, unlock the front door and walk in on Mary the one day she forgot to bolt her front door while Muriel was out?  Was it Muriel herself, and if it was, where did she go?  How did Muriel’s back door stay bolted on the inside, if she, or anyone else, left through it?  And if you trust Mary’s saying she never does, never did, leave doors unlocked, how did her door get unbolted?  But if it was a ghost, why did it unbolt one door it came through, and leave its exit door bolted?  Did Mary just dream the whole thing?  None of this makes any sense, which is exactly right for a true ghost story.   

Mary’s description of lying in bed, soaked in perspiration, trying desperately to disappear into the mattress while being fully aware of a presence a few feet away, could be a dream, if it weren’t for the part about the footsteps continuing in the empty apartment above as she threw herself out of bed.  But we’ll never know who was standing in the bedroom doorway.  “I didn’t have the guts to open my eyes and check,” said Mary, somewhat but not completely rueful.   

As in the Thurber house, nothing ever happened again at the Loomis Street apartment while Mary was living there.  She still doesn't  have a strong opinion as to what happened to her there, but offers a theory that there are other dimensions of existence right on top of us, that perhaps break through once in a while.  We'll never know, at least in this life.  If you go by the house, you'll see the cylinder lock that was installed to keep whatever it was out.  The duplex door next to it still needs only a skeleton key.