measi's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haunted Places This was my contribution for a LMAO on Nervousness.Org dealing with ghosts and haunted places. Oh, and Strawberry?, if you want to see the exact house for the live illustration of this entry... go down Northampton Street going toward downtown. Make a left onto North 10th Street. It's about three houses up-- painted gold/yellow with detailed trim. The house is on a rise up from the street level. There's a bit of a front yard to the left of the house, and concrete steps leading up to the front porch (which is covered), and a swing on the left side of the porch. Pretty distinctive, actually. Although I have no pictures to provide for my entry, I'll try to be as descriptive as possible with my experiences to compensate (one of the reasons I'm typing�I have large, loopy handwriting which would take entirely too much room otherwise). Until I was in my early teens, my relatives lived in a beautiful old Victorian home on North Tenth Street in Easton, Pennsylvania. My grandparents had bought the house when my mother was in grade school, and when I was seven years old, they moved out and my uncle and aunt, who were newlyweds at the time, bought it from my grandfather as their starter home. It was a three-floor house with rich, dark wood paneling on the first floor and the winding staircase that went up to the second floor (where the three bedrooms were). It had 1920's-era heat registers in the rooms and a claw-foot tub with a hand-held showering wand. My grandparents kept it in beautiful traditional condition�whitewashed on the outside, a swing-bench on the front porch, and rich colors throughout the house that fit the character. My favorite place of the house, though, was the attic. To get up there, I had to climb a set of extremely narrow, twisting stairs hidden behind a door on the second floor. The stairs were covered with hard plastic runners, which cracked under my feet as I put my weight on each step. Upon reaching the attic, I had to cross the main attic room halfway before reaching the string that hung from the ceiling light. I usually ran because I was afraid of the dark, and often overshot the string (or hit it with my shoulder, sending it swinging in the darkness). The attic was divided into three sections�the main room, at the top of the stairs, a smaller room that had windows facing North Tenth Street, and a set of storage cubbyholes accessible from the main room. The layout was something like this: (hand-drawn sketch). The street-facing room had been my mother's room in high school. She'd painted it lavender, and had several faded postcards still stuck to the wall, as well as a small collection of first-run Nancy Drew mystery books, which I now have stored with my book collection. It was a room that looked like it had been locked away in time, even though I know my grandparents frequently used the attic. Although I always wanted to, I never slept up there. The first (and only) time I attempted to ended up being the night of a horrific thunderstorm, and a bolt of lightning hit a stop sign just a block away from the house. It sounded just like a gun firing. I was too scared to try sleeping up there after that. Many times, I felt like someone was watching me as I spent time up in the attic. There were cold spots on areas of the stairwell, and my heart would race, forcing me to run the rest of the way up the stairs. I'd tell my grandmother what I'd felt, and she'd laugh lightheartedly, telling me in her thick Polish accent that my imagination was running away from me and that there was no such thing as ghosts. But I had to wonder. By the time I was twelve, I wasn't going to the house as often, since I tended to stay with my grandparents at their new house, rather than with my aunt and uncle. But when I did go over there, it often was to babysit my baby cousin, Kathryn, and give my aunt and uncle a few hours to themselves. After I'd put Kathryn to bed, I usually would go up to the attic to hang out, since it was directly over Kathryn's room and easier than on the first floor to hear her if she started fussing. I still was nervous about going up into the attic, but had tried to convince myself that there really was nothing there, and I was just psyching myself out to be scared. One particular night, that all changed. I had put Kathryn to bed, and went upstairs to read and relax, when I felt an incredible burst of cold air go right through me. It was mid-July, and there was no air-conditioning in the house, let alone in the stifling hot attic, so the cold air was completely out of place. After the cold air had passed, I was filled with overwhelming fear and a sense of pain and loss�like something or someone had died. I tore down the stairs of the attic immediately, and noticed that my hands were shaking. I don't know what it was. I'm convinced I ran into a ghost, and that it was of someone who had lived in the house. I never went up into the attic again after dark. The following year, my uncle and aunt sold the house, much to my grandparents' irritation, to move into a brand new house in Bethlehem, which was the next town over. Once they'd moved, I sat down and talked with my mom about my experience that night, and about the cold spots I'd always felt on the steps. It turned out that my mom had often felt them, too, including an occasional cold rush in the middle of summer. (She later showed me her high school diaries, where she'd recorded the experiences). Apparently, there HAD been an elderly man who'd lived in the house about a decade before my grandparents bought it, who had died in the house sometime in the summer of 1950, and who my mom was convinced still "lived" there and was the cause of the cold spots. Mom thought that he was bewildered because of all of the activity with our family there, since he'd lived alone as a widower for several years before his death. She thought that the extreme feelings in July probably reflected a specific anniversary to him, either of his own death, or possibly his wife's. I wish that now, in my late twenties, I could have the opportunity to find out, and to go up into that attic again after dark, and see what happened. ~ Mel. 4:09 p.m. - 4 June 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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