TRUE "GHOST" STORY
Seeing as how I was asked
One summer, likely 1947, when I had just turned nine, my parents were heading out to California whene my father had purchased some land (La Jolla). Me go on a trip with parents during summer vacation and miss the fun of freedom from scholastic incarceration? Whoa, and how could I weasel out of that?
My parents being good and kindly souls, arranged for some friends to come up and stay at the house during their absence. Better still, those friends just happened to be the parents of my oldest friend, a lad who lived next door when we were in Chicago, whose mother had wheeled him in his carriage next to my mother with me in a like buggy. Hooray!
My bedroom had bunkbeds, so Dave and I were really having a lot of fun the first night of his stay. Ignoring adult admonishment to go to sleep, we were horseing around at midnight. That's when his parents came up, heard the racket, and set things "right." David was escorted to another bedroom by his father as I was scolded sternly bu his mother. Ah well, all good things must end...
Just as I was dozing off, perhaps 10 minutes after the dressing down, a tremendous crash shook the house. The noise came from nearly overhead, My room was near the front of the long house, and it had a full attic, six bedrooms on the second floor. A second after the terrible crash there followed six or seven great thumpings from the same location, the attic. These sounds came from the place of the initial one, moved from there north to the opposite end of the attic as if soneone with really long legs were stomping along up there.
In a minute Dave's mother was in my room to see if I had anything to do with the noise. Of course she discovered me huddled under my sheet, quite unwilling to leave the "safety" of my bed. Meantime, Dave's father checked on David, found him fast asleep in his bed in the room across the hall frm my own--incidentally that was almost directly under the place where the initial crashing thump originated, but he slept through that ant the following noise quite undisturbed.
Mr. Dimery, David's father, roused him, and the four of us proceeded down the hallway to the attic door. Mr. Dimery had picked up a baseball bat from my room, likely fearing the commotion was due to burglars of the like. Unkikely in the extreme, but who at that hour of the night, morning, properly, would think of anything but some such?
As we three stood at the bottom of the steps, David's father turned on the lights, proceeded into the attic, had a cursory glance, then came back down. Too many dark corners and unlighted portions to manage. We locked the door, wedged the key fast, and retired.
In the bright light of morning all four if us preceeded to thoroughly search the attic. Nothing was broken, no trunk or box or crate disturbed. All open windows were fully screened, and those screens fastened in place. In short, no possible physical cause for the whole bizarre series of sounds could be discovered.
That was that. Needsless to say, I was thereafter somewhat charry about going up to the attic alone, even in daylight, but that didn't last too long, and soon I was back up there playing. That is until the next time the "ghost" manifested itself in the house--a year later and when I was absolutely alone.
Cheerio,
Gary
