Haunted (14 page)

Unable to wait until morning to satisfy my piqued curiosity, I went up to the attic to retrieve the old page of newsprint and spread it out as it had been when we had found it on the front lawn. I looked at the number at the top of the right-hand page and felt my heart begin to race. It was page five.

I began a thorough search through all the page's articles and advertisements, but searching for something significant was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Any one of the news stories could contain a message, including the top centred article entitled “Two Brilliant Students,” which featured a photograph of a young man and woman and listed all their academic accomplishments. Feeling discouraged, I folded the old paper and put it back on the desk.

During that summer, my friend, Sylvia, planned to visit. I had been keeping her informed about the strange happenings in our household, and she was anxious to see evidence of paranormal activity while she stayed with us. She seemed more fascinated than frightened by all my tales of the haunting.

When her car pulled up, the children and I went out to greet her, leaving the house empty behind us. As I helped Sylvia unload her suitcase and bags from the trunk, I noticed that Kammie was staring at the foyer window. I tried to get her attention as I handed over a bag for her to carry in for us, but she stood transfixed, seemingly unaware of anything else.

“What's wrong?” I asked, seeing Kammie's disturbed expression.

“Who's that?” she whispered to me, not wanting Sylvia to overhear.

“Who's who?” I asked, looking at the empty foyer window.

“She was just there,” Kammie said.

I glanced over at Sylvia, hoping she had not been able to hear our conversation. I did not want her to be afraid to enter the house from the moment of her arrival. Sylvia, though, was engaged in lively chatter with Rosa and Matt about their summer activities.

“I don't see anyone,” I told Kammie.

“Someone was looking out of the window and then went up the stairs,” my daughter said.

“What did they look like?” I asked quietly.

“I'm pretty sure it was a lady. She was dark, and I couldn't really tell what she was wearing. She was watching us. Then I saw her move away from the window, and it looked like she went up the stairs.”

Kammie continued to stare at the window for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders and took the bag from my hand. She did not seem concerned about what she had seen and soon joined the other children in telling Sylvia all about her summer holiday plans.

The first thing Sylvia wanted to look at, once the children had gone back outside to play, was the newspaper we had found on the front lawn. As I chose to not overwhelm her with too much information, I did not tell her what Kammie had just seen in the foyer, but did take her up to the attic to see the page of newsprint. We spread the paper out on the floor and, paying particular attention to page five, closely examined its contents. I explained to her that when we had first found the paper, it had not smelled like old newsprint. Although now, a few months later, it did have a slight odour and was beginning to yellow, it still did not appear to be nearly as old as it actually was.

The article about Germany was the first thing to catch Sylvia's eye, and I agreed it did seem the most newsworthy. However, I did not understand what the significance could be of a news article that warned of an impending world war.

“What's on page five of the paper under the porch?” Sylvia asked.

“I don't know. I can't remember. We only looked at it that one time and then put it back,” I said.

We looked at each other and then raced down the flights of stairs to the porch to retrieve the old paper from behind the lattice. Ted, arriving home from work, volunteered to pry the wood loose for us, more out of concern that the fragile piece might be broken if done incorrectly than out of interest in our quest for clues.

As my husband handed the bundle up to me, I stared at it in confusion.

“This isn't the same paper,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” Ted assured me. “It was exactly where you left it.”

“But look at it!” I said. “It didn't look anything like this when we found it three months ago.”

The newspaper now appeared to be every bit as old as its date indicated. The pages were so yellowed and brittle with decay that it was scarcely possible to make out the print at all. As I handled it, large pieces broke off and crumbled. I didn't understand how it could have deteriorated to that extent.

I gingerly carried the remains of the newspaper up onto the porch and opened it up to see if anything could still be read on the fifth page. Most of the paper was now illegible and some pieces were missing altogether, but, amazingly, there was an article at the top centre of page five, in the same location as the other newspaper's fifth-page story. That article, too, warned about the very real probability of war. Its headline read: “Preparation For War Proceeds In Germany.” It informed the reader that Hitler was telling the German people that the rest of the world hated them and wanted to destroy them, but he would lead them to victory over that oppression.

That article had been written fifteen months after the story in
The Mail and Empire
, yet they both spoke of the threat of a world war, and they both appeared in the same location on page five. Perhaps the most extraordinary fact was that the
Toronto Daily Star
article was nearly the only legible story left on the page.

Sylvia read the article again. “This must be the message,” she said. After she spoke those words, the three of us saw, though the open front door, the light in the foyer turn on.

“Is this the message?” Sylvia asked, staring wide-eyed into the foyer and then turning to me with a nervous smile.

The light turned off and then on, twice. At first I felt a sense of relief that someone else, besides me and the children, had seen that happening. I looked at Ted to see if he too had seen the flickering light and realized from the look on his face that he had. But, it was disturbing that the message could possibly be related to the approach of a world war. The three of us looked at one another soberly for a moment.

“Where are the kids?” Ted asked, thinking that perhaps one of them might have been inside playing with the switch.

“All three are playing basketball at the side of the house,” I said, which he quickly confirmed with a glance around the corner.

Ted just smiled and shook his head, again refusing to believe there was not a reasonable explanation for what we had just seen. I was growing frustrated with his refusal to admit something unusual was happening in our home and to take it seriously.

“What will it take to convince you?” I asked him in exasperation. “I wish something else would happen, specifically to you, that would prove to you that this is real.”

My husband smiled at my frustration. Ted would admit that he had heard the footsteps many times and of course the smoke detector alarms woke him up as well at night. He acknowledged that it was strange that Piper refused to go upstairs to the second floor, and he knew the children all claimed to have seen spirits in the house. But he still refused to admit that anything supernatural was at the root of all of this.

Sylvia, now a firm believer after being in the house only a few hours, laughed at my husband's stubbornness.

“I think you're too scared to admit this is actually happening,” she teased him.

“No way!” he laughed, heading back into the house. “Who wants a beer?”

Ted went into the kitchen to get us drinks, and Sylvia and I continued to look through the legible sections of the old newspaper. I decided to get my camera and take a picture of it as a keepsake before it completely decomposed. I also went up and got the sheet of newsprint from the attic. Although it was still in good condition, having been kept inside, on my desk, I knew it might be only a matter of time before it deteriorated too. I brought it outside and spread it out onto the lawn, as it had been the day we found it, and took a picture of it as well. Even if I was not able to figure out the significance of page five and the paper did decompose, at least I would have a photograph as a permanent reminder of finding it.

When Ted came out with our bottles of beer, he helped me to replace the old newspaper under the porch, and I took the other piece of newsprint back up to the attic. We then all sat in the living room and relaxed. Ted took a few sips from his beer, and then left it on the coffee table to answer the phone in the kitchen. When he came back, he lifted the bottle towards his mouth for another drink. As he did so, the beer suddenly erupted into his face like a small volcano. It shocked him so much, he almost dropped the bottle. Sylvia and I both jumped up from where we were sitting to help Ted clean up. His face was covered in beer, and it was dripping from his clothes and hair.

“Did you shake that up?” he asked me, thinking it had been some kind of practical joke.

“No! We didn't touch it,” I insisted, and Sylvia quickly agreed.

None of us had ever seen a bottle of beer erupt like that before, and after the initial shock, we all broke into peels of laughter. It had made quite a mess but the look on Ted's face had been something to see. We started to laugh all over again every time we thought of it.

“Do you think maybe it happened specifically to you to convince you this is real?” I asked my husband jokingly, reminding him of what I had said on the porch. He laughed as he towel-dried his wet hair and warned me that I should be careful about what I wished for from then on.

“Let's try that again,” Ted said, and got another bottle out of the refrigerator. He took off the cap and let the beer stand still for a few minutes before he attempted to take a drink. Nothing happened. He took several more sips and still nothing unusual occurred. Finally, after convincing himself that the last beer's eruption had just been a fluke, he settled down comfortably on the couch and took another drink. That time the beer again shot straight into his face, but with even more force than before. No one laughed then, though. It was much too strange to be humorous, although Ted's look of stark horror gave me a bit of satisfaction. Even he could not logically explain away this phenomenon.

From that day on, Ted was unable to enjoy a bottle of beer in his own home. If he were drinking a bottle anywhere else, nothing unusual would occur. But if he attempted to drink a beer in the house or anywhere on our property, he could be assured it would shoot right into his face. It would not erupt when the cap was removed, or when he might expect it to, but only when his guard was down. Neither of us really drank much, but in our amazement with this oddity, we tested it on many occasions. We tried switching bottles, but it still erupted in Ted's face. He even tried drinking the beer from a glass, but it shot up as it was being poured into the stein. It eventually became quite a family joke, and even the children would gather around to watch what happened when Daddy tried to drink a beer. But, although it exasperated Ted, he refused to acknowledge there was anything unusual behind it.

Finally, after months of that activity, I had the satisfaction of hearing my husband admit that it really was strange and something must have been going on that could not be explained or denied. And that was all it took. There was never another eruption. After that admission, he was allowed to drink his beer in peace.

A GIFT OF FLOWERS

E
arly
one morning after Ted had walked sleepily into the bathroom, I heard him anxiously call for me. I went in to see what was wrong and looked in the direction of his gaze. A cabinet stood in front of a mirror that covered a large portion of one of the bathroom walls. On top of the counter was a huge, decorative oil lamp. Together Ted and I stared at two tiny hand prints pressed firmly and clearly onto the mirror directly behind the glass chimney of the lamp.

The hand prints were positioned beyond the reach of any our children, and it would have been impossible to have left those marks without removing the oil lamp. Yet it looked as if a very young child had been staring at their reflection and then placed two little hands on either side of the face's image.

Upon examining the impression of the hands, the most inexplicable feature about them was their size. Rosa was the smallest member of our household. Yet when we compared her hands to those ones, hers were twice as large. The prints obviously had been made by a child of perhaps only one or two years of age. I was not frightened, but very bewildered, by their appearance.

Our children were just as amazed by them. Ted seemed much more disturbed by those hand prints than anything else we had experienced, and I watched him inspect them with obvious concern. That was definitely something he could not rationalize away. The prints were distinctly apparent on the glass; we all clearly saw them, and they could not be dismissed as a figment of anyone's imagination.

I wiped the prints off of the mirror, but they reappeared three more times in different locations. Finally, I was able to clean them off for good.

We spent the next day preparing for a two-week holiday on the coast. The children were out of school for the summer and everyone was looking forward to our vacation. As I was packing up groceries from the kitchen to take with us, I heard Piper begin to whine at the back door. I walked through the family room to let her out into the yard and glanced out the window as I passed by. To my astonishment, I saw the full blooms of a rose bush just below the window sill.

I had decided to reclaim the neglected small garden in which Kammie had found her large sample of pyrite, now located next to the new family room, after all the debris from the construction of the new addition had been cleared. I had dug in the area for most of one afternoon, and after hitting a piece of rock sticking up out of the grass, I had unearthed what turned out to be all the original pieces of stone that had once surrounded the garden. After I had hosed down the dirt-caked pieces of stone, I replaced them, like a jigsaw puzzle, where they had once been positioned. When I had finished, the garden had been completely restored to its original condition, except, of course, for its flowers. I had planted some impatiens that bloomed there nicely, adding bright colour to the backyard.