A Ghost Story

Oh, hey! Thursday already? Sorry about that. I didn't mean to vanish for days.

Anyhow, I've got a ghost story for you. This is kind of cheating, since it's not my story. A girl I worked with at my high school job told it to me, and I was so creeped out and impressed that I went straight home and wrote it down. I'm not sure if it's really that creepy almost ten years later, but here it is, as she told it (only the names have been changed):


A ghost story, as told to me by Danielle P., September 14, 1998.

I had this friend named Jenny, and she was kind of an eccentric person. She had these sleepovers that were legendary. We called them Jenny-Fests. She lived in this old farmhouse in Clunelle, this ridiculously small town that had maybe seven houses. They had one church and a chemical farm.

The house was really old, and no one had lived in it for a long time. The guy who owned it was an explorer. He had old money, so he didn't really work. He traveled all over the world and wrote. When he died, he was really old. His family took some of his things, but they left a lot of it behind. When Jenny's family moved in, they found a lot of his things, like old hats, cloaks, and a rocking chair and stuff. In his study, his relatives had barely taken anything, and there were all his journals from his travels. Jenny's family read some of them and gave them away. They kept some of the stuff, but gave most of it to the former owner's relatives.

The first night they stayed in the house, Jenny couldn't sleep in her room, because the house was so old that the floor had rotted through. She couldn't walk into the room or move in her stuff, so she slept in a sleeping bag on the living room floor, but it was okay, because the master bedroom was on the first floor, so she was right around the corner from her parents. Her sister's room was okay, so she slept upstairs. Jenny was around 8 years old at this time. She woke up during the night because she smelled cherry pipe smoke. She saw an old man sitting in the rocking chair, smoking a pipe. He beckoned to her, and she sat up. The man came over to her and put his finger on her lips as if to tell her to be quiet, then walked away and disappeared.

Jenny woke up in the rocking chair the next morning and remembered the man right away. She wondered if she'd imagined it, but she felt something poking her in the back, and when she reached back she found a pipe there. Jenny's family knew that the previous owner's name was Bert, and Jenny figured this was him. After that night, she said she mostly heard him. She'd hear someone rattling silverware in the kitchen and then she'd go in and the silverware would be messed up. Her family said they'd seen this kind of thing, too. They would hear his footsteps on the wooden staircase. One day Jenny had folded a huge load of laundry up in her bedroom. She left, and when she came back it had been thrown all over.

Sometime in middle school, Jenny started having her sleepovers. There was this girl named Kylie and this horrible girl named Dana, and they always said that Jenny was full of shit. They teased her and called her awful names all night one night. Jenny had been telling her Bert stories, and Kylie and Dana were like, "Oh, Jenny, you're such a bullshitter!" Kylie went upstairs to Jenny's room to get something from her bag, and when she came back, she fell. She hit the floor, hard, and Jenny was like, "What are you doing?" Kylie said she'd felt the carpet under her feet--there was only carpet at the bottom of the stairs, not on the steps, and when the lights were out you could only tell you'd reached the bottom of the stairs by feeling for the carpet with your bare feet. Kylie said she'd felt the carpet, but when she started to walk forward, she missed the last two steps and fell on her ass. The same thing happened to Dana at another party a few weeks later. She said, "I swear to Christ, I felt the carpet," and she'd fallen on her ass. After that, we kept our opinions to ourselves. Even if we thought Jenny was a big liar, we didn't say anything until we got home.

There was one story Jenny told me that's like that thing you were talking about where you don't know if you're dreaming or not. She was dreaming that she was in her room, but it looked different. She was sitting at the desk that came with the room that she'd kept, and it had a big vanity mirror on it. She saw her reflection in the mirror, but it didn't look like her. She was a beautiful woman with long dark hair. Then she saw Bert--she had seen pictures of him--behind her, as he'd looked in his younger days. He kissed her temple and was stroking her hair. She woke up and saw his face reflected in the window and it scared her. That was the only time she ever felt uncomfortable about him.

When we were in high school, there were three of us who had gotten really close. There was me, Jenny, and Cori. Jenny still had her big Jenny-Fests, but we also had sleepovers with just the three of us and didn't tell anybody else. We were at one and Jenny was telling her stories, because she knew they bothered us. I refused to be alone in her house, even in the daytime. When Jenny and Cori left the room, I always went with them. That night, we were giddy and silly, and Jenny was telling us all her stories. Her parents were divorced by then. Her mom was sleeping in the master bedroom. Jenny ran outside, yelling, "Bert! I'm coming!" just to freak us out. We could hear her banging on the outside of the house. They had a cellar--an old fruit cellar--and slaves used to hide there, the house was so old. You could see old cans of food that were left down there, and there were secret places in the walls.

Cori and I were in the kitchen and we heard Wendy banging on the screen of the front door. Then we heard this horrible noise. It was the loudest noise I've ever heard. It was like a vacuum cleaner but turned up really, really loud. Cori and I were screaming at each other and we couldn't hear ourselves. I was screaming, "Cori, what is it?" and I could see that she was saying, "I don't know." It went on for the longest time, then stopped and started again. As soon as it stopped again, for real this time, Jenny popped up at the front door. We knew the noise had come from the door that went out the back to the cellar and the garage. We asked Jenny about it, but she hadn't heard anything. We could see the master bedroom from the kitchen, but when we asked her mom the next day, she hadn't heard anything, not even us screaming.

To this day, it still bothers Cori and me. After that, but not because of it, my friendship with Jenny just kind of deteriorated. Like I said, her parents were divorced by then. This is the last Bert story I heard: Her dad wanted the house. I don't know why--he was a single guy and there were three of them (Jenny, her mom, and her sister)--but he did, so they moved into an apartment in the next town over. We had one last Jenny-Fest before the move, and Jenny woke up screaming in the middle of the night, saying, "No, Bert! No!" She was screaming bloody murder and she ran into her mom's room, bawling. She wouldn't tell me what she dreamed. She said she was okay when I asked about it later, but she seemed embarrassed. She never told me what happened.

I still wonder, because Jenny's the kind of person who'd love to think she'd fooled us all, but there was that noise. And Cori heard it, too.



So that's it...creepy? Not creepy? I guess it depends on your perspective. Anyone else got any stories?


Reading:  The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coehlo

Playing:  Howl by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

P.S. New post at the book blog.