Chatting With Ghosts – Part 1
Posted on | September 5, 2009 | 2 Comments
It isn’t a problem for me — having ghosts around — since that has been a part of my life since earliest childhood. But there are times when you just need to get on with tasks that you are trying to accomplish or sleep that you are longing to dive into and you simply need to ask them to leave you alone.
Just over a decade ago and prior to moving back to Australia, we were renovating a house we had just purchased in one of the southern states of the USA, the classic fixer-upper at a bargain price. The house had been built in the late 1930s by the original owner and his widow had resided there until we purchased it through a broker. There was no insulation at all between the paper-thin plasterboard and the outer timber siding, so our first task was to tear down all of the internal walls and gut the house right back to the studs.
Garbed in facemasks, gloves, and safety goggles, we gleefully punched through the plasterboard and removed sixty-plus years of mess and rubble as we demolished an old chimney and dragged the soot-covered bricks and dirt-covered plaster out of the house. Finally we were ready to bring in the insulation and begin to rehang the walls.
Prior to moving in, we had created one ‘safe space’ to dwell in — the small master bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. So we did have one clean and relatively dust-free room to sleep in at night. But the rest of the house looked exactly like what it was — a construction zone — and you could literally see from one side of the house to the other since all of the walls were torn out.
Within days of moving in, I began to see Charles, the man who had built the house and who had been dead for over a decade. We’d had a long conversation with the woman across the road who knew all of the neighbourhood history and the vision that I saw fit her description perfectly.
From both past experience and from having done a large amount of reading into the literature of ghostly phenomena during my graduate school research, I already knew that ghostly activity tended to escalate when an older house was changed or altered if the former owner had a strong attachment to the place. That was apparently the case with our little 1930s bungalow although, in truth, I had never felt his presence when we looked at the house prior to purchase.
My husband Mark never saw Charles. He felt him on occasion, but his ‘contact’ with Charles was mostly limited to swearing at him out loud as he began to reconstruct the house and he realized that Charles had used a lot of salvaged or ‘pre-used’ building materials in the original building process and some of it was frankly a bit dodgy. It had all been hiding behind that ultra-thin plasterboard that they used during the Depression in the USA.
The times that Charles made a sudden appearance were probably in direct correlation to the amount of swearing at him that Mark had done that day in the vein of, “Damn it ,Charles! Why in the world did you do it that way?” Within a few hours, I would be jolted by the face of a short, dumpy looking man in the bathroom mirror above the sink or in the mirror on the front of the 1930s wardrobe in our bedroom. And I was NOT amused when I was washing my hands or brushing my teeth and suddenly a face appeared in the mirror and I knew that Charles was standing right behind me! I would be so startled that I’d blurt out rather sharply, “Charles! Don’t DO that!” And he would fade from sight in an instant.
I won’t lie to you — I never really got better about the sudden visual manifestations when I knew that I was all alone in the house. I’ve seen far too many women-in-peril movies in the past for that. But my responses to Charles slowly softened until it got to the point where I was chiding him for startling me, not barking at the ghost.
The house began to take shape, the kitchen was restored, Mark began to create beautiful built-in cabinetry in the livingroom, and we hung more mirrors and pictures in each room. That meant that there were more places for Charles to suddenly pop up. But as I relaxed into the process of settling in, I decided to have a quiet chat with Charles one day.
I sat with the sunlight streaming through the sheers in back of the sofa and bouncing all around my shoulders and I quietly sent out the mental call, “Charles, we need to talk.” The energy in the room shimmered a bit for a second just as I opened my eyes again and I knew that he was there. Ever so quietly, I spoke aloud for a few minutes as I told Charles about all of our plans for the house and garden and reassured him that we were not trying to destroy what he had built, we were trying to bring it all back to life! We wanted it to be just as beautiful and happy as it was when he brought his bride there in 1939 after building it in his after-work and weekend hours for the better part of a year.
There was a sound like a sigh — and then nothing more. That was our last contact with Charles and he never appeared in the house again while we lived there.
Part 2 will discuss Mark’s conversation with a ghost this very week — over a decade after the contact with Charles — and it had an interesting continuity to the previous story.
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Deborah Harmes, Ph.D.
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September 6th, 2009 @ 4:33 AM
Great story! We’re redoing a 1920s bungalow in a former mining town. Part of the restoration is stripping out the layers of drywall back to the original plastered adobe and insulating the attic space, so I can appreciate all the hard work you put into that fixer-upper.
We never felt a presence when we bought our current home either but a little over a year after we’d been there, I had a VERY strong sensation one evening of a pretty (and very happy) young woman in my bedroom. I sensed she was a former occupant and that she approved of all the restoration work we were doing. There has been no further contact with her since that one brief encounter about nine months ago.
There have been other experiences, some quite disturbing. When we were restoring a loft space in an old Victorian building on the west coast years ago, we had the experience, after tearing out some cobbled-together closet space, of a sudden, almost overpowering, stench swirling in a vortex in the middle of the room. It lasted about five minutes. That led us to do some research and we learned that the loft space had quite a history including being a bordello and later a speakeasy liquor joint. Apparently there was even a murder in that very room where the smell appeared. Nasty business but once we redid the room, there were no more incidents.
September 7th, 2009 @ 4:53 PM
Interesting stories from YOU as well! Nice that the experience in your current house was a happy one. But the other one was a bit icky and that must have been disconcerting at the time.
I’m pretty sure that what turned that around was your own sense of positivity AND the cleaned up and remodeled space.