As I said the other day, and why don't you pay attention to me when I'm talking, on Fridays, I will report for you a freaky story told to me by a reader. Several have rolled in, and here's the first one. I read this LATE AT NIGHT when I was ALONE and thanks a lot, Faithful Reader Donna.
If you have any freaky stories for me--unexplained sightings, near-death experiences, haunty-ass houses, times you were psychic--send them to me at byebyepieblog@gmail.com. And title it Freaky Friday.
Here's the story.
We live in a 99 year-old house. Since we moved here, one of our dogs has a room that he will not go in. He just stands in the doorway and whines or sometimes growls a little while looking forlornly into it. Except for one time when I could hear him from upstairs, I came running down and he was lying in the middle of the room, crying inexplicably.
There were other unusual occurrences, doors slamming when no windows were open, lights on in rooms where you could swear you had turned them off, and a feeling that something has brushed just past you and when you looked down thinking you were going to pet one of the dogs, nothing was there. My daughter swears someone (thing?) is always turning off her curling iron. We joked that we had a ghost, a seemingly benevolent one, and randomly began calling him Walter.
One summer evening we noticed some people standing on the sidewalk looking up at our house. Our son recognized the man as one of the teachers at school. We had heard that he had lived in our house several years before, so we walked out and introduced ourselves. We chatted for a bit until the couple asked us if we had met “the ghost.” Of course we asked them to tell us more about it. Basically, they described the exact same situations we had been experiencing with one exception, almost all of their encounters (including an incident with a wall that wouldn’t take paint-creepy eh?) had occurred in the pantry instead of in the dining room/front room.
Unusually, another one of my son’s teachers had also lived in our house. I guess a house doesn’t get to be almost 100 years old in a college town without going through quite a few tenants. She too asked my son if we had met “the ghost,” described similar occurrences and reiterated the couple’s assertion that he lived in the pantry.
We continued co-existing peacefully with Walter, even taking to greeting him when we walked in the door. After we had been here a few years, my son and I went to the historical society to do some research on our house. We found out two things…
-The house had gone through several remodels, and the room that now torments our poor sweet black lab, used the be the pantry!
-While reviewing resident registries from the 1940s, I ran across a listing for a man named Walter Phillips at our address. When I saw it, I tapped my son on the arm and pointed to the listing, he read it and we both just sat there, feeling kinda freaky. We couldn’t explain why we had decided to call our ghost Walter any more than we could explain the things that were happening that we credited him with.
I did a bunch of research trying to find out more about him, see if perhaps he had died here. So far I’ve not been able to come up with anything. So for now, he remains the mysterious soul occasionally messing with our family, but mostly the dog.
