Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away...
- Hughes Mearns (The Guy With 2 Last Names)
Just a simple set of dark wooden stairs against white
risers, they go up to a landing, turn, and go up another shorter set of stairs to
the second floor. That’s the first thing you see when you enter the front door.
Most people don’t pay attention to the adjacent bathroom not-so-hidden beneath
the second set sitting to the right. There’s no window on the landing, so you either
get the light from the fixture above, or from the window on the next floor, or
none at all towards evening. Regardless, everyone looks up them as soon as they
enter. “Sensitives” often inquire about what happened there, and my usual
response is, “You tell me.” I don’t know if anything ever actually happened on
that landing and probably never will. It appears they may have once been a
window there, but it is nefariously sealed up and painted over! Just kidding.
The house next door was built up against mine, so I assume that’s why. I’m not
going to talk about how we found a footprint in the drywall dust on the
upstairs landing, the hallway light being turned off by itself, or about the
time something came across and tried to force itself into my sister’s bedroom,
since I’ve already covered them. But we have animals getting bent out of shape,
pennies being dropped, and full-sized apparitions walking up and down them.
I don’t think it really started or stopped at any given
time. I think it had always happened but we just never paid much attention to
it. It usually happened at night. You would hear a penny hit the linoleum, as
if it had been dropped. Only no one was in the hallway. You would hear that on
a regular basis. We always assumed it was the cat, but then she died. It
continued, when all of our other animals were accounted for. When I moved back
into the house, we swept the stairs and found a few dozen pennies on them. A
few nights later we found a few more. I had been living off of credit cards and
hadn’t been using money in any physical form, yet they continued to appear. Sure,
maybe it is mice with copper fetishes, unaware that pennies don’t contain much
copper at all. Stupid mice. The dates on the pennies don’t seem to have any
significance.
When I was younger I saw a bearded man dressed in flannel
walk out of the bathroom and up the stairs. He was not accompanied by any
sounds and it happened so fast while I was in the living room watching TV, so I
assumed I hallucinated. A few months later my mother reported seeing the same
man in the kitchen, so I related my story. On more than one occasion, we have
all heard someone heavy going up the stairs, all the way to the third floor.
The first step to the attic lets out
aloud squeak when you step on it, so we know they made it that far. My
mother mistakenly thought it was me, before realizing I walk light. I heard
this myself twice, accompanied by an odd jangling noise, which I assumed was my
uncle’s biker jacket, but I was of course wrong. It may have been the ghost of
Hipster’s past, since we did have a lot of records up there.
But the thing that has always bothered me the most was the
feeling that someone is right behind you when you walk down them. I remember as
a kid, running as fast as I could downstairs. It may have just been the fear of
the unknown at the time, based upon odd experienced I had earlier, but as late
as my teen years, I remember being bothered by it. When my nephew lived in the
house for a couple of years, he did the same thing, running to get to the
bottom because he felt like someone was behind him. We had a poorly engineered
two-way lighting circuit, one that you had to turn on wherever you turned it
off. When you went to bed late at night, you climbed the stairs to your bedroom,
turned the light off, went to bed. In the morning, since there was so much
daylight, you forgot the light was off, so didn’t turn it back on. Later that
night, you had the unfortunate task of walking up the stairs in darkness. The
attic was set up the same way, but it wasn’t creepy. When I moved back in, I
noticed I still had that same apprehension when going up them, but coming down,
I decided I was too damn old to be worried about some monster getting me and
just walked at a regular pace, but on occasion those hairs still stand up on the
back of your neck. Of note, it was brought to my attention that improperly
installed two-way circuits can give off high EMF readings, which in theory can
give you strange feelings. While the EMF reading off the circuit is indeed
almost double or triple the normal, the circuit has been turned off for the
past month, due to an electrical short, and people still continue to look up
the stairs, have weird feelings like someone is behind you, and get attacked by
a ghostly lumberjack.
Next we explore Gertrude’s room.