"An October Moment"

I've been reading the blog of a guy who calls himself Magazine Man for a few years now. Last fall, he posted a series of entries that he classified as "October Moments". Basically, spooky stories that he or people in his life have experienced first hand.

I've also been reading/watching (because he does a lot of video entries) the blog of a guy named Richard. Recently, he asked the question "Do you believe in ghosts" and my response was "I do. I don't want to...but I do. I used to spend a lot of time in a place that was rumored to be haunted and for a while I tried to just laugh the stories off, but I felt and saw some things that convinced me at least some of the stories were true." and Richard's response was "tell us more."

So, I've decided to post my own "October Moment" blog to explain myself in a little more detail.

Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I spent a lot of time at the Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia headquarters in Evansville, Indiana. The "headquarters" was (and still is) actually just
a really old house out in the middle of nowhere. On my first visit to the house, I was told the story of Burr, who was the original owner and was rumored to have never really left. The story claims that Burr died of a heart attack in his bedroom at exactly midnight on new year's eve and has been haunting the house ever since. I took the story with a grain of salt...actually several grains of salt which had been stuck to the back of my hand below the index finger and were quickly followed up by a shot of tequila and a lime wedge. So yeah, I was there to have a good time, not be scared out of my mind with ghost stories. So I ignored them...for the most part. Until I just couldn't anymore.

The guy I was living with around this time worked for the fraternity. We suffered some water damage (the roof caved in!) in our downtown apartment and decided to stay out at Lyrecrest until our Landlord took care of it. It had been easy to shrug off the ghost stories when I didn't have to spend the night in the place. When I suddenly had to eat, sleep and shower there, the stories began to occupy my mind all the time.

First there was the temperature issue. It was winter and fairly cold outside, so we tried to keep the place kinda cozy. Every night we'd set the thermostat at 72 degrees and every morning, we'd wake up shivering, sometimes able to see our own breath. When we'd go to check the thermostat, it was re-set at 40 degrees.

Then there was the desk chair. Before leaving his office every night, my ex made a point of pushing his leather chair under his desk. This was a wide chair that just barely fit under the desk. He really had to jam the thing in there to make it fit. Every morning when he returned to his office, the chair was rolled out and turned around to face out the window behind his desk.

Then there was the toilet seat cover. His secretary was alone in her office and heard a slamming sound in the bathroom. She peeked in and saw that the toilet seat cover, which was always left open, was closed. She hurried downstairs to tell us all about it and refused to go back up there unless someone came with her. We all laughed at her a bit and came to the conclusion that it was an old toilet seat and the hinges were probably just going bad. She still wouldn't go back up there. Finally, I was elected to escort her back to her office (the guys were all still laughing to hard to make it up the stairs). So together, we returned to the third floor, where I planned to take a quick look around and tell her everything was okay. When I peeked into the bathroom, the toilet seat was back up again.

On the night when we were finally able to move back into our apartment, we were each gathering things in separate parts of the house. My ex was up in his office and I was by the back door, about to carry a load of things out to the car. As I stepped up on the concrete step by the back door, the chain for the lock started swinging back and forth. Not just jiggling...literally swinging. Two seconds later, my ex came charging down the stairs saying, "We gotta get the Hell outta here!!" So we left. I never could get him to tell me what it was that made him feel the need to leave so urgently. He always said it was just a feeling.

Finally, there was a tradition in the fraternity to hold a three day leadership seminar during the week between Christmas and New Year's which always culminated in a "pass the gavel" sort of "this is what I've learned and why I'm so happy to be a brother" ceremony at midnight on New Year's Eve. On the year that I had the pleasure to be in the house during this event (I was confined to the kitchen where I churned out tray after tray of chocolate chip cookies), there was a lot of talk among the chapters of "crashing" the retreat on New Year's Eve. To prevent un-invited brothers from showing up and turning the dignified event into a party, they locked all of the outside doors and huddled together on the first floor, directly under the room where Burr was said to have died. As the gavel pass began at midnight, everything was silent as each brother shared his story, until they all heard a scuffling sound overhead...like awkward footsteps...the kind you make when you first stumble out of bed. Then the sound became more pronounced, like staggering. (At this point, I released myself from the kitchen, because I could hear the sounds too and I was not about to stay locked in there all alone.) There were four of these clumsy footsteps, then an enormous thud and the door to the room overhead slammed shut. Every eye in the room went wide as we all realized we'd just heard a re-enactment of Burr's death. Some guys ran outside to check for practical jokers, some ran upstairs to see if someone had managed to get in. (Nobody found any evidence of anyone else in or around the house.)

I...ran into the kitchen and helped myself to a cookie and a beer.
I felt I'd earned it.

Happy Halloween, everybody!!