Ghost Story
In honor of Halloween that is soon to be here, thought you would like a true Ghost Story, found in Book Two: Down the Rabbit Hole:
Age 18 was when I was working a summer job at Empire Laundry. The laundry washed work pants and shirts, ironed and folded them, and returned them to those businesses renting the clothing. Most of the dozen workers had been there for years. The only other person around my age was Aggie Parquett. She was my work friend.
We were at a pizza shop having lunch, when she told me the story of a ghost house her family had lived in for over four years. It was on a farm outside Webster, Massachusetts, the town where the laundry was located. She never would tell me exactly where. Aggie considered it too dangerous a place.
All afternoon, while digesting pizza, I replayed the tale Aggie had related. Just before four o’clock when we got off, I called Aggie’s sister. Mary had also worked at the laundry, but had found a better job. I told her I would pick her up, after work, and take her home. She was to tell me the same story Aggie had spun.
That night I met their mother Mrs. Parquett. She invited me to dinner, giving me the opportunity to question both Mary and Aggie further. But after dinner, Mrs. Parquett took me aside and told me more. The following is a summation of their stories.
Aggie was the oldest, followed by a bother Joe, Mary and Annie. In addition to the kids, Mrs. Parquett’s husband and mother moved into the wooden farmhouse.
You had to drive down a dirt road, which ended in a forest enclosed meadow with the house in the middle. There was a stream on one side emptying into a small pond not far from the house. The entire farm was surrounded by trees, which had taken over the ancient farm fields decades before.
Everything went well for the first couple years. Then Mr. Parquett decided to dig the cellar deeper, to make a basement room. He uncovered a skeleton. He decided to just cover it back up, and think about what to do. It was obvious the disintegrating bones had been there for a long time. There did not seem to be a reason to hurry notifying the authorities. That was when things got weird. He never did report his find to the authorities and the cellar was never renovated.
Strange sounds had always been detected, now they got louder and more frequent. It was like the wind carried sounds of people talking and chanting. And glimpses of movements of figures could be detected out of the corner of eyes, night or day, inside or out. But when one looked directly toward the object, nothing could be seen. And searching, as they periodically did, produced no source for the disembodied voices.
The problem with automobiles began. Friends driving down the dirt road often found their cars would just stop running upon entering the valley. Some got to the front of the house only to be unable to restart the car. Minutes later the cars would be perfectly alright.
Inside the house the telephone started acting up. The ringing phone would be answered, but the ringing would continue. Often the dial tone could be heard instead of a voice. Near the end, Mrs. Parquett got so irate she actually cut the phone line. The phone continued ringing.
After having already heard from Mary and Aggie the more horrifying events that were to come, I asked Mrs. Parquett why the family continued to stay in a house that was to become dangerous. She explained her husband was not working and they had no money with which to move. She also believed something was oppressing the family’s ability to think correctly. Mrs. Parquett described a feeling of just living in the moment and blocking out thoughts and fears. Strange things happened without explanation and without the attempt to explain. “We just did not think about what was happening,” she said.
Father Parquett finally left and Grandmother died. The weird happenings at the farm and the divorce, forced the older kids to get jobs and move with their mother, into a small, two bedroom apartment. They had been living there for six months when I had dinner with them.
Mrs. Parquett seemed to feel a sense of guilt in not moving sooner. As her mother’s health began failing, they believed her mind was also sick. It was only after Grandmother died the others began seeing movements and figures, Grandmother had called ghosts.
“My mother was the first to actually see figures. She also saw images on the wall that I could not see, like chains and tombstones and faces. I don’t know if they were real too. She kept seeing a young girl come into her room with a tray. Mom claimed it was Aggie trying to poison her. I don’t know why she thought that. I never told the kids about what Mom was seeing. And she claimed she could hear moaning in the night, coming from the cellar stairwell, which was on the opposite side of her bedroom wall.”
The cellar stairwell led down to the shallow grave. Mary was the one to notice the hole in the wall. There were shelves along the top of the stairwell used like a pantry. Mary was retrieving a can of food when she saw a shaft of light. She realized it was hole through the wall, and the kitchen could be seen on the other side. The spooky thing was, the kitchen was vastly different. Instead of linoleum tile on the floor, there were wood planks. The wall paper was gone, also replaced by wood. The kitchen furnishings were replaced. Everything seen through the hole looked many decades older.
As impossible was the collapsing air-shaft. Between the upstairs and lower floor was a structure in the wall, allowing air flow between the two floors. Since moving in, Joe would climb into the upper wall opening and slide down and through the wall opening on the ground floor. On one slide, the wall seemed to collapse around him, trapping him.
His sisters claimed there was no way he had just gotten too big for the stunt. They had also used the slide and knew it was way large enough, to let someone much bigger than Joe to slide down unimpeded. The sisters believed the house had “grabbed” their brother. The wall had to be taken down to get Joe out.
Perhaps belief in the “doings of the house” was not so irrational, in light of the water problem. On more than one occasion a thick, red liquid came out of the kitchen faucet. While not having it analyzed, everyone claimed it looked just like blood. They would run the faucet until the water came back. One day it took over two hours.
One night the family was watching television, when they saw a cigaret burning outside the window. When Joe opened the door and looked out on the porch where the smoker should have been standing, he saw nothing. “Can you still see it?” he asked his sisters. They could, yet he could see nothing. He was back inside looking at it when it disappeared.
Another night Mary looked out the upper window in her bedroom. She saw lights of a car coming down the driveway. It was her boyfriend’s. Excitedly watching, she saw Aggie get out of the passenger side. Then Aggie got back into the car and they drove away.
Hours later, Mary was furious when her sister finally did come home. Annie had picked Aggie up. Initially Aggie denied being with the boyfriend. But when Mary claimed to have seen them together, Aggie confessed that, at the time Mary had seen the car drive down to the front of the house, her sister was with the boyfriend. Aggie had run into him at a local bar. But she had not been in his car.
The most frightening event also involved Mary. She awoke in the middle of the night feeling hands around her throat. Wide awake, she was presented with the vision where one of the hands had a ring around a finger. But the hands did not seem to belong to the cloaked figure, standing beside the bed. Mary realized she could well be dying.
Suddenly the bedroom light came on in a burst. That broke the darkness and the strangling hands and vision, of the classical rendition of the black cloaked Death, standing beside the bed. Annie was standing in the doorway with her hand still over the light switch.
Annie told me, “I don’t think I woke up until that light went on. I had no idea why I was there.”
This is the story as I wrote it down at the time. I was impressed that four people all confirmed the same events. While I had never considered existence of ghosts or events of such strangeness, I knew this family believed what they were saying was all true. But it had not ended.
The near strangling of Mary was the last event at the farmhouse. But a few weeks after hearing the story for the first time, I was stunned by Mary and Aggie relating an event happening the night before in the new apartment. Mary had seen a figure at the end of the hall. When Aggie investigated, she found the pajamas Mary had been wearing when she was nearly strangled. They had thrown them away that same night, as they had been soiled as Mary neared death.
A few weeks later I left for college. The next time I saw the Parquetts was at their Mother’s funeral, during the Christmas holiday. I had no idea their Mom was so sick. No one had mentioned Mrs. Parquett had been fighting cancer for many years. I saw Aggie, Annie and Mary at the funeral home. Mary and I took a ride where she told me the story.
Mrs. Parquett got real sick fast. She was in the hospital for three days and was stable. It was Christmas Eve and they had just finished dinner. There were three distinct knocks at the front door. Aggie opened the door and there was no one there. She looked down into the freshly fallen snow and could see no footprints. She turned around and looked at her two sisters. She said nothing. All three knew the knocks had been their Mom’s way of saying goodby. The phone rang soon after, announcing the passing of a very special woman.
I had met Mrs. Parquett only that one time, when she asked me to dinner. For some reason, she took me aside and expanded my understanding of the haunted farm. And she told me some other things. I don’t think, even she knew why she made me her confidant. But she did. She told me about the Antichrist and small green men. I could have written the entire family off as delusional. But while I had not known of ghosts or the Antichrist, I had heard about the green men.
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Age 18 was when I was working a summer job at Empire Laundry. The laundry washed work pants and shirts, ironed and folded them, and returned them to those businesses renting the clothing. Most of the dozen workers had been there for years. The only other person around my age was Aggie Parquett. She was my work friend.
We were at a pizza shop having lunch, when she told me the story of a ghost house her family had lived in for over four years. It was on a farm outside Webster, Massachusetts, the town where the laundry was located. She never would tell me exactly where. Aggie considered it too dangerous a place.
All afternoon, while digesting pizza, I replayed the tale Aggie had related. Just before four o’clock when we got off, I called Aggie’s sister. Mary had also worked at the laundry, but had found a better job. I told her I would pick her up, after work, and take her home. She was to tell me the same story Aggie had spun.
That night I met their mother Mrs. Parquett. She invited me to dinner, giving me the opportunity to question both Mary and Aggie further. But after dinner, Mrs. Parquett took me aside and told me more. The following is a summation of their stories.
Aggie was the oldest, followed by a bother Joe, Mary and Annie. In addition to the kids, Mrs. Parquett’s husband and mother moved into the wooden farmhouse.
You had to drive down a dirt road, which ended in a forest enclosed meadow with the house in the middle. There was a stream on one side emptying into a small pond not far from the house. The entire farm was surrounded by trees, which had taken over the ancient farm fields decades before.
Everything went well for the first couple years. Then Mr. Parquett decided to dig the cellar deeper, to make a basement room. He uncovered a skeleton. He decided to just cover it back up, and think about what to do. It was obvious the disintegrating bones had been there for a long time. There did not seem to be a reason to hurry notifying the authorities. That was when things got weird. He never did report his find to the authorities and the cellar was never renovated.
Strange sounds had always been detected, now they got louder and more frequent. It was like the wind carried sounds of people talking and chanting. And glimpses of movements of figures could be detected out of the corner of eyes, night or day, inside or out. But when one looked directly toward the object, nothing could be seen. And searching, as they periodically did, produced no source for the disembodied voices.
The problem with automobiles began. Friends driving down the dirt road often found their cars would just stop running upon entering the valley. Some got to the front of the house only to be unable to restart the car. Minutes later the cars would be perfectly alright.
Inside the house the telephone started acting up. The ringing phone would be answered, but the ringing would continue. Often the dial tone could be heard instead of a voice. Near the end, Mrs. Parquett got so irate she actually cut the phone line. The phone continued ringing.
After having already heard from Mary and Aggie the more horrifying events that were to come, I asked Mrs. Parquett why the family continued to stay in a house that was to become dangerous. She explained her husband was not working and they had no money with which to move. She also believed something was oppressing the family’s ability to think correctly. Mrs. Parquett described a feeling of just living in the moment and blocking out thoughts and fears. Strange things happened without explanation and without the attempt to explain. “We just did not think about what was happening,” she said.
Father Parquett finally left and Grandmother died. The weird happenings at the farm and the divorce, forced the older kids to get jobs and move with their mother, into a small, two bedroom apartment. They had been living there for six months when I had dinner with them.
Mrs. Parquett seemed to feel a sense of guilt in not moving sooner. As her mother’s health began failing, they believed her mind was also sick. It was only after Grandmother died the others began seeing movements and figures, Grandmother had called ghosts.
“My mother was the first to actually see figures. She also saw images on the wall that I could not see, like chains and tombstones and faces. I don’t know if they were real too. She kept seeing a young girl come into her room with a tray. Mom claimed it was Aggie trying to poison her. I don’t know why she thought that. I never told the kids about what Mom was seeing. And she claimed she could hear moaning in the night, coming from the cellar stairwell, which was on the opposite side of her bedroom wall.”
The cellar stairwell led down to the shallow grave. Mary was the one to notice the hole in the wall. There were shelves along the top of the stairwell used like a pantry. Mary was retrieving a can of food when she saw a shaft of light. She realized it was hole through the wall, and the kitchen could be seen on the other side. The spooky thing was, the kitchen was vastly different. Instead of linoleum tile on the floor, there were wood planks. The wall paper was gone, also replaced by wood. The kitchen furnishings were replaced. Everything seen through the hole looked many decades older.
As impossible was the collapsing air-shaft. Between the upstairs and lower floor was a structure in the wall, allowing air flow between the two floors. Since moving in, Joe would climb into the upper wall opening and slide down and through the wall opening on the ground floor. On one slide, the wall seemed to collapse around him, trapping him.
His sisters claimed there was no way he had just gotten too big for the stunt. They had also used the slide and knew it was way large enough, to let someone much bigger than Joe to slide down unimpeded. The sisters believed the house had “grabbed” their brother. The wall had to be taken down to get Joe out.
Perhaps belief in the “doings of the house” was not so irrational, in light of the water problem. On more than one occasion a thick, red liquid came out of the kitchen faucet. While not having it analyzed, everyone claimed it looked just like blood. They would run the faucet until the water came back. One day it took over two hours.
One night the family was watching television, when they saw a cigaret burning outside the window. When Joe opened the door and looked out on the porch where the smoker should have been standing, he saw nothing. “Can you still see it?” he asked his sisters. They could, yet he could see nothing. He was back inside looking at it when it disappeared.
Another night Mary looked out the upper window in her bedroom. She saw lights of a car coming down the driveway. It was her boyfriend’s. Excitedly watching, she saw Aggie get out of the passenger side. Then Aggie got back into the car and they drove away.
Hours later, Mary was furious when her sister finally did come home. Annie had picked Aggie up. Initially Aggie denied being with the boyfriend. But when Mary claimed to have seen them together, Aggie confessed that, at the time Mary had seen the car drive down to the front of the house, her sister was with the boyfriend. Aggie had run into him at a local bar. But she had not been in his car.
The most frightening event also involved Mary. She awoke in the middle of the night feeling hands around her throat. Wide awake, she was presented with the vision where one of the hands had a ring around a finger. But the hands did not seem to belong to the cloaked figure, standing beside the bed. Mary realized she could well be dying.
Suddenly the bedroom light came on in a burst. That broke the darkness and the strangling hands and vision, of the classical rendition of the black cloaked Death, standing beside the bed. Annie was standing in the doorway with her hand still over the light switch.
Annie told me, “I don’t think I woke up until that light went on. I had no idea why I was there.”
This is the story as I wrote it down at the time. I was impressed that four people all confirmed the same events. While I had never considered existence of ghosts or events of such strangeness, I knew this family believed what they were saying was all true. But it had not ended.
The near strangling of Mary was the last event at the farmhouse. But a few weeks after hearing the story for the first time, I was stunned by Mary and Aggie relating an event happening the night before in the new apartment. Mary had seen a figure at the end of the hall. When Aggie investigated, she found the pajamas Mary had been wearing when she was nearly strangled. They had thrown them away that same night, as they had been soiled as Mary neared death.
A few weeks later I left for college. The next time I saw the Parquetts was at their Mother’s funeral, during the Christmas holiday. I had no idea their Mom was so sick. No one had mentioned Mrs. Parquett had been fighting cancer for many years. I saw Aggie, Annie and Mary at the funeral home. Mary and I took a ride where she told me the story.
Mrs. Parquett got real sick fast. She was in the hospital for three days and was stable. It was Christmas Eve and they had just finished dinner. There were three distinct knocks at the front door. Aggie opened the door and there was no one there. She looked down into the freshly fallen snow and could see no footprints. She turned around and looked at her two sisters. She said nothing. All three knew the knocks had been their Mom’s way of saying goodby. The phone rang soon after, announcing the passing of a very special woman.
I had met Mrs. Parquett only that one time, when she asked me to dinner. For some reason, she took me aside and expanded my understanding of the haunted farm. And she told me some other things. I don’t think, even she knew why she made me her confidant. But she did. She told me about the Antichrist and small green men. I could have written the entire family off as delusional. But while I had not known of ghosts or the Antichrist, I had heard about the green men.
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