From: frankm@microsoft.com (Frank R.A.J. Maloney)
Subject: My Haunted House Story
Date: 07 Sep 92 04:40:57 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Windows/DOS Users Ed Group
Summary: long

The following is a series of events between December 1969 and March
1970 in Seattle. I should warn you right now that it does not a climax,
it just ends. Not dramatic, but you have my word that it's true, to the
best of my knowledge.

I and four college friends (three other men and a woman) moved into a
five bedroom house near Green Lake, a few miles west and north of the
University of Washington. The house was completely ordinary, in what
was then a blue-collar neighborhood, the victim of one or two rather
insensitive remodels.

I would be less than honest if I didn't tell that we and our many
friends did a lot of drugs in that house -- grass, acid, peyote,
mushrooms, and so forth, the usual psychotropics of the day. So maybe
everything we experienced was just drugs. Not that I believe that, but
it is always possible, I suppose.

The first event was one evening in December, shortly after we had moved
in. All five of us had been on campus and we drove up to the front of
the house in Ben's 57 Chrysler 4-door hardtop. The house was situated
well above the street level (a garage was dug into the retaining wall).
It was twilight (4:30 pm at that time of the year). As we got out of
the car, we saw all the house lights flash on and off at once, quickly.
We heard what might have been a woman scream. We dashed up the stairs
and got the front door open; it was locked, but we assumed there was an
intruder or intruders in the house. We search it systematically and
found nothing, no one. All the doors and windows were secured from the
inside.

A few days later, we were coming home in a group again.  Ronny, our
female housemate, put her key in the front door latch. She said that
when she pushed in on the handle, she felt someone push back, as if to
keep her out. I was standing right behind her, and her motions seemed
to accord with the story. The pressure on the inside let up in a moment
and the door opened to an empty house.

In January, we guys came home to find Ronny sitting on the front stoop.
She said that she would never be alone in that house again. She had
been ironing some clothes downstairs and heard voices and footsteps
upstairs. She went up there to investigate and as soon as she was on
the second floor she started hearing the same noises on the main floor.
(There were front and back stairs inside the house, but they came
together halfway up.) That's when she stepped outside and waited two
hours for us to escort her back into the house.

Two of the guys, Ben and Ron, used to wear each other's clothes and
they both liked sweaters a lot. They had gotten several of these
sweaters back from the dry cleaner and had stashed them in a downstairs
linen closet. I saw them do it, in fact. One day a little later, one of
them complained that all the sweaters were missing. Neither had worn
any at that point. I was too big for them, and neither Ronny nor our
other housemate Dennis had ever shown any interest in them.

A few days later, still in January, I came home on a Friday late in the
afternoon, tossed my poetry notebook into a corner cabinet and threw
myself into cleaning the house for a party. By Monday, I was looking
for the notebook. I had a workshop on Tuesday and needed to make copies
of some new poems. I couldn't find it, even though I distinctly
remembered where I had put it Friday. Most of the poems in that
notebook existed only as original typescripts and were unrecoverable.

Shortly, thereafter some more of Ben's and Ron's clothes disappeared,
jeans this time, and blue workshirts. Also, Ronny had been studying in
bed, working with a dictionary.  She got sleepy and put the dictionary
on the floor by her bed. When she got up in the morning, she couldn't
find her dictionary.

At this point, we began seriously discussing the possibility the house
was haunted -- whatever that means. Talking it over with a friend from
Japan, where the Shinto priests are said to be skilled in exorcism, she
suggested that we put out some items and invite the spirit to select
something as a way of providing a clue to its identity and its wishes.
We never actually did this, but we did take to addressing the spirit,
if that's what it was, as if it were another housemate (but not in
front of guests).

I should mention here that only four of the five housemates were
willing to entertain the idea of a ghost. Dennis had a wonderful time
laughing at us and ridiculing the idea. He was convinced that someone
was playing an elaborate, practical joke on the rest of us.

In February while we discussing our strategy, the situation changed.
One morning a scream came out of Ronny's bedroom. I rushed across the
hall and burst in. What I found was my housemate sitting bolt upright
in bed and pointing at her dictionary which lay at the foot of the bed.
Shortly, thereafter, the sweaters, shirts, and jeans were found exactly
where they should have been all along. The only thing that was never
recovered was my poetry notebook. Virtually, the entire first year of
my life as a poet was lost.

By March, there had been no new episodes for ten days or so, and there
were none thereafter, even though I continued to live in the house for
two years and through a succession of housemates.

I do think the house was haunted. I think the ghost was male,
college-connected, and perhaps a writer in life. I think it merely
become comfortable with our presence. I don't know, and I say this
seriously and jokingly, whether it kept the poems because they were so
good or so bad. My poetry changed directions during this period
however, and became the foundation for the kind of poems I continue to
write today.

Dennis refused, for as long as I continued to know him, to acknowledge
the incidents as anything but a hoax.

That's my story.

-- 
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
	"Well, I'm a little muddled." -- Glinda