by Carol Murphy
“Something is strange,” my father grumbled, pointing his smoldering cigarette at our house through the window of the family’s yellow Ed Dorado. Sinewy ghost soldiers of drifting smoke infiltrated the long, twisted branches of a nearby weeping willow skirting the driveway, then dispersed across the narrow bridge that crossed the front creek. On the other side, the silent street veered to the right where every house had its own unique bridge, secluding every neighbor. To the left was another street, always a route away. My father scanned our extensive lawn, bushes and trees as dusk darkened murky shadows along the house’s columned veranda.
“What?” My mother stared scornfully at him. The three of us were parked in the driveway, the silver V on the 1959 Cadillac’s hood pointed ahead, an obvious indication of escape.
My parents often waited in a car for my younger sister Paula, late every time retrieving some item. Because of my father’s car obsession, the automobile changed yearly, but my sister’s behavior never did.
“Where the hell is she?” He sighed loudly, briefly held the cigarette out the window again, then flicked ashes onto the driveway. “Paula!”
Tension filled the car. “Don’t yell, Richard. The neighbors will hear. You know how she is. Shouting won’t help.” His opinions never did matter, especially when they contradicted hers.
I turned to examine the sharp lines of the house and thought his comment was about the structure. “What would you change, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, Karen. Something isn’t right.” He looked at my mother and shrugged his shoulders.
“Richard, it cost a fortune renovating this place. Stop criticizing!” She flipped her ashes out and set her face obstinately.
“Your father paid the fortune. We have to pay him back.” Bickering again, and it started with the house.
Paula finally opened the door and giddily jumped in carrying a tiny stuffed frog. Was she late intentionally?
I was in junior high, and my sister was in elementary school when our parents bought a house on the most sought-after street in the valley, aptly named Tanglewood, where every house on our side of the street hid behind a bridge and collection of vegetation. When the four of us first drove over that slightly unsteady bridge, there were masses of high weeds, wildly overgrown trees, a house with fractured paint, gutters askew, and small irregular rooms, all creating a sort of dim dreariness.
My mother was enchanted back then.
“This is remarkable.” My mother leaned forward and stared out the windshield. “Think what we can do with it!”
“Look!” squealed Paula, pointing her finger at a rat running along the porch.
My father only sighed and did what he regularly did. Said nothing.
I only thought about the work that needed to be done.
To make the place livable, the property had to be altered, repaired, and redesigned, but my mother insisted it would eventually be wonderful with lots of room for everyone. Maybe there could be a pool. It was right next door to her parents, so it had to be perfect. She was not a person people argued with. She once chained herself to a tall pole that held the family named business sign along a busy street, refusing to take it down even after the city issued an order to do so. Embarrassed officials relented after her picture was published in the local newspaper. If government mandates could not control my mother, my mild father was useless, so, over time my father had simply surrendered.
They bought the house.
Inside walls were knocked down and rearranged, a back porch became part of an immense kitchen with contemporary appliances, tiny closets were expanded, and a garage remodeled into a family room that necessitated the addition of a three-car garage and storage area. Windows and doors were replaced, and my parents’ bedroom was transformed from a dull cubicle into a vast master suite. A new roof was put on, luxurious carpeting was installed, and textured paint was used throughout. Overgrown vegetation was either cut or removed, with the leftover landscaping revealing burrows and tunnels of critters used to doing what they wanted. Exterminators swept in and trapped so many it looked as if we were raising them.
Eventually the house appeared pleasant on the outside, although the remodel never went smoothly. Each project needed some repair, had to be ripped out or redone. The contractor took a level to the flooring and stated that the house was slightly off but that changes would fix it. It was exhausting, time consuming and infuriating, especially because by that time, we were living in the middle of it. Several workers were fired and two were injured, one almost losing an eye. It was almost unbearable.
While the lesser alterations were still going on, my father’s drinking noticeably increased, maybe joining my grandfather who was known throughout town as a drinker. Occasionally he’d barge through the fence with a shotgun to “get the burglars”. During those incidents, my sister and I would be stashed in the laundry room. It had an opaque window along the driveway behind the house. We could see the twirling police cruiser lights, hear muffled demanding voices, and vaguely watch my grandfather being guided into a squad car by his friend, the police captain. The next morning hung over and remorseful, he’d come over to apologize.
“Daddy, I know you didn’t mean to frighten the girls,” my mother soothingly told him. Then life would anxiously go on, until it happened again.
My father drank all day and then just went to sleep on the couch, conveniently unavailable to argue with my mother. She watched TV alone after making dinner and cleaning up. We girls put ourselves to bed.
We lived in a normalized irregularity. No one spoke about them, but it was about this time when the strange noises began.
Moving swooshes and patters wandered in the attic and echoed through the walls. At night, little taps would start in the kitchen, getting louder as they skittered down the hallway and seeped under the bedroom floors. Swiftly moving screeches and scratches moved in and out of rooms during the day, quieting when anyone tried to find their source. The noises increased when the workers took a break. We thought they would go away when the construction stopped. They didn’t.
“It’s got to be the old pipes,” announced the foreman.
“Has the plumber looked at the plumbing?” My mother had taken the day off just to supervise this contractor who she had come to mistrust. The remodel was taking far too long and costing twice what had been originally budgeted.
She was holding on to my sister’s hand, unaware that her grip was getting tight until my sister moaned, “Mom, let go!” and shook free. It was summer, so my sister and I went everywhere with her looking at items for the house. We had just gotten back from one such excursion and my mother was not in the mood to be nice.
“Yes,” he insisted in a slightly louder tone, “And he couldn’t find a thing wrong.” The man obviously did not like my mother either.
But this response did not bother my mother. Her father was a plastering contractor and she had learned to drive in a cement truck. “Well, you will just have to look till you find it.” She squared her shoulders, looked him in the eyes and took a puff of her cigarette.
But the sound problem was never really solved; it just faded for a while.
The heating was another issue. The house never seemed to get warm, even in the summer, and the family room was especially difficult to heat.
The family room had originally been the garage and was separated from the house by a small patio. A walkway led from the kitchen down outside stairs, through a door into a small storage room with a half bath, then into the family room itself. My father called it the “rumpus room”, a name I never understood until I looked it up. Rumpus means disturbance. It was always cold. Years later when my now husband slept there once, he said, “Something is weird out there.” He refused to stay over again.
The bridge over the small creek in the front was another oddity. One day it collapsed from the weight of a lumber truck, pinning the driver underneath for hours until heavy moving equipment arrived. He ended up just getting a few nicks, but the accident necessitated a complete stop to any construction for weeks, not to mention that daily we had to park out in the street, walk down the creek embankment, cross the stream, and climb up to the house.
These disasters should have been a foreshadowing, but each was determined to be an expected building problem.
Eventually my parents put in a pool outside the sliding glass doors of the rumpus room, an expense my mother opposed but my grandfather insisted for me and my sister. Us kids were thrilled, but the pool often seemed queerly lopsided, made of a plastic lining over sand which might collapse in different places, relentlessly requiring the water to be drained so the sand could be reshaped.
When the workmen finally finished, the sounds got louder. My father went crazy trying to find out where they came from. He investigated the pipes again, tore out another wall, and crawled several times under the house. He found that rats had created a trail running from the front creek, under the house, and out to the back creek. So, one weekend he began positioning himself in the master bedroom window with a long-barreled pellet gun.
This went on for weeks.
“I hate rats!” He sounded ominous, sticking the barrel out of the window as he crouched down, his finger on the trigger, squeezing his left eye shut so the right eye could look down the sight while he moved his upper body back and forth. He practiced this way for days, looking like a sniper.
They were sewer rats with long tails and grey hairy bodies larger than a family cat. The blasts were deafening. The first ones made the neighbors call the police, but after they found out what my dad was doing, they encouraged him. Rats were everywhere.
My father shot eight, then later put huge traps under the house, traps that enticed them to enter for food, where they were held for days before they died of dehydration. Sometimes the smell came up through the heating vents, but eventually the noises seemed to grow fainter. Then another, more insistent noise took their place. This one was first noticed by my mother.
My mother was delighted she now lived next door to her parents. The gate in the fence between the houses was exciting for my sister and me. We would play hide and seek between the two yards or would sneak over to get home baked cookies and candy from my grandmother, things my mother rarely made.
But the opening eventually seemed to allow more awfulness.
About a year after we moved in, my grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We visited and brought her food through that gate. She became frail and lost her hair, but smiled when she saw me, trying to appear unscathed in a turban. Her nasty toy Pomeranian, Trinket, became aggressive. Interestingly, my mother lost her hair right along with my grandmother and it never did grow back. Three months later grandma died.
After that, my grandfather would come over every morning, through the gate, open the back door and walk down the long hallway. My mother would hear him and say, “I’m back here, Daddy.”
It became a ritual that took a dark turn.
One day my mother was sitting in her dressing room, putting on makeup when she heard the back door open, footsteps echo in the kitchen, through the living room and down the hallway. As always, she yelled out, “I’m in here, daddy.” But when he didn’t appear, she went out to the hallway to look. There was no one there. She called his house and he answered. “Daddy, did you come over just now?”
“No, I haven’t been out all morning.”
Later she told me it made her body tingle to even think about it. “Who was it, then?” she asked me, as if at 13 somehow, I would know. She sat for a long time at the kitchen table, smoking, drinking coffee and staring out the window.
It happened several times.
There was an unending series of questionable happenings. Clothes went missing on the clothesline, the back door would be open, and items would disappear. The house felt like it was getting stranger, my parents fought constantly, and my sister was oddly distracted. My family and home were upended and often I was left to myself, broodingly trying to make sense of it all, although I was never really frightened until the incident in the hallway.
My mother had gone to fix lunch for my grandfather. Both were still grieving, and I was doing my best to help by folding laundry. I was putting the towels away in a hallway closet and just like the story my mother told, I heard the back door open, steps came through the kitchen, down the hall and stop near my parent’s bathroom. Silence followed.
“Karen,” a voice called.
“In here, mom.”
Further away the voice called again. “Karen.”
Suddenly I realized that I did not recognize the voice. It definitely did not belong to my mother. A creeping sensation started in my arms and I began to shake. I took off running down the hall, through the back door, through the gate, and into my grandfather’s house. I did not stop until I was in the same room with my mother and grandfather.
“What’s the matter?” My mother asked startled.
“Someone called my name. There were steps down the hallway.” I was clearly rattled.
“I know,” my mother whispered, took my hand and then explained to my grandfather what had been happening.
He took a pipe out of his mouth and laughed. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve seen a lot of strange things. Why, my mother could make a table walk!” This was a new story making everything creepier. He winked, and said that it sounded weird, but it was true. “Folks came from all over to see her do it. One time I was in the room and that table walked clear over to the door.”
But nothing was funny anymore. Someone or something I couldn’t see had walked into the house and called my name. The house would never be the same.
But the really terrifying stuff started after my sister and I used the Ouija board we found in one of the hallway closets. I don’t know why it was there at all since the house had been so ripped up in the remodel. But we found it and decided to wait till a bossy neighbor kid was enticed over and made to try it out. When she came, we ushered her into my parent’s bedroom and placed the board on my parent’s bed with the piece used for pointing, telling her there were “spirits” in the house.
It didn’t help that we all watched that creepy stuff on TV then, programs like “One Step Beyond”, “The Outer Limits”, and all the others that scared us silly.
We put our fingers on the wooden pointer. The first questions were stupid. My sister asked if her eyes were blue, and I asked if mine were brown. But then we asked if anyone else was there and it moved to yes.
“You did it!” I accused the neighbor kid.
“No, you did!” she shot back, eying me accusingly. She was the tomboy of the neighborhood and never walked away from a fight.
“Let’s ask it to tell us who it is.” My sister was more practical. So, we all put our hands on the thing, and she asked, “Who are you?”
It started slowly but then spelled out the letters A L E X, Alex. “Does anyone know anybody named Alex?” she asked. We were silent. “Well, I guess it’s someone we don’t know named Alex.” Paula paused and then asked, “Where do you come from?” And that damned thing spelled out the words San Francisco. This really scared us, so we all looked at each other and just started putting the board away silently.
But for days we talked about it every chance we got, on the way to school, on the way home, at recess, during lunch. Other kids wanted the grisly details and wanted to come over to meet Alex. And so, Alex began to dominate our conversations, friendships and even our dreams. We avoided playing with it for awhile, but then our friend Sarah had a birthday and we thought it might be fun to ask it questions about that person, so we got it out again. And that was the last time.
Sarah was a delicately pale girl who looked scared immediately, but we convinced her that it was just a game, and it could tell her future, especially on her birthday. With all the peer pressure, she reluctantly agreed to try it. My mother was doing paperwork in the kitchen, so we got out the board and put it on her bed like we had the first time and immediately started asking for Alex. The pointer seemed very strong, moving around almost by itself. We asked it mostly juvenile things like what clothes we were wearing, and we were laughing even though it was answering correctly. Then Sarah, who was really getting into it, asked about her dad and it moved to the words “lose job”. That stopped her cold.
“I don’t like this thing,” she said. “I want to quit.” And she stood up looking even paler.
“Hey, it’s only a game.” My sister tried to coax her back.
“I don’t care. My dad has gone through a lot of jobs and if he loses this one, we can’t stay in our house.” She looked at us for a long time. “How did you guys know that?” She was distraught.
“Sarah,” I said gently. “We didn’t know that. How could we?”
But Sarah stared at the board and shivered. “This is a bad game. If I were you, I’d throw the horrible thing away.” And she backed out, turned, and walked down the hallway.
My feet felt tingly. “I think she’s right,” I said aloud to everyone standing around the bed in utter disbelief.
“Oh, you guys are crazy!” said my sister.
“Yeh,” said the tomboy neighbor. Paula and I will fuss around with it for awhile.”
The others, with me following, walked down the hallway and to make them feel better, I handed out chocolate chip cookies, the only ones my mother had made since grandma died.
When they left, I thought I’d watch some television.
About twenty minutes later, my sister yelled, “We’re still in here.” Then two minutes after that, “If you want to come in, come in, but don’t stand out there!”
I finally got up and walked down the hallway.
“Finally!” the tomboy announced. “How long have you been out there?”
“Out where? I have been in the living room watching tv.”
“Come on,” my sister said eyeing me. “You walked down the hallway and then just stood outside. We could hear your breathing.”
“I told you, I was watching tv.”
“Then who was out in the hallway?” She got up and came to stare in my face.
I just looked at her. We both turned to look down the long hallway.
Then we looked at the Ouija board.
Sarah’s father did lose his job. Her family sold their house and moved away. I went into high school, and my sister into junior high. Teenage stuff began occupying our time and minds.
Now that I look back, I see other odd incidences that seemed unrelated at the time. A small fire started in the rumpus room and some strange people were seen just standing on the bridge staring at the house. Once I spotted a greyish man walking around by the pool and told my mother. We went out to look, but there was no one.
She whispered to me, “I bet it’s that Alex.”
I starred abruptly at her. Apparently, she knew about the Ouija.
My grandfather married a woman everyone hated. When he died, she stole all my grandmother’s collected treasures. My mother brought a lawsuit to get her mother’s things. It never went anywhere.
Somebody put a lock on the gate.
My sister and I went to college, got married, my parents finally sold the house and we all eventually moved away. Nevertheless, the house remained an enigma. Periodically I would think about it, sometimes even having dreams with nebulously disturbing images, but the years became busy with my own two kids.
Finally, when they were older, I took them on a short trip to see the town where I grew up which included, of course, Tanglewood.
We could only drive by, parking in the street to gaze through the trees, and there it sat looking almost exactly the same, a bridge length away.
“It doesn’t look scary,” announced my fifteen-year-old son, staring from the car window.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I answered, noticing that the paint color seemed slightly darker, weeds were everywhere, the weeping willow had taken over again, and a rat sat on the bridge.
“That’s what really frightening things want you to think,” my ten-year-old daughter whispered.
I started up the engine and drove away. I have never been back.
Carol Murphy, MA, has written essays, interviews, stories and poems about children, language development, learning disabilities, the therapeutic and almost mystical influence of animals, and the many ways language, or a lack of it, colors life’s experiences while often emphasizing themes of mystery and the unexplainable. Some of her many stories were Likely Story, published by www.specialeducationadvisor.com, Auricle published in Good Dogs Doing Good, and Whiffs by Reddashboard Press. Her first book, Slits, came out in 2017 and she is currently working on another book while publishing stories. She finds daily inspiration for writing through her experiences with the complexities of communication and the many ways lives can go awry, or be set straight, simply by a precise word at a pivotal moment. A favorite quote is “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein). Her website is www.carolmurphy.org.