Rockford, Illinois, 1966

The phone rang and Mom answered it. She smiled at whoever was calling, and turning, looked toward the back of the house.

“Why?” she asked into the phone. Picking it up, she stretched the cord into the dining room until she was able to see Mrs. Fiorenza standing at her kitchen window in the house next door. Mom jerked her head toward the back of the house again, and her brows knit together. “Okay,” she said with hesitance.

A chill ran up my spine as she set the phone on the floor and hurried to the kitchen. Sniffing the air for something burning and coming up with nothing, I jumped from the chair to follow.

“Stay here,” she commanded.

Who me? You’re not leaving me here alone. Not with that expression on your face. We went to the window at the end of the long kitchen to look out at the back yard. Someone was swinging on the swing set – high and low, back and forth, apparently having a grand old time.

It just wasn’t someone we could see.

* * * * * It was exactly the style of house you would expect to be haunted: an old two-story with five bedrooms, a creepy attic, and a basement that hid doors even adults balked at opening. From the upper floor, two windows next to each other were like eyes watching the quiet neighborhood street. The wallpaper peeled; floors, doors, and stairs creaked. It smelled like dust and old people. The yard was a deep jungle of weeds and thickets. I was nine the year my family moved into Poltergeist Central, and things were strange right from the start.We were a family of five, and I was the overlooked middle child. Wait, that’s a different story. We were a typical second family consisting of mom, step-dad, a bossy older sister, and then me, the bespectacled bookworm; followed by a rosy-cheeked cherub-faced toddling baby sister with new Bugs Bunny teeth. A few weeks after we watched the swing, Bugs let out a blood-curdling scream.

Mom and Dad raced up the stairs. Hovering on the landing, I was afraid to go up, afraid to stay down. Standing with my back to the wall, looking up to see what was happening up there, glancing down to watch my own back, I heard their voices.

“What happened?” my mother yelled. Bugs was in Bossy’s room, crying. The room with the door leading to the attic.

Bossy shrugged as she crossed the hall at the top of the stairs. “I don’t know. I went to turn the water on.” She was supposed to give Bugs a bath.

“What is it, honey?” I knew from the tone of her voice that Mom was asking Bugs, and that she would be frantically checking for injuries or bleeding. Bugs whimpered.

“What?” Then, a pause. “What? This?” Bugs wailed again. The door was partially open, and I saw her face through the gap. Her eyes were terrified and tears dripped from them as she looked up at the scarecrow that hung on the back of Bossy’s door.

“Watch her,” Mom said. A couple seconds later, Dad tromped down the stairs carrying the stuffed scarecrow Mom had knitted while she was expecting Bugs. Bugs had never taken to it.

I suppose they kept it for sentimental reasons, moving it to the wall over the basement stairs. It creeped me out, like eyes watching, like a silent voice warning Keep Out! Trespassers Die!

I never liked going down those stairs in the first place. They were only flat boards nailed to a naked frame. Anyone could be hiding under there to reach through and grab my ankles as I descended. Once, while I was down there, the lights went off. It was always cold and made the hair on my arms and neck stand up. Every time I put my foot on that bottom step to go back up, a chill spread like hands across my shoulders, and I’d race up them as fast as I could. I tried never to go down there alone.

* * * * * I saw them following me. I knew they were there. They stayed a respectful distance behind. I must have been a spectral sight in my long white nightgown when they took up chase as I padded barefoot down the stairs to the foyer in the middle of the night. I turned lights on as I went: the one in the foyer, the one in the living room, then the dining room, and finally the kitchen.Pulling a chair to the counter, I climbed up and stood on it, opening the door to the cabinet above. The ceilings were ten feet high, and the cabinets were a monstrosity, a towering monument to architecture standing in the corner, reaching all the way to the top. I was already halfway there; a well placed foot on a shelf, then another, and I was able to reach the cut-glass punchbowl Mom kept at the back of the top shelf, and climb down with it. Instead of rushing toward me in case I fell, Mom and Bossy stood back with their mouths hanging open.

My hands were full, so I didn’t turn out the lights on my way through the house and back up the stairs. I turned on the bathroom light when I went in. Placing the punchbowl in the old clawfoot tub, I turned the water on, then sat on the side and put my feet in it.

“That’s not a haunting, that’s just sleepwalking,” you scoff. Maybe. Except that I had never done it before, and have never done it again in the forty years since. I remember it as clearly as yesterday, and still have no clue why I did it.

* * * * * It was an archetypal Hollywood haunting. Chairs rocked on their own, furniture moved, things disappeared and reappeared at random. I was in the kitchen with Mom when Bossy took Bugs out to play on the swing. Sitting at the table with a cookbook, I watched through the window. It was a tall window, the old wooden sash kind that were always getting stuck, or that some previous homeowner had painted shut. We were lucky; ours had screens and worked just fine.Mom pulled drawers open from the leaning tower in the corner, jangling metal as she tore through them, pulling items out, tossing them back in, going on to the next drawer.

“Have you seen my big knife?” She turned frustrated eyes to me. I shook my head. “Well, it didn’t just grow legs and walk off,” she said. “Who washed dishes last night?”

Ha! My eyes darted to the guilty party outside. Mom went to the window and leaned down with her hands on the sill. “Bossy! What did you do with my big knife?”

It happened faster than a blink. The window slammed shut. My mother turned white. She couldn’t even yell. Her hands were inside the window frame; her fingers were outside. The part where the window landed looked flat as a pancake. I struggled to open it; maybe it was so difficult because I was a kid, and Mom was in the way of my getting a good hold on it.

Luckily, it looked worse than it was. Easy for her to say, Mom wants you to know. God rest her soul. Tell them where the knife was. The knife turned up in the middle of the table, in plain sight.

The door leading to the basement was right next to that window. There were two steps down to a landing where another door led outside, then a turn at the flight that descended into those dank rooms underground. The door separating the kitchen from that hole to hell stayed open because we were always running in and out of the backyard. We’d duck past the stairs, not looking; pretending the dark gaping maw and whatever secrets it held weren’t there.

Almost two, Bugs was steady on her feet. One second she stood at the window, her bright eyes peeking over the sill like sunrise; the next, she was crying at the bottom of the basement stairs, her little bunny teeth stuck through her bottom lip.

Crying in her daddy’s arms as he carried her up, she turned and pointed at the scarecrow, fear in her eyes, and screamed. Mom took the little doll to the barrel out back and burned it immediately. But the strange happenings didn’t stop.

It was Christmas week. Nanna arrived on a train from Chicago. It was my favorite time of year, being a kid and all. We waited with anticipation for her to make the traditional fudge because no one else did it as well. Mom made and decorated a thousand cookies. There was snow on the ground, and all kinds of festive holiday specials on TV. Best of all, Nanna and I stayed up after everyone else went to bed and watched the late movie, the late late movie, and sometimes the very early movie. Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, and The Bells of St. Mary’s had kept us up one night, and on this one, we’d watched back-to-back Bing in White Christmas and Holiday Inn, followed by Cary Grant in The Bishop’s Wife. I was curled up beside Nanna, and she patted my leg as the credits began to roll. We got up, and I turned off the TV, which required walking over to it in those days. Nanna turned out the light. In the tiny rotunda at the top of the stairs, Nanna went right, to Bossy’s room. I went left, to mine. Already in my pajamas (they might have had little feet in them, I’m not sure), I was immediately snug and warm under the covers in the quiet house. Until I heard a strange noise and raised my head to listen. It came from just outside my door. It sounded as if someone was sawing through wood, and it wasn’t Dad snoring. For some reason, I thought of the wooden chair that sat outside the bathroom door, next to my room.

“Dee Dee,” Nanna called, because that was her pet name for me, “what are you doing?”

“It’s not me,” I called back. “I thought it was you.”

We met in the tiny rotunda. The noise persisted. I examined the wooden chair. “It sounds like someone sawing wood,” I said.

Nanna raised her head and tilted it. “It’s not wood. It’s water.” I turned around and we flipped on the light and went into the bathroom. We had an original pedestal sink with real antique faucets – hot water came from one and cold water came from the other, and both were slowly turning as we watched, squeaking like rusty hand pumps. The water spraying hard from them had almost filled the bowl. I wish I could remember which of us found the courage to turn them off.

The last incident I recall wasn’t one I witnessed. I overheard Mom on the phone telling someone about it.

“We were in bed,” she said, and I pictured her and Dad in the big king-size bed in the room across the little rotunda from the stairs. “They came up the stairs … these little green lights. Faint green spots of light. I shook Bill and made him look. They came in and floated at the end of the bed … and then they went through the wall.”

I don’t remember hearing Mom and Dad discuss moving away. I don’t recall the words realtor or for sale or mortgage or equity ever being mentioned. We left late one night with some clothes stuffed in the trunk and some more piled nearly window high on the back seat. Bugs’ new baby sister slept in a wicker laundry basket wedged down in the pile, and Bugs laid on top of it like the Princess and the Pea. We drove far away, and we never drove back.