In honor of Halloween this year, I'm going to tell a ghost story. However, this ghost story is true and happened to me.
The house I spent my formative years in was built in 1913 (pictured above). It was a small three bedroom, two bath craftsman style house on a very large lot on the in North Tacoma, Washington. The previous owner was an elderly woman who had been Clarence's second wife. Clarence's first wife, Ila, had died soon after they completely and extensively renovated the house in the 60's, and he had eventually remarried after quite a few years. As it turns out, Ila was very attached to the home and she and Clarence would frequently have parties to show off their new home in the months after the completion of the project. She and Clarence had saved for years to be able to afford to renovate the house, and it was heartbreaking for her as she only got to spend a short time in her new home before her unexpected death.
Needless to say when we moved into the house in May of 1992, it was essentially unchanged from its 1960's gloryhood--shag carpet, fifties-style kitchen (yellow linoleum!) and arched doorways. My parents had bought the house because my Dad, a self-employed artist, had plans to build a large, free-standing studio in the yard behind the house. Once we moved in, he began plans and broke ground the following fall. Little did we know, that 16-month period between our move-in date and the commencement of the studio building were going to be the only quiet months we ever experienced in the home.
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Ila began bothering my Dad soon after he broke ground to begin building the studio. At first, he chalked his experiences up to being a little older when undertaking such a huge physical task--he built the studio with his own two hands and often complained about the amount of ibuprofen he had to take at night to be able to sleep. It began upstairs in their bedroom, and he would often hear a sound much like a disapproving mother saying "tsk!" in the air around him. He didn't think much of it until one night after a particularly hard day of work he lay in bed reading a book before sleep. He began feeling a little uneasy when suddenly he was shoved HARD from behind by an unseen force. It was enough to cause the waterbed to slosh violently from side to side (but not enough to wake my Mother, who sleeps like the dead).
The rear of the house, studio on the right.
Soon after that, he had another experience in the middle of the night. He awoke suddenly, and felt a presence nearby. He looked to the side of the bed and saw a very flat, dark image of a woman from the shoulders up, much like a portrait on the wall, although no detail could be seen. As he looked, the picture began moving erratically side-to-side and backwards before it disappeared into the dark. It was at this point he sought the advice of a shaman who recommended a cleansing for the house. He was to burn sage and sweep the walls of the house with cedar branches, urging the spirit to move on. After he performed the ritual, she no longer bothered him upstairs. Instead, she seemed to concentrate in the living room, dining room, and my bedroom (yay!).
The activity was always its strongest while the studio was being built, although she would strongly object to any changes made to the house at all. One afternoon, my Dad and my brother were installing a set of bookshelves in the living room when my brother left the room to retrieve some forgotten tools. As my Dad was bending over, he felt someone poke him firmly on the shoulder as if to say, "What do you think you're doing?" He immediately knew who it was, and had begun to correspond that increased activity coincided with any changes or alterations in the house. He quietly explained to her that the shelves would make the house look better, and that he was only taking care of his home.
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I had my first encounter with Ila my freshman or sophomore year of high school. At this point, I was almost completely unaware of my Father's experiences. (He had told the story of the picture once at a party when I was in middle school and it had scared us silly. But afterwards, he lied and said he'd made it up.) One night while laying in bed mere minutes after turning off my bedside lamp, I heard an incredibly loud cracking noise in the air above my bed. It was loud enough that it jolted me upright and caused my heart to start racing. I turned on my light and began looking for what could only be some type of electrical short, although no burst of light or smoke had be seen. The noise sounded like a powerful man had taken two wooden dowels of moderate length and cracked them together with his full force. A few weeks later, I would be in my bedroom when something shouted my name into my ear from a close distance. At the time, I thought maybe my ears were playing tricks on me and went in search of someone who may have called me. I was alone in the house.
Not long after this, Dad and I began comparing notes and he came clean about the fact he had suspected there was something in the house. Although she bothered he and I mostly, there was a solitary occasion later where she bothered my sister. My brother and Mom remained unaffected.
During my senior year of high school, I had the strangest experience of all. One morning, I was laying in my loft bed thinking about crawling down and having breakfast. Suddenly, I began hearing a woman's voice speaking to me in a conversational way. I could hear things being picked up and tidied and it occurred to me it sounded like someone would chat with you while they were doing housework. Her tone was pleasant and friendly, although the strange part was I couldn't understand a word she was saying. It was a language I've never heard before or since, and the oddest thing was I felt like I should be able to understand her. Although I felt no animosity, I was too terrified to peek over the edge of my bed. I was too scared of what I'd see. And so I continued to lie in bed listening while this went on for a solid 5-10 minutes. After this time, it went silent, and I got the nerve up to get out of bed--again, the house was empty. Not a thing in my room was out of place, although it was pretty messy. I took the hint and figured if Ila was communicating with me from the afterlife about the state of my bedroom, I'd better do something about it.
By this point, Ila had become a fixture in the household, although we'd always been very careful to shield my much younger sister from the stories. Ila would frequently knock things off shelves, and once while watching TV with my family she knocked a box of incense off the TV set onto the floor. We experienced cold spots and she particularly seemed to favor my Dad, standing behind him during evenings, especially if we had been talking about her. You could feel the air in a well-circumscribed area was at least 15-20 degrees cooler, and the spots would move. She would regularly touch me, both while I was in bed and otherwise (usually on the calves or knee, it always felt like a reassuring touch), and I have many memories of pulling up a pant leg to see goosebumps in a hand-shaped area on my legs. She also loved to yell at our family dog, Heike, which my Dad could hear through the intercom system he had wired into the house so he could hear the doorbell from the studio.
I consider myself lucky to have experienced such a thing and have no doubt the experiences were real. I haven't had an experience since moving out of the house permanently in 2002, nor had I ever had an experience prior to living in that North Tacoma home. I guess I can say that, although I feel fortunate to have lived through such a thing, I have no desire to experience it ever again.
