Our Haunted House

I met Lew on a Friday the 13th. I was on my way to the City Cemetery on Broadway to take a “Ghost Tour” with a forgotten psychic. He was on the porch petting a black cat.

I stopped in my tracks, looked up the stairs and blurted “Your cat looks exactly like my cat!”.

And so began the romance now entering it’s 9th year.

It’s a safe bet to say with a beginning like that the supernatural was destined to play a large part in our relationship. And it was within weeks of moving in that Lew was convinced his house was haunted. I was appointed exorcism woman, and the two of us went through the house, me with sage in hand, smudging and telling anyone hanging around to please exit the house, he following, pointing out places of intrigue. I knew he was for real when he asked me to pay particular attention to the area under the basement stairs (one of those dark, cobwebby spaces I know to be frequented by disgusting spiders, some of which are highly poisonous… I don’t have to mention names here).

We were pretty sure we knew whom the ghost was, the former owner, Mrs. Hicks, who lived here for about 50 years. She was a retired schoolteacher and widowed. She raised two sons in this house. She was in her mid-eighties when she fell down the back steps going to the basement. The poor thing lay down there for 3 days before her son discovered her. From the hospital she went into a nursing home where she passed away a few months later. Her son put the house on the market and Lew bought it.

Lew was always saying, “I never feel alone. I feel like someone’s always watching me”.

Lew wasn’t just having a case of nerves, he was no stranger to living by himself, he knows what it feels like to be by oneself in one’s abode and he was not feeling the aloneness. He said the smudging got rid of pockets of negative energy, but he could still feel a presence in the house.

When my son, Travis, was running cable through the basement he said he had the same feeling. “I’m always turning around to see who’s behind me, and no one is there.” He thought the basement was just plain creepy.

When I moved into the house I didn’t particularly feel any particular presence, but then again I never feel alone anywhere I live, but just like I can never go over Donner Summit without thinking of trudging through 12 foot snowdrifts with rags tied around my feet, I could never go downstairs without thinking/picturing Mrs. Hicks sprawled at the bottom, alone and hurt, for three days.

I painted those back stairs and the walls bright colors. (The steps were formerly painted battleship gray, the walls a green and a sickly yellow color.) It brightened up considerably with my peach-blue-yellow and lavender color scheme. I hung a couple of Harry Fonseca paintings and the rest of my collection of Native American pictures on the walls. One of the neighbors told me Mrs. Hicks had been very fond of Native Americans and I kind of did it for her, and kind of did it because I didn’t know where else to put my Indian art.

My daughter, Peggy, was here one morning talking to her husband Dave on the phone in the hallway when I heard her abruptly tell him she had to go. She put the phone down and went directly to sit down on the couch. I asked her what was wrong, thinking she was mad at something Dave said.

“My back” she said, “it’s better now, but for a moment it hurt so bad I thought I was going to pass out.” Then she asked, “The lady who used to live here, did you say she fell down some stairs? Was it those stairs?”

I told her those were indeed the stairs, and she said for a moment it felt like she had a broken back. Peggy was pretty sure it had to do with the accident. That incident somehow seemed to forge a connection between Mrs. Hicks and Peggy.

Peggy said Mrs. Hicks “told her” she’d seen me around the mid-town area and liked me. She was happy that I was living in her former house. Peggy also said Mrs. Hicks enjoyed accompanying me on some of my daily rounds either to the Indian Museum, the Fort, the Governor’s Mansion or to EarthTrek up in Coloma where I led student tours for EducationalField Studies!

Mrs. Hicks enjoyed the Indian Museum, communing with the spirits there, disliked the Fort because of some of the spirits there, and wasn’t too sure how she felt about the Old Governor’s Mansion. Some days were pleasant, other days she encountered spirits she didn’t care for. She especially enjoyed the trips to Coloma. (This was about the time Doug Mooney told me I traveled with a host of spirits, Native Americans. Maybe he didn’t notice Mrs. Hicks in the crowd or she was part Native American.)

Now Peggy didn’t tell me all this that morning, it would come out here and there in conversations. Peggy and I usually talk every day on the phone, and apparently it didn’t matter where she was, she could pick up on Mrs. Hicks and relay simple bits of information no matter if she was here or not.

Now remember, Mrs. Hicks had been a schoolteacher, so her hanging out with me made sense. I was like a daily field trip. Of course I asked for “proof”, and I vividly remember one day her telling Peggy that the orange flowers she’d planted on the alley side of the front yard were blooming. I walked outside with the phone in my hand and guess what? The orange Lilies were blooming right where she said they would be. So after a few of those kinds of confirmations I just accepted the information I was receiving. About a year later Peggy said Mrs. Hicks had decided to re-incarnate. A girl, in the Placerville area, someone she ran across when she was with me on an overnight to Coloma.

Lew said he didn’t feel her presence here after that. Like I said, I couldn’t tell, one less spirit around me really didn’t seem to register. But Travis's wife, Becky, still hated to be here alone. She always comes over to water and tend the cat when we’re on vacation and she says;

“When I’m downstairs I can hear people upstairs, and when I’m upstairs I can hear people downstairs.” She did not find it amusing.

She was especially freaked one evening when she needed to get downstairs and was positive someone was standing halfway down the stairs in the dark. To Becky’s immense relief, when she turned on the light, the stairwell was empty. She got the impression it was a man, dressed in a hat and coat.

When Ranger Joann retired ,and took all her pictures out of our office at the State Indian Museum I decided to bring all my Indian pictures in and hang them over my desk. I really don’t do Native American art much anymore, and I wanted to put some of my other cards on the stairway walls.

When I got them all down I said out loud, and I don’t know why,” I don’t care who likes Indian pictures, I’m taking them down.”

No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I heard a crash from the dining room. I hurried in there to find one of our porcelain masks shattered on the floor. It had been sitting on the ledge above the window. Nothing else was on the floor. The ledge is wide. There was no earthquake. It had been a gift from Peggy. Lew has a smaller one just like it. It was still sitting on the ledge. Go figure.

“The pictures are going to the Indian Museum,” I said out loud, “you can go visit them there.” I didn't want anything else of mine smashed.

I thought once the remodel was finished downstairs the creepiness associated with the basement would be gone. But my children all assured me that whatever was down there before was still down there.

There was another story associated with this house. Our neighbors said that the original owners of this house (1912) had either a retarded or a mentally ill son. The story was they kept him locked up in the south side of the basement. That side had a chicken-wire barrier nailed to the studs, and a window that looked into the dirt area from the north side of the wall, which runs down the middle length of this house. The window and the chicken wire supported the story and because that was what people did with their less than socially acceptable relatives in those days. They locked them up in attics and basements.

So, if I’ve heard her once on the Montel Show, I’ve heard Sylvia Brown dozens of times telling people that to rid their house of ghosts all they have to do is tell the ghost to go to the light. "Tell them it’s your house now and it is time for them to move on". I decided to experiment.

One night I went downstairs and deliberately kept the lights off in the family room. It was pretty dark, but not enough so I couldn’t see at all. I went to the far end of the family room, sat down in a chair, and just waited to see how I felt. It was creepy in there. I noticed I had chills all up and down my body.

Buddy (dog) and Mia (cat) followed me. Buddy sat in the laundry room looking at me as if to ask why I was just sitting in there and did I really want him to come sit next to me. The cat prowled around for a few moments, then took a very circuitous route to me, via the large box still propped against the wall, slinking behind it and creeping up to me.

I didn’t call them, I just waited to see what they would do. All the time I had those chills running up and down my body. Buddy finally came into the family room, but I could tell he wasn’t sure it was what he wanted to do.

I got up and went into the dark, unfinished side of the basement and I spoke to the spirit who was giving me those chills. I told “him” he was free to leave. He was no longer a prisoner. I pictured a door of white light and told him to go to the light. I told him to go home to God, go to the spirit world, repeated he was free to leave. I did this for a few minutes until I no longer had the chills.

The next night I repeated the same scene. Left the lights off, went into the family room, sat down and waited. No chills. Buddy and Mia bounced in right behind me. Mia didn’t creep, she walked around the box and came right over to me. Buddy was playing, prancing around and acting all pleased to be there. The space felt clean, fresh, and free of anything except us.

I have since been down there alone (except for Buddy and Mia) on many an evening, painting furniture, watching t.v., doing laundry, and it always feels perfectly normal. I think, at last, we have the place to ourselves! (more or less)