A Haunting On West 13th Street

A Haunting On West 13th Street

By Derek L. Caine

My name is Derek L. Caine. I first became aware of the haunting or rather, the ghost, of our house on West 13th Street after my maternal grandmother told me that she had seen the ghost herself. The house was a large, three-story, Victorian, half a mansion.

It had a strange history:

It was built in 1866; one year after the town was founded and declared the county seat. It was a huge house, three stories in height, originally containing about thirty rooms, ten rooms on each floor, when it was first constructed.

About twenty-years following its construction, it was divided into two even halves, both of which contained fifteen rooms, five on each floor and were moved to different locations, about five blocks apart from one another. It was relatively easy to tell where the two halves were divided because the house had gingerbread moldings under the eaves and the places where the two halves were divided had no moldings. This is why I called it a half a mansion.

My parents, maternal grandmother and I had moved into the house in early October of 1978, on my parents’ 20th wedding anniversary. I was seventeen. On their twentieth anniversary, they were spending a month-long vacation voyaging in the Caribbean Sea, touring the various islands in that vicinity.

A few days after they had left, I had placed a tumbler in which I drank my sodas on a corner of the dining room table and left it there to go into the downstairs half-bath of the house for a minute or two. When I went back to the dining room retrieve the tumbler, it was gone. I looked all over the house for it, in every room I had passed through. I looked my bedroom thinking that perhaps I had left it there, I searched the second-floor hallway leading to the stairs, I searched the living room, the dining room, the half-bath room in which I had taken my temporary stop and the kitchen, although I was sure I had left it on a corner of the dining table but to no avail. I didn’t find it.

After going up and down the stairs several times searching for the tumbler, my grandmother asked me why I was going up and down the stairs so many times.

I told her of the tumbler’s disappearance and asked her if she’d seen it and she said: “No.” It was then she told me that the house was haunted by ghost of a little girl, and that she was “playing,” with me, and that the missing tumbler would reappear in just a day or two. As bizarre as it sounds, she was right as it did, in fact, reappear a day or two later on the dining room table, right on the exact spot where I was sure I’d put it in the first place!

My grandmother also said that she had seen that ghost several times before my tumbler had disappeared.

Since she was fond of her “rheumatism medicine,” which came in a small, brown bottle, wrapped in a brown, paper bag, I believed that she’d “taken a little too much of her medicine” that day since you could smell it on her breath, even though it was only early in the afternoon.

However, a couple of nights later, between one and two o’clock in the morning, I saw what I thought was the glow from automobile headlights shining through the dining room windows and passing through the room, but I realized that no car had passed the house at that time. (There was a street that came to a “T” in front of our house and at night, you could see the headlights of cars turning from that street reflecting into the living and dining rooms as they passed by.)

The glow I had seen on this night appeared as a faded patch of fog and from my position sitting in my recliner in the living room, it appeared to come from the left side of the dining room, or the area of my Mom and Dad’s bedroom area, and slowly moved to my right, across the back of the dining room, toward the kitchen area.

As I continued to watch, it turned to its left, or away from me, and continued toward the kitchen and disappeared as it approached the back door. It was then that I realized that my grandma was definitely NOT imagining things, alcohol induced or not, for I had now seen the “ghost” myself. On the other hand, maybe it was my grandmother’s power of suggestion over me, even though I was nearly eighteen-years-old at the time and had just passed my college entrance exams.

A few nights later, a terrible thunderstorm had come through my area at approximately three o’clock in the morning. I was in bed asleep when the noise of the storm awoke me, and as I became more awake, I realized something had curled itself up in my arms and was trembling violently. I thought it was my dog, a female, French Poodle, Wire Haired Terrier mix as I could hear the tags on her collar tingling, but when my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw my dog cowering in terror in a far corner of my bedroom near the closet door, several feet from my bed! Imagine my surprise when I looked down and saw the ghost of the little girl in bed with me!

She looked up at me with the innocent look of a child with her hand caught in the cookie jar, saying, “I’m not doing anything bad. Really, I’m not.” Only, in this instance, she remained quiet.

It took me several minutes to regain my composure and to tell myself that I definitely was not imagining things nor was I dreaming. By then, she had disappeared, but it happened several more times mostly during thunderstorms or in the winter, especially on cold, snowy nights when the winds were howling, shaking the old house. I also noticed something else on the nights when “she,” curled herself in my arms: You know the fresh smell of a small girl after her nightly bath and she’s in her nightgown, all ready for bed? Well, that’s the smell that would fill my room when she would be in my arms in bed. It was almost as if I were the daddy and she was my daughter, and she’d climbed into bed to curl up into my arms for protection from the storm and wait for Mommy to come to bed.

I decided to have a friend spend the night with me in the house to prove to myself that the ghost of a little girl did in fact, haunt the house. I told him beforehand about the haunting and as you might guess, he didn’t believe me. I also had my grandmother reaffirm my story.

Almost as if on a prearranged signal, she appeared that night, eerily walking from my parent’s bedroom area, through the dining room, and into the kitchen, where she disappeared.

My friend sat bolt upright in the easy chair in which he was seated, his eyes bulging with surprise, apprehension, and perhaps a little fear. After he calmed himself down, he was thoroughly convinced that what he saw was his own imagination, caused by my and my grandmother’s powers of suggestion. I assured him it was not, that it was the real ghost of a real little girl.

The next day, after school, he apologized to me for not believing in the ghost of the little girl. He also told me a female schoolmate he was acquainted with worked a psychic on weekends

“What!” I nearly shouted. “Half of the people at school are going to make us a laughing stock while the other half are going to camp out here, trying to see the ghost, and that is going to make my parents very angry! Not to mention we’ll never be able to show our faces again at school.”

“Now wait,” my friend, Jeff, said. His full name was Jeffrey Donaldson and I met him shortly after my parents, grandmother and I had moved into the house on 13th Street. “I told her to keep this strictly confidential, so that won’t happen.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet she will.”

“Look, it’ll be alright. I promise,” Jeff said.

I didn’t believe him. I believed there would be a huge media circus with everyone in town making fun of us. Unfortunately for my parents, my grandmother and myself, I didn’t know how right I was.

The next Saturday, the first Saturday of December came and by five in the afternoon, Martha Grimm, the girl Jeff had told me about, came by to inform me that she and her constituents would be here at a eleven thirty that night to make their survey of the house and determine of there really was an earthbound spirit of a little girl trapped in the house and why.

At eleven thirty that night, Martha and her friends, Mr. and Mrs. James Tabor appeared at my doorstep. Somewhat nervously, I let them in, not knowing what to expect.

Since the ghost of the little girl made most of her appearances in the dining room, they decided to hold their séance there and since the dining room table was over one hundred-years-old, they would use that table for the conducting of the séance.

Mrs. Tabor sat at the head of the table in an old-fashioned arm chair, her right shoulder toward the area from which the little girl appeared, the doorway to the kitchen behind her left shoulder.

At precisely midnight, they began the séance, Mrs. Tabor calling on the spirits and (of course) asking protection from the “other side,” as she asked for the appearance of the little girl.

After approximately half an hour with nothing happening, we stopped for a breather.

“Nothing is coming. I can’t understand it,” Mrs. Tabor said.

I turned to Mrs. Tabor, and said, “As I told Martha, the little girl doesn’t come until one o’clock in the morning, sometimes later.”

“Very well,” Mrs. Tabor said. “We’ll try again, just before one o’clock. In the meantime, why don’t you build a fire in the fireplace? That sometimes helps.”

“Okay,” I said and in a few minutes, I had a nice fire going and by five minutes of one in the morning, we had restarted the séance.

At almost precisely one o’clock, Mrs. Tabor suddenly shot straight up out of her chair, knocking her chair over backwards. “I know where it is! Paul, lead me upstairs. Quickly.”

We hurriedly left the dining room and with me leading, we all ascended the stairs. Constructed of ancient mahogany, it was beautiful years ago when it was new. Now, it was old and faded.

As we entered the second floor, Mrs. Tabor turned to her right and entered the upstairs hallway and stopped. The paneling in this hallway was also constructed of mahogany.

“Here,” she exclaimed, toughing the wall on her left. “Yes, it’s here,” her voice was shaking now as she lightly ran her hand along the wall. “Behind this wall is the answer.”

By now, it was all I could do to keep myself from bending over, laughing hysterically, it was so funny. Turning to me, a little angry, she said, “Don’t laugh. There is something here.”

In order to pacify here, I turned on the hallway light and began to feel the panels for myself. When I got to the third one, it actually felt a little loose. Working at it for a few minutes, I actually managed to push it back a scant inch and slid it to my right. We were all shocked to find a narrow, steep stairway, no more than three feet wide!

Mr. Tabor had brought a three-battery flashlight with him and led the way up the stairs to the third floor. At the top was a large, square hallway in the middle of the floor, surrounded by four rooms and a long, blank wall on the one remaining side. It too was paneled in mahogany.

As Mr. Tabor, moved the light around, we saw there were no overhead lighting fixtures, no switches on the walls, and no electrical outlets in the hallway or in any of the rooms.

We returned to the square hallway and we all felt along the paneled wall. Jeff discovered a loose panel and working diligently it too, pushed back by an inch, then slid sideways and revealed an opening about the size of a standard doorway. What we saw inside stunned us.

It was a little girl’s room, fairly clean of dust and cobwebs, all painted in pink, including the furniture. The dresser had a mirror and the top of the dresser was covered with a hand-held mirror, brushes and combs, powders and a couple of ragdolls.

“Oh my God, no!” Mrs. Tabor called out.

We looked toward the far corner at which she was pointing. There was a child-sized, four-poster, canopied bed. Lying on the mattress was what appeared to be porcelain doll with long, very dark hair. Upon closer examination, we discovered to our horror it was no doll, but the skeletal remains of a dead child!

We all believed it to be the lifeless body of the ghost of the little girl, but why? Why would someone put the dead body of a little girl in this room? Did it have something to do with sealing off the third floor? We immediately descended to the first floor where I called the police. All I told them was I and some friends had found a dead body, but nothing more because I didn’t know what else to say.

After the police had arrived, I explained to them, in detail, how we had found the loose panels and subsequently, the sealed-off third floor and the secret room, leaving out the séance we had performed. I merely said my friends and I were watching a haunted house movie on a DVD that had movable panels and after the movie was over, I told my friends that I had noticed one of the panels was loose in the second floor hallway and my friends and I decided to see why it was loose, thereby finding the stairway, the third floor, and the secret room.

The police had made an investigation and found that back in the bootlegging days, a family that had lived in the house while it was in its original location, had disappeared. No one knew why they had disappeared or if they had a preteen, dark-haired daughter. Also, the police couldn’t determine if the father of the family was involved in any of the local bootlegging operations or any other nefarious schemes of that time. The police also didn’t know to whom the little girl belonged so she remained unidentified.

Meanwhile, my parents gave the little girl a nice burial in the local cemetery, giving her the name of Jennifer Wilson since we did not know her real name; Wilson was my mother’s maiden name.

Over the next few months my parents, grandmother and I had a plethora of news media, mediums and literally hundreds of curiosity seekers hounding us for a glimpse of the “nineteenth century murder house,” as the news media were calling it. Most of the visitors wanted to see the murder room. I wanted to charge an admission fee of ten dollars a head, insisting we could make a fortune, but my father steadfastly refused to allow anyone in the house or the little girl’s room.

My mother, a very strict Roman Catholic had our Pastor bless the house, but she would never feel comfortable living in the house again and after the Christmas and New Year’s Holidays, she insisted we move again, which we did.

I haven’t seen the ghost of the little girl since and I haven’t asked any of the subsequent occupants if any of them have seen her, either.

I wonder who she was any how her body came to be lying in her bed on the third floor. I suppose I never will.

THE END