Category: US – New Hampshire

(Continued from Portsmouth – real ghosts, private home, part two)

A TRUE GHOST STORY – PART THREE

There were a few more incidents of things casually flying through the kitchen. The faucets turned themselves on more frequently, and with more force. Other odd little things happened, but nothing particularly destructive or frightening. In fact, many of these things struck us funny.

One of the funniest “ghostly” events was when the paper cups would topple in the kitchen. It almost always happened when my oldest daughter was in the kitchen. She did the dishes every afternoon at about three o’clock.

With three children, we have always used paper cups for beverages. It reduces the number of dishes to wash, and the cups were safer for the children when they were small; my youngest liked to chew on the edge of whatever held his beverage. Paper was a vastly better choice than glass. As the children got older, we simply continued to use paper cups for convenience.

Paper cups come in two stacks of 40-50 per plastic-wrapped package. They stand on a level counter easily, and our kitchen counter was level; we’d checked it.

However, when my oldest daughter was in the kitchen, and usually when she was washing dishes, the cups would topple repeatedly. One of us would straighten them back up, make certain that the cups were stable, and stand back. While we watched, the stacks would begin to sag and then fall over, as if someone had accidentally leaned against them.

This didn’t happen just once or twice, but dozens of times. We finally gave up, and learned to leave them sprawled across the counter the first time this happened, each afternoon. Later, we’d prop the cups back up again when my daughter was about to leave the kitchen. Then they would stay in place until the next time she visited the room.

Although the poltergeist incidents ranged from funny to annoying, the bigger problem was the general sense of discomfort we felt in the house. We tried painting the front hall a warm, cheerful yellow with crisp white trim. I displayed quaint country quilts on the walls, and later tried sunny landscape paintings. I bought country-style bleached pine furniture. We read about feng shui and tried a variety of “remedies,” and though they made the house look better, they didn’t solve the problem.

The house still wasn’t cozy and home-like, although we’d been there over six months. Still, the house seemed like an irresistible real estate opportunity, so we stayed. But I was anxious about the fire premonitions, and kept making trips to the storage place with boxes of our belongings, ignoring the illogic and unnecessary expense of it.

More and more, I had the impression that the woman in white was kindly urging us to leave the house, while the man in brown was ordering us out in a sinister manner. I have no idea why I got this impression. The woman seemed to be trying to leave through the kitchen door. The man always seemed to pause abruptly at the door instead of trying to exit. I can’t honestly say that I ever connected their focus on the door, with the idea of leaving the house, but in retrospect it seems obvious.

Nevertheless, I rarely saw the man in brown, and he visually appeared fewer than five times during our year in that house.

Then the neighborhood took a turn for the worse. About three nights each week, I’d answer the door to the police, who were searching for reported criminals. During the day, the police were often on our street, dealing with malicious mischief. Tagging — words I didn’t want my children to see — appeared on walls a few blocks from our house.

My husband and I decided that the house might not be a smart investment, after all.

Then, one night, our next-door neighbors’ truck had been smashed with what looked like a baseball bat. They gave notice to their landlord at the same time we told our house’s owner that we would not be staying.

We prepared to move. It wasn’t much work. Many of our belongings were already in storage on the other side of town.

The story concludes in part four

Portsmouth house, Portsmouth, NH
October 1999, about 11 a.m.

This photo was taken outside a Portsmouth private residence. While living in that house, I saw two ghosts and experienced considerable poltergeist phenomena. I took several photos of the house in late October 1999, to illustrate my pages about this very haunted house.

When I had this film printed and examined the photos, I kept returning to the photo shown above. Something about it didn’t seem “right.” My attention was drawn to what seemed to be window reflections of the old lilac bush in front of the house.

The following day, I decided to enhance the image with my computer, simply making it larger so I could determine what was bothering me about the picture. That enlargement appears below:

Either this photo looks like a man looking to the right, with longish hair and 19th-century dark sunglasses, or it looks like a reflection of lilac leaves. Nobody seems undecided about this photo!

If you’d seen the male ghost in that house, you’d recognize the window reflection right away: That’s our ghost. He has a broken-looking nose, a scar under his right cheekbone, and his hair is thinning on top.

In spectral appearance, he was about 5’5″ tall and stocky. He looked like a hastily-groomed, slightly British version of Buffalo Bill… sort of.

Among people I know in modern times, our ghost reminded me of folk singer Jaime Brockett.

When our ghost wasn’t wearing sunglasses, he had average no-particular-color eyes, somewhat tanned skin, and slightly sun-bleached brown hair. He favored brown clothing, usually wore a suit, rarely buttoned his jacket, and he always seemed in a hurry to go nowhere. When I took this photo, I had the sense that someone was at the window, but I didn’t notice the man’s face.

It seemed reasonable that the current residents of the house might have been peering out at the strange woman taking photos of their house. I don’t put any significance on my discomfort at the time.

Read about our experiences in Portsmouth – real ghosts, private home

Camera: Olympus AF-1, point-and-shoot
Film type: Kodak ASA 400 b&w film, 35mm
Negative shows: Same image. Nothing unusual.
Developed and printed by: Shaw’s Supermarket overnight photo service

A TRUE GHOST STORY

It was too easy. In the early 1990s, I placed a notice on a bulletin board, looking for a “nothing down” house to buy near Portsmouth, NH. Several people called within the week, but one house seemed almost perfect: a house within walking distance of downtown Portsmouth.

The owner was eager to leave. Perhaps too eager, but I believed her when she said that her reduced salary (since being disabled) left her unable to pay the mortgage on both an in-town house and her summer home. Also, the two-story in-town house seemed too large since her divorce.

The house was near downtown, in an area that was either on its way up, or continuing to descend into… well, the kind of neighborhood I wouldn’t raise my three children in. Betting on the former, we decided to take a chance. We had nothing to lose, since we were renting on a trial basis first.

The owner was out of the house within three days, and we moved in. I remember how gleefully she laughed as she drove away. It seemed odd, but I thought maybe it was just her relief, since she’d finally rented the house.

The house needed work. Right away, we covered the black, half-finished floor in the kitchen with a white-and-gray vinyl flooring, and painted the yellowing walls and cabinets shiny white. It looked brighter then, but not quite right.

In fact, for the next year we continued to paint, remodel, redecorate and upgrade the old house, but it remained unwelcoming. It wasn’t anything specific, just the feeling that no matter what we did, the house would always need something that paint and wallpaper couldn’t fix.

Maybe the angles weren’t quite straight at the corners. Maybe the floor wasn’t quite level. I should have measured these things, but instead kept redecorating, trying to solve the problem. I had the idea that a vase of flowers here, and a fresh coat of paint there, or a new throw rug, would finally lend a sense of ease to the house. But nothing seemed to make this house a “home” for us.

Still, we continued on a “rent to own” basis, planning to take over the mortgage as soon as we accumulated the down payment.

There were odd noises during the afternoon and towards dusk, like footsteps on the second floor when no one was there. The faucets, particularly in the upstairs bathroom, would turn themselves on. I said to myself, “Older houses have these quirks, especially when temperatures drop in the evening. It’s okay.”

One night, I stopped making “logical” excuses:

It was about four in the afternoon, and the sun had not set yet. It had been a sunny day, and I was in a cheerful mood as I prepared dinner at the stove. It was a jambalaya dish, all made in one skillet. I was sauteeing the onion and sausage when I left the spatula in the skillet, and stepped across the room to get rice out of the cabinet.

I picked up the pink-trimmed Tupperware container of rice, and turned around just in time to see the spatula make a mid-air twirl as it flew across the room and landed on the floor at the opposite wall.

Always choosing the rational explanation first, I decided that a slice of sausage must have cooked in just the right way to release a burst of air and propel the spatula. And to prove it to myself, I washed the spatula and put it back where I’d left it, and then hit the handle with my fist to deliberately send the spatula into the air.

It rose about two inches and then fell on top of the stove, next to the skillet.

I repeated my experiment about fifteen times, trying to find a way to replicate what I’d seen when I’d picked up the rice. Different angles. Different ways of hitting it. Nothing worked.

Still dismissing the obvious poltergeist answer, I continued cooking. Once again, I stepped away from the stove for more ingredients, and again, the spatula was airborne. This time it landed about five feet from the stove.

I resumed my experiments to make the same thing happen, but couldn’t figure how to do it. Nothing seemed to work.

I continued cooking, feeling very uneasy. The rest of the meal was without incident, but I told my (mechanical engineer) husband about the flying spatula, and he said there was no logical–or scientific–way it could happen.

He wanted to believe me, but my story didn’t make sense.

I thought about this, and decided not to make anything of it.

Next, in part two: The ghost makes an appearance