Category: US – New Hampshire

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

This concludes a true story that began at Portsmouth – real ghosts, private home

OUR LAST NIGHT IN THIS HAUNTED HOUSE

Our last night in the house, the footsteps returned, louder than ever. It was late in June, and about three o’clock in the morning. I remember hearing the footsteps, pounding up the varnished pine stairs as my family slept. Hard, leather-soled shoes.

For some reason, I thought that I was the only one who heard them.

Then the noise woke up my husband, and he leaped from the bed and turned on the lights. He shouted into the hall, and the steps paused.

My husband returned to bed, but sat up, prepared to go out to see who it was if the noise resumed.

It did. The footsteps suddenly continued, like someone was now running up the final few steps to the second floor where we slept.

Then the noise stopped, as if the person waited one or two steps from the top. My husband and I both went out to the stairway, turned on the lights, and saw nothing unusual. After checking the locks on the front and back doors, we left the lights on and nervously returned to bed.

Adrenaline pumping, I checked the stairs and hallway many times that night, but it remained silent. Something felt malicious to me, but that was probably my imagination after too little sleep, and the accumulated stress.

We moved out the next day. (My now ex-husband’s independent summary of the footsteps that night, are on the …Other notes page.)

THE FIRE WARNING WAS REAL

The night after we moved out, a huge Victorian house in back of ours burned to the ground. The distance between that house and ours was about 100 yards, at the most.

Our house would have been filled with smoke. The fire would have been seen from the window where — in my dreams — I’d seen fire reflected.

We were miles away, sleeping peacefully under the stars on the first night of a well-deserved camping vacation. When I saw the newspaper the next day, I was both stunned and relieved.

Someone else lives in “our” house now. It’s been fixed up, and the neighborhood may be improving after all. Perhaps we made a poor financial decision, but I don’t regret leaving that house after all we witnessed there.

1999 UPDATE

I took photos of the house on Sunday morning, Oct. 17th, but I felt as if someone was watching me from the house. Perhaps someone was; it’s certainly odd for a woman to stand in front of your house with two cameras, taking pictures. Nevertheless, when I picked up the prints, something about one photo nagged at me. It didn’t look right. One of the windows had a reflection that didn’t seem right to me.

Below, I scanned the section exactly as it appeared in the print, and an enlargement of it on the right. To me, it’s the man’s face, looking to the right, with an indented scar beneath his right cheekbone. He’s wearing round, dark sunglasses from either the 19th century or the hippie era. He has long-ish, light colored hair, and he’s slightly balding at the top.

From a 19th-century Portsmouth city directory, I know that the first inhabitants of the house were probably a man from England, his brother, and his son. All of them worked with leather, making shoes at a local factory, I think.

He’s the man in brown that I’d seen in the house. I’m certain of it.

But, maybe I’m just jumping at shadows, and perhaps you see something different in the image… even just the reflection of the lilac bush in front of it.

You can read more about this photo, and see a sketch of the man, at Portsmouth – portrait of a real ghost

Author’s comment: My ex-husband wrote this before reading my notes about what happened.

“One night, at about 3AM I clearly heard someone coming up the stairs to the bedrooms. We lived in one of those old Cape Cod type houses, built around the turn of the century. The stairs had no carpet on them and the hallway was quite bare with excellent acoustics. I called out, ‘Hello?’ wondering if it was a burglar or other intruder.

“We had only lived in the house for less than a year. The previous owner had myriad tenants who rented rooms. There was a distinct possibility that one of these ex-tenants came back from a night of drinking or drugs and had mistaken our home for theirs.

“I could tell that the person on the stairs had stopped right at the top step or the one right below it. I turned on my light, got out of bed, and looked at the top of the stairs and no one was there.

“There was no possibility of someone running down the stairs before I got there. There was no place to hide. There was no possibility of there being someone making the noise outside of the house. The footfalls were definitely on the stairs. I remember hearing that slight crunch of that stuff between your shoes and the treads of the stairs. Someone had definitely been walking up the stairs. But no one was there.”

Is this a real haunted house? Those who lived there in the early 1990s would say that it is. We have tried to conceal the actual location of this private home and ask those who recognize it not to bother its current residents. They have enough problems, if the house is still haunted.

[2016 update: The current residents say that they’re not troubled by any ghosts at the house. But, if a ghost did show up, they’d be fine with any benign spirit.]