After I quit college for the final time I worked a couple of jobs before heading back to California. I drove a shuttle bus for the organization that schooled, trained and employed intellectually handicapped children and adults. I had a short stint as a DJ at a top-40 station.
Both those jobs have stories of their own. But this is about the amazing woman I asked to exorcise a “spirit” or “ghost” from the apartment I was living in.
The apartment was in a big old post-civil war house near the Ohio River in Evansville, Indiana. The three story house had been divided up into a number of apartments and mine consisted of a sunroom entrance that led to the kitchen and dining room.
The sunroom was a sort of living room that looked out onto what was now a small backyard. The kitchen was big, with a table in the center. And the dining room was also quite big. That was used for the bedroom. To add to the elegance of the room and its walnut panels and skirting was a fireplace and a chandelier.
The landlady had forbidden me to use the fireplace for safety reasons and I put colored light bulbs in the chandelier because I thought they added to the ambience. What she hadn’t told me about was the kitchen door that led to a narrow set of stairs for the servants and the door from the pantry going down to the basement. Those I had to find out about for myself. But more of that later.
It was in a part of town that had once been where the successful middle class lived. Not the very rich who lived facing the river on South East Riverside Drive or one street back, but further inland from the river where the next level in the pecking order built their large family homes. They all would have had maids, cooks and gardeners. But the downsizing and subdivision of the large original properties had seen some less grand houses take the places of original stables and coach houses.
The rent was cheap and my neighbors were people of varying ages taking advantage of the low rents.
Some strange happenings occurred while I was there. Flickering lights. A lightening ball that came through an open sash window during a rain storm and did a circuit around the room before exiting from another window.
The strangest was a sweeping sound that I’d hear at night right outside the tall sliding doors that opened onto a wide hallway outside the dining room I used as my bedroom. It didn’t happen every night, but got to the point where I’d tiptoe up to the doors (which were locked on my side) and suddenly slid them open in order to catch whomever it was outside the doors.
These were tall, heavy solid oak doors so I wasn’t worried that someone could ever break in. But the sound had become somewhat irritating and I wanted it to stop.
The hall was big and to my right there was a wide, carpeted stairway that went up to the next floor. I’d burst into the hall and check the stairway and the two doors that led off the hallway into the other apartments on the ground floor. Then I’d feel a bit stupid because there was nobody there except a chill.
The more often I tried to catch “the sweeper” the chiller it got out there. So I gave up and decided to hitchhike up to Bloomington to visit some friends who went to Indiana University.
While I was gone I loaned my place two two friends who needed a place to rendezvous for sex. They were very grateful because they’d run out of places and since my male friend was a local and his family well-known, he didn’t want his parents to find out.
When I came back after a week or so I found the place empty. My friends had only spent one night there before deciding it was too weird to stay any longer. They told me the lights kept flicking on and off, things would fall off shelves in the kitchen and the temperature would suddenly drop. My female friend said she could see a vague, transparent form in the corner by the doors to the hallway. “And then there’s that sweeping sound. It’s all too spooky.”
Since I hadn’t told anyone about my experiences I was, in a small way, relieved that someone else had heard the sound. But the next occurrence convinced me that the place really was “spooky.”
Mariechen Al-An’© Robert R. Feigel 2022 – All Rights Reserved
Pieces from a Puzzling Life 