J.P.'s Story                  My Paranormal Stories                    Ghost Story In 1968, my parents bought a two-story house near Garfield Park that had been converted to three apartments.  A few years after they bought the house they heard from friends who lived nearby that a woman had been killed in the house.  The story they were told was that she came down the inside stairway, walked into the living room, and her husband shot her. I lived in two of the three apartments over a seven year span.  Several people have told me they heard unexplained noises such as voices, footsteps, thumping, and doors closing. It seems the house reverberates with the unquiet spirit of this woman who died within its walls.  Following are a few of the events I experienced. Soft Steps One evening I came into my downstairs apartment with my two-year-old daughter, Carol, asleep in my arms.  I was next to the inside stairway when I heard footsteps descend the stairs and stop near the bottom.  The steps were quick and soft like the feet were bare or in slippers.  My sister lived in the upstairs apartment and I assumed she had seen me park and was coming down to visit.  I thought it would be fun to scare her when she opened the door at the bottom of the stairs.  I put Carol in her bed and stepped behind the door and waited.  And waited.  When my sister didn’t open the door, I opened the curtain and looked up the stairway.  There was no one there. I had no doubt that I had heard footsteps.  Both apartments were empty and quiet, Carol was still sleeping, and I had been next to the stairs when I clearly heard the quick steps.  I decided someone must have broken into my sister’s apartment.  Hearing me come in the intruder had somehow managed to slip soundlessly back up the creaky stairway.  But when we went up to the apartment we found the door securely locked and nothing disturbed. A Body Falls Late one night my husband and I were talking when we heard the thump-thump of a body falling in the other bedroom.  The two bedrooms had no wall, just a large open doorway between them, and we both clearly heard the sound.  Assuming Carol had fallen out of bed, we waited quietly to see if she would cry out and need comforting, or just get back in bed.  When there were no sounds from Carol’s room, I thought it was strange that the fall didn’t wake her.  I went into her room to put her back in her bed, and was surprised to fine her sound asleep, under the covers, in her bed.  A few months later, my husband was working out of town during the week.  One evening Carol and I were home alone and she chattered to me as I washed my hair in the bathroom.  We heard a thump-thump from another room, and Carol stopped talking.  We looked at each other, wondering what the noise was, and she said “Daddy’s home.”  I hoped she was right and he had come home unexpectedly, and maybe the noise was his suitcase dropping on the floor. When we went out of the bathroom we found the apartment empty, and nothing had fallen that would account for the noise we both heard. Most of the times when I experienced something strange, I was first afraid that someone had broken into an apartment (which did happen once).  After I heard the story of the woman being shot, I attributed some of the previously unexplained happenings to her. I wasn’t afraid of her, this phantom of my imagination.  She was just an unhappy former human, and not dangerous.  I much preferred a sad ghost to a live intruder.  After I accepted her existence in my mind I didn’t hear anything unusual again.  But that’s not the end of the story. A Woman Named Laura A few years later when Carol was a teenager, and we had moved across town, my dad paid off the mortgage on this rental house.  Reading the abstract on the property, I found where a woman named Laura had owned the house in the 1950s.  When she died, the house didn’t go to her husband as you would expect, but in a trust to her three young children.  Thinking this might be the woman who was killed by her husband, I noted the name and date and made a trip to the Star & News newspaper archives.  There on microfilms I found the Easter Sunday tragedy involving a troubled marriage and three small children. Photos of the front-page story showed the beadboard wall of the bedroom with the unfortunate Laura lying on the floor next to a bed. Laura and her husband were separated; he had become abusive and she had filed restraining orders against him.  After Easter Sunday services, Laura’s husband had dropped in and the two of them began arguing heatedly.  Their two daughters became afraid.  They ran to a neighbor’s house and asked for help.  The neighbor took the girls in and called the police.  The police entered the house at both the front and back doors.  Laura and her husband stood in the inner doorway between the kitchen and a bedroom.  He was holding a gun to her back.  Surrounded by the police, he fired the gun shooting Laura as their terrified son watched.  Laura stumbled across the room and fell next to the bed, where she soon died.  The newspaper reporter described the crime scene with the body on the floor, the Easter clothes hanging on a closet door, and the Easter baskets spilled on the bed. I made copies and shared this story with friends, but not with my children.  One friend asked if anyone had ever had bad dreams while we lived there.  We moved into the house when my daughter was two months old.  Carol did not sleep through the night until she was four.  While she was still a toddler, she began having nightmares and screaming—not crying, but screaming—sometimes at night.  Sometimes she couldn’t be soothed back to sleep, she had to be shaken or yelled at to get her attention.  Since this had started when she was very young it was ‘normal’ to both of us.  When she got older, and after we moved, she stopped having nightmares and finally slept through the night. After my friend’s comment, I asked Carol if she remembered any of the nightmares she had when we lived in that house.  She instantly said, “Oh, yes. I remember because it was always the same dream.” “I dreamed my dad and you were standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the bedroom, and he shot you in the back.  You took a few steps across the bedroom and fell to your knees next to the bed.  Your head and one arm were on the bed, and your arm swept across the bed as you fell to the floor on your back.” Carol was not aware of the newspaper articles I’d found and didn’t know the story they told.  Though she personalized her recurring nightmare, the details are eerily similar.  She even gave an explanation for how the Easter baskets on the bed could have been spilled, just as the newspaper articles described. — J. Perdue