We told ourselves that the stereo was old and suffering from some mechanical problem, but when we started hearing footsteps in the night, things got strange. The bedrooms in the house are off of a long narrow hallway, with Brother’s old room at the near end, and the master bedroom at the far end. Sometimes at night, we’d hear the clomp, clomp, clomp of heavy feet walking up and down the hallway. There was never anyone there when we checked.
None of our cats wanted to go down that creepy corridor, either. If they felt like they had to see Mama about something, they would puff their tails and run as hard as their little paws would go, until they reached the safety of her bedroom. Brother and I did the same thing.
Being strange kids raised by a strange woman and a man who’d given up trying to normalize us, Brother and I soon accepted Henry’s presence with no problem. He was a creepy family member to us; like an invisible uncle. We did do a little detective work, just to see if we could figure out who he’d been when he was corporeal, but no one had died in our house, and we were never able to figure it out.
Henry actually appeared several times, leaning against the doorway to Mama and Daddy’s room, and we were not the only people to see him. He was a middle-aged fellow, tall, with an affinity for natty suits. He had a 1950’s look about him. He was never there on second glance, but we all had the same impression of him.
One time, poor Henry got a bum rap. I had a good friend in high school who was always strangely interested in the ghost. My other friends adopted my attitude and accepted Henry as part of the family, but this friend was always on the lookout for signs of spirit-type goings-on, and trying to catch poor Henry in the act. He spent a lot of time in the hallway.
One evening, while Brother and I and those of my friends not obsessed with the paranormal activity at my house were hanging out in the den, there came an awful howling from the vicinity of the hallway. It sounded like an operatic aria gone tragically wrong, and we rose and ran as a unit through the house to find out what in the world was going on.
When we turned the corner from the living room into the hallway, we saw our intrepid ghost-hunting friend, crumpled in a gibbering heap by the clothes hamper. His arms rose and fell again and again, as if he were trying to get a message to us before it was too late. His mouth opened and closed, but no words came out- just the horrified warbling.
There was another noise in the dark hallway, though. There was giggling.
When we gathered ourselves enough to look, we saw a figure in a flowing gown in the darkened passage, with a dead-white face, and horrible black holes where its eyes should’ve been! It was from this phantom that the giggling was coming.
Mama was a sight, with her cold-cream smeared face and dissolved mascara smudges around her eyes. She was in her nightgown, and had been in the middle of taking off her make-up when she discovered the need for a fresh bath cloth from the linen closet in the hall. My poor friend had looked up when he heard her footfalls, expecting to see a semi-transparent Ward Cleaver, but looking at something straight from his nightmares, instead.
We all got a good laugh, and my friend got the exciting ghost encounter he’d been looking for. After that, Henry sightings dropped off. I guess he figured he’d never be able to top Mama in the striking mortal fear into kids department.
I could’ve told him that from the start.
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