A True Story, I'm A Believer

I See Dead People
By La Belle Rouge


It was my paternal grandmother’s home, a grand, old Craftsman cottage. Mail ordered from Sears and built by my father and five uncles . The beams, joists, rafters and studs were rough hewn and almost twice as big as the smooth-finished wood homes are built of now. Three stories, a Gibraltar of a house, with high ceilings, heart of pine floors and a huge brick fireplace, it had withstood the test of time and storms. The front door was leaded crystal and the solid pine interior doors had intricate designs burned into the wood and boasted ornate crystal door knobs. The distorted glass windows laboriously moved up and down on ropes. There was a stone foundation and a full basement that held the dark secrets of open spaces, an old boiler furnace and the ghosts that haunted a child’s imagination.

It was built beside a winding creek squarely in the middle of a Native American village which later became an old southern town so wild that over two centuries earlier it had earned the name “Hell’s Half Acre” . By the time my Grandmother’s house was built things had settled down quite a bit and the rural community had been renamed to something more reflective of God’s grace which had apparently been poured out there during a Methodist revival at the turn of the twentieth century. There were still hard living, fighting, drinking men who called it home, along with an assortment of loose ladies who mothered children the general public only guessed at the paternity of. Everyone went to church on Sunday, drinkers, fighters, undercover lovers, everyone except the few honest souls who were what they were and saw no reason for pretense. Upon reflection, I think these unpretentious ones were the neighbors I admired most.

When my grandmother became elderly and ill my parents bought the house from her and it was there I experienced my earliest memories. Memories of my mother’s sharp voice and my father’s comforting arms: memories of wildflowers in the meadow and kittens dressed up in doll clothes. Recollections of playing in the woods beside the now dried creek bed and finding native knives and arrowheads. Then there were the memories of something so frightening in the basement my hair would stand on end and I’d shiver with fear and cold whenever I had to go down the stairs to bring up jars of pickles for dinner or to wash clothes on the old wringer machine. I have no idea why I felt this way about the basement but what I felt was real. Perhaps it had to do with the ground the house was built on. Indians in that region buried their dead in mounds. Was the house built on an Indian burial ground or the site of violence or murder in the old town of Hell’s Half Acre? I had no way of knowing but I did know something paranormal lived in that basement.

Before I was three years old I could see them, the ones no one else could see. The one I called the “Mean Man” who filled my heart with fear. He was a big man with angry eyes and a dark mustache who stood peering at me from the corner of the semi dark bedroom. He held a long knife in his hand. He never said anything but sometimes he laughed in a sinister way that chilled my bones. There was also the Indian, a tall, bronze presence with long black hair, wearing leather and rabbit fur. He had kind eyes and a soft voice. He stood at the foot of my bed and with words I could only understand in my mind, told me not to be afraid. I saw them, just as surely as I saw the living people who came and went in my normal world of daylight.

Often I would beg not to be sent to bed or for one of my parents to sleep with me. I met with my mother’s distain and sometimes my father’s sympathy. Occasionally my father would take pity on me and lie beside me until I fell asleep but I was usually sent to bed alone to face the horror of the Mean Man for what often seemed like hours. I learned early that crying out only brought a scolding about seeing things that weren’t there, so I learned how to smother fear with silence. The Indian would eventually appear and the Mean Man would fade into the darkness, then I could sleep. Who they were I never knew, maybe the Indian once walked the land where the house was built and the Mean Man could have been a infamous citizen of “Hell’s Half Acre”. I grew up with the stigma of having too much imagination but I knew what I knew and even now, so many years later, I can still clearly see both entities in my thoughts and feel the same emotions their presence evoked in the psyche of a frightened little girl.

The old house was home, it held my childhood. It held the sounds, sights and scents of all that I belonged to and that belonged to me. It was the old umbrella tree I climbed and hid in when I wanted to be alone. Tears I cried across the creaky, old bed in the attic when I had tried so hard to please my mother with no success; songs I sang with my father and the laughter we often shared. The fresh fragrance of pine oil cleaner and paste wax was forever a part of that house. Scents of evergreen Christmas trees, holiday turkey and ham baking. Family voices around the dinning room table, all the aunts, uncles and cousins sharing Thanksgiving and Christmas cheer. The old house was home, home I left but never forgot.

It was sounds of weeping when grandparents died and hymns my mother hummed when she was busy with housework. The front porch swing was where I was rocked to sleep as a small child and where I spent twilights with the boyfriend who became my husband. Then the cycle repeated itself, weeping when a soldier left for war, laughter when he returned. Lullabies sung once again in that old wooden porch swing as I rocked my babies to sleep. Children, my children, laughing and making all the noise little boys make on summer days at play in the yard or early evenings catching lightning bugs.

The years had passed, my husband and I had bought the old house from my mother. I became a woman, a mother but what I felt in that basement didn’t change. I never told a soul and felt ashamed at such seemingly groundless fear. I avoided the basement as much as I could. I even had my husband move the washer and dryer to the main floor so I wouldn’t have to do laundry in the basement.

The Indian and Mean Man became things of the past except for the times I was gravely ill and feverish, then they would once again pay their respects unseen by anyone but me. I kept it to myself since I had learned most people wouldn’t believe it anyway.

When I was still a very young woman my beloved father passed away. The ache in my heart was unbearable, I doubt I will ever miss anyone the way I missed him since he was the bright spot in my otherwise dismal childhood. A few days after his death I had to go to the basement to put away some of his personal effects my mother wanted to keep. As I reached up to place the box on a shelf I felt that same eerie feeling I had grown accustomed to in the basement. It was as if someone was watching me behind my back. I expected to turn around, see nothing out of the ordinary and then hurry back up the stairs. When I turned I saw him, My father sitting in an old arm chair. He seemed as flesh and blood as I was. He was wearing his old overalls and the stained straw hat he loved so much. There was panic at first and then all the fear vanished at the joy of seeing him again. He looked me in the eyes and said in a calm voice,

“Take care of your Mama. She‘ll need you”

And then he was gone. So I took care of my mama who died three years later of cancer. The night after she died my four year old son saw her, in an old arm chair in the basement. She told him she loved him and she would see him again.

Several months after her death we sold the old house and moved far away. There were just too many memories there, too many ghosts watching me behind my back. The people who bought our house were especially difficult to deal with. We moved in the dead of winter when it was sleeting and we were packing as fast as we could. It wasn’t fast enough for the new owner who called the sheriff to throw us out. Of course the sheriff told them to leave us in peace and let us move. When we left I felt such a mixture of emotions, I don’t even know how to describe it. Leaving all the good, leaving all the bad.

Only two weeks after we moved we heard that the new owners little son had fallen through the ice on the pond and died. I’ve never had any news chill me more nor make me wonder about the whys of certain situations.
The old house is almost falling down now. I guess after they lost their son the new owners cared nothing about a house. I don’t go back there, haven’t seen the house in five years. I like to remember it the way it was on those long ago Thanksgivings and Christmases, filled with firelight and laughter.

I don’t laugh at those TV shows or movies about seeing dead people, I’m a believer. I saw them in my childhood home, I’ve seen them other places since. I don’t know why, but I know it’s true . Yes I’m a believer in things we don’t understand and most of us never see.


11/27/2009 La Belle Rouge

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