Houses

In my childhood we lived in several different houses in Bangor and Hartford, Michigan. Those two towns are about 10 miles apart. My Thomas grandparents lived 3 miles south of Bangor (toward Hartford). My Burford grandparents (my mother's parents) lived in Watervliet, which was about 5 miles west of Hartford. (Going from Van Buren county into Berrien county.) 

My parents bought a house in Bangor when I was 1 1/2 years old and we lived there 7 years. When my parents decided to move to Hartford they put the Bangor house on the market, and it was several years before it finally sold. After that they always rented houses -- which is partly why we moved every 2 or 3 years when the rental house was sold or some other thing happened. Most of my school years were in Hartford.

PHOTO: Our house in Bangor, at the intersection of Union and Division streets (which seems like it might make a good book title). This house was haunted. I don't have any specific memories of it, but here's what my mother wrote about it: 

 

  We bought and moved into the house in Bangor on Union St., (it was the corner of Union St. and Division St.) sometime in 1956...  Dianne was about a year and a half old when we moved into that house and Rick was due early in October. It was an old house, two stories with the bedrooms upstairs.  There was one very small room downstairs but it was not big enough to make a very good bedroom and it was very cold in there in winter time.  So we didn’t use that room.  The two rooms in the front part of the house downstairs, both seemed to be living rooms. I suppose one had been used as a living room and the other as a parlor back in the days when people had parlors.  It would have been inconvenient to try to use one of those rooms as a bedroom because the doorways into both of those rooms were big open arches, so there wasn’t a door that could be closed.  The one that was obviously meant to be the living room was a bigger room than the one that I suppose was the parlor.  It wasn’t wider than the parlor but it was longer.  There was a doorway from that room into the kitchen, so that back part of the room was used as the dining room, as I think it was meant to be used.  The kitchen, bathroom and laundry were in the back part of the house.  The enclosed stairway to the upstairs was in the center part of the house and the landing at the top of the stairs was between the two bedrooms.  About halfway up the stairs there was a door on each side of the stairs that opened into the attic.  They were not regular doors.  They were much smaller and thinner than regular doors and you wouldn’t have been able to stand up straight in those doorways.  But you wouldn’t have anyway because you had to step up through the door from the stairs.  Those two doors were actually just flat boards of some kind.  As I remember, it seems to me like those doors might have been big pieces of wainscoting.  They had some kind of hinges on the left side and there was no latch on the right side.  You just pulled the door shut and there was a hook and eye to latch it with in order to keep it closed.    

  When we had lived in that house for a while, one afternoon I heard loud noises upstairs.  I didn’t have any idea what could be causing that noise.  It sounded like somebody moving furniture around up in the bedroom that was just over the living room – heavy furniture being dragged across the floor.  That noise was very loud and unmistakable as to what it sounded like.  I started upstairs to see what it was but when I got halfway up the stairs the noise stopped.  I went on up and when I got to that room nothing was out of order and there wasn’t anything I could see that could have caused that noise.  When Red came home from work, I told him about the noise and he went upstairs and looked around but couldn’t find anything either that would explain it.  He even looked in the attic.  He said it must have been squirrels on top of the house that I was hearing, or possibly even in the attic.  But I absolutely knew that’s not what I was hearing.  I did know what the squirrels sounded like when I heard them.  It was not even close to being the noise I had heard that afternoon. 

 

  I would hear that same noise like furniture being moved around up there often after that, and sometimes I would hear another noise up there that sounded like somebody who was pretty heavy, moving around up there and using a cane.  The footsteps sounded like one good leg and the other leg might have been stiff and wouldn’t bend at the knee or something like that. It just sounded like one leg didn’t work right.  I could hear that foot drag some (or kind of scuff along) and I could hear the thud or clunk of the cane when it was used.  I always went up the stairs to try to find out what was making the noise but it always stopped when I got halfway up the stairs. I kept hearing those noises pretty often over the next few months.  Rick was born the first of October and after that, when I heard those noises I would literally run up the stairs trying to make it to the top before the noise stopped but I never did make it. The noise always stopped completely when I got halfway up the stairs.  I kept hoping that noise would happen sometime when Red was at home, but it never did.  He never heard the noise. It never happened when he was at home.  So he always insisted it was squirrels.  But he would have thought different if he had ever heard it himself.   

  I used to sit out on the front porch of that house pretty often.  It was pretty close to the sidewalk. There was an old man, John Miller, who walked by every once in a while and he would stop to visit.  I suppose he had spent his entire life in Bangor.  He knew everything about Bangor.  He knew about all the houses – who built them and when, and the families who had lived in them.  Even if the house had changed hands several times, he knew and could remember all the people who had lived there.  He knew all those people well and seemed to know everything about them.  I was fascinated by that man.  He was so interesting to listen to and he enjoyed talking about all those people.  I decided that I would ask him some questions about the people who had lived in our house.  I didn’t want it to be obvious that I was suspecting ghosts were in our house, and I tried to make my questions sound like ‘normal’ questions.  I don’t know how good a job I did of that, but he didn’t seem to have caught any hint of that kind of thing.  I guess he told me who had lived in that house from the time it was built. Finally, he got to a point where he mentioned a man who had died.  I asked if he had died in a hospital or was he here at home when he died.  He said the man had died here in this house, right up there in that bedroom and he pointed to the window of that room upstairs where all that noise always came from.  I asked if the man had been crippled.  He said well, he wasn’t really crippled but he did have a “game” leg and used a cane but that wasn’t anything to do with his death. He said the man died of whatever his ailment was which I can’t remember now but I think it must have been a stroke or heart attack -- something sudden like that.  I think if he had had a lingering illness, they would have fixed him a place to sleep downstairs.  I asked how big a man he was – was he big or small or what, and he said he was a good size man.  I said I wondered how he managed the stairs with his bad leg and his cane and he said oh, he used his cane and just went down one step at a time and put his “game” leg down on the next step first and then put the good leg down beside the first one (or maybe vice versa), and went down the stairs like that, and went up the same way – one step at a time.  I don’t remember just what he said but it was some explanation like that.  I believe that is just about exactly what he did say.  I’m sure John Miller had seen that man go up and down the steps from the porch to the sidewalk many times.  He seemed to know just exactly how he did it.

 

  After I had been hearing those noises upstairs for quite a while, one night after we had gone to bed I noticed that there was light coming from somewhere in the stairway. I thought we had forgotten to turn off the dining room light and I got up to go turn it off, but when I got to the top of the stairs I could see that it was dark in the dining room and the light was only in the middle of the stairway.  I couldn’t see where the light was coming from.  It was just sort of a cloud of soft light in the stairway between those doors that opened into the attic on either side of the stairway..  It didn’t look like it was coming from anywhere else, but I looked out the windows in both bedrooms to see if there was a street light or if the moon was positioned so it would shine its light into the house but there wasn’t anything like that.  And if there had been some kind of light coming in the windows, it would be showing somewhere besides halfway down the stairway.  In fact, there wouldn’t even be any way a light coming through any of the windows could even shine down there because there wasn’t any window that was in line with the stairway by any means.  I went back to bed and watched that landing at the top of the stairs to see if the light ever went away, but it didn’t go away any of the time that I was still awake.  After that I saw that light every night.  I don’t know if it had been there all the time we had lived there or not.  I had changed the furniture around in mine and Red’s bedroom and moved the bed from the opposite side of the room to the way it was when I first saw that light.  That might be why I had never noticed the light before.  Or maybe the light hadn’t ever been there before.   

  The next day I told Red about that light and he said it was just a street light or the moon shining in.  I told him I had checked that out and that wasn’t what it was.  That night when we went to bed, I told him to look at the landing.  He looked out at the landing and I asked him if he saw that light that looked like it came from the stairway and he said yes.  I asked him to see if he could find out where it was coming from.  So he said it’s from the moon or a street light.  I asked him to show me.  So we got up and he couldn’t find the moon or any street light that was shining in any of the windows. He did agree that it looked like it originated in the middle of the stairway.  He also agreed that even if the moon or a street light ever shined through one of our windows, it couldn’t possibly be seen only in the middle of the stairway and nowhere else.  He said he just didn’t know where it was coming from, but he didn’t seem near as curious about it as I was.  That light was there every night after I first saw it, and I don’t know how long it had been there before I noticed it.  It might have always been there, or might not have been there at all before that. I almost never needed to go downstairs in the middle of the night, but any time I did go down, as soon as I started down the stairs that light disappeared. When I came back up the stairs I didn’t see it at all until I got to the top of the stairs.  Then it would be there again.   I don’t have a clue or any idea at all of what that light was about or where it came from.