A Ghost Story

Once upon a time, I lived and worked at a bed and breakfast. It was a brand new business venture for four different individuals who were dead-set on producing a product that would eventually become very, very good. A retired professor of psychology and amateur history buff, Wayne was the bank for the operation. His son Roger would be head of maintenance operations. I was the hired guru of food and service. Michele was enticed away from her homeland of Trinidad to become the Inn’s Chatelaine, the lady of the house.
The Inn is a restored mansion (circa 1855) and stands four stories proud. There are ten guestrooms, each with their own bath. Beautiful woodwork, original fireplaces and a wrap-around deck, romantically adorned with a wall of rose bushes. It was quite the undertaking.
The Inn’s original owner was named Audrey. That’s called foreshadowing.
The first step in our new venture was getting the house ready for guests. Wayne and Roger spent their days on landscaping projects and other aesthetically-pleasing features. I painted all ten guestrooms, each a different color from the Civil War Era palette. Michelle worked on handcrafted curtains and the sort, adding a lady’s touch throughout the home.
One Saturday morning (the day of my ghost enlightenment), I was in the basement, the first floor of the house. I had an office ‘area’ set up beside my little apartment room. My other three Musketeers had left for the day, leaving me to myself. All alone. In that great big building. I was checking e-mails and working on Web site promotion, when something dawned on me. Why am I working while the rest of the gang is off playing? Well, I'd do a few more things and then kick off for the rest of the day. But my competitive spirit got the better of me. The Ashby Room needed just a mattress in order to become the first guestroom completely readied to receive guests. What a heap of guilt I could hold over the others if I could simply move a queen-sized mattress from the first floor up to the third floor. By myself. My hardheaded self.
I slid the mattress to the bottom of the basement stairwell. This was going to be the hard part of the journey. Utilizing the weight of my beer belly and the never-lose mentality of my caveman brain, I forcefully bent the mattress into a u-shape that conformed to the angle of the rickety old basement stairs. Up ten more steps and leg one of the journey was complete. I slid the mattress over to the landing of the grand staircase that led up to the third floor. A queen-sized mattress was not going to defeat the king of furniture moving. After twenty-five minutes, forty stair steps and three heart attacks, we had arrived at our goal of reaching the third floor. I leaned the mattress against the hallway wall and began a well-deserved ‘king of the mountain’ break. Just as my mind questioned “where in the heck is my open can of lemon-flavored, Lipton Iced Tea”, the mattress fell from its resting wall onto the top of the stairway’s handrail. My drink, which had been sitting on the top of the handrail, fell through the open gap of the winding stairwell and landed with a clunk on the floor below. “Son-of-a-gun!” A sweetened beverage spilling across the original hardwood floors. What kind of reward was this for my ‘above and beyond’ efforts? I stomped downstairs to assess the damages. Despite a few drops splashed across an area throw rug, the undented can sat ominously upright. “Geez, that’s kindda weird.”
After lunch, I plopped my tired, achy body back in front of my computer desk. You know that feeling that you get when someone walks behind you, you can’t see them, but you sense that they are there. I got that feeling and it came from the older section of the cellar, fifteen feet or so from my desk. I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing, my attentions returned to my desk work. The feeling happened several more times over the next twenty minutes. So strong a feeling that it led me to red wine and out the basement’s back door. It’s a beautiful afternoon, there IS no one here, and I’m a grown man. Go back into the house, silly.
Audrey is buried in the cemetery just down the hill from the Inn. It is rumored that during the latter stages of her life, she had developed a brain tumor or cancer. The medical experts of the time determined it to be a mental illness and she was confined to an institution up north for the remainder of her lifetime. She loved her beautiful estate and vowed to return home one day.
As far as I can tell, after days of research on the subject, you have three categories of ghostly, undead spirits. Casper, the friendly one. A murdered Patrick Swayze, romantic ex-lover type. And lastly, the Amityville Horrors situation, were you develop red welts on your chest after being levitated two feet above your bed, your husband sees an image of a man with his head blown off, and your daughter develops an imaginary friend named “Jodie”, a demonic pig-like creature with glowing red eyes. I was hoping that Audrey was friends with Casper.
One morning around 7 AM, my Caribbean princess Michelle comes strolling into my kitchen domain. Eyes very wide open, she asks if I had watered the hangings plants in the sitting room. The only plants that I had ever watered were the bushes out by the barn that I had pissed on. Seems that after an evening of being ‘alone’, the plants’ baskets were dripping water all over the handcrafted window seats.
In the same sitting room one day, I had joined a gentleman in conversation as he waited for a friend to join him. We sat on opposite sofas; my line of sight over his left shoulder was of the butler’s kitchen and its open folding door. As we chit-chatted about nothing important, I watched as the folding door slowly closed. I politely excused myself because I had just remembered that I had a very important errand to run. It ran from that sofa to the back yard. He was paying to be there, so that’s where I left him.
A loud boom had Michelle and I running from opposite ends of the Inn to a spot near the laundry room. We triangulated and found the source of the noise. A 2 gallon, Costco brand container of liquid laundry soap had fallen to the ground from its resting place above the washing machine. Could happen to anyone. The vibrations of a commercial-sized washer spinning a full load of linens could easily have been the cause. Problem was. No linens. Not spinning. No reason.
I once hosted an afternoon tea for eight local women. I spent my morning creating different scones, cookies and crumpets. Standing facing the kitchen’s oven, I spun around after the startling crash of the gallon container of vegetable oil that had knocked open the pantry’s door from the inside. As I told the story to my ladies’ group, one lady jokingly suggested that Audrey was hinting that a recipe had needed more oil. (Wait, or was that a back handed insult from that old lady?
Doors slam and floors creak. It’s just the nature of an old house.
As I gave tours of the Inn to newly arriving guests, one question would occasionally be asked. “Are there any ghosts?” My blunt reply “Do you want there to be any?” To the interested, I presented Audrey’s story, which grew more elaborate over time. To the rest, it was room keys and breakfast times.
And the following happened more than once with un-Audrey-knowledgeably guests. As they entered the breakfast nook in the morning, they’d stop and ask “Do you have ghosts here in the Inn?” Michelle and I would look at each other and laugh, then slowly ask the person a drawn-out “W..h..y? Seems that during the night, they had the overwhelming feeling that someone was sitting in the chair at the foot of the bed, staring at them as they tried to fall asleep.
We didn't have a set time for breakfast. One Sunday morning, all of our guests had eaten, checked out and departed. Except for one young couple who didn't come for breakfast until almost 10:30. As we patiently waited as they enjoyed their meal, a loud series of obvious footsteps crossed the bedroom floor above us. Michelle and I looked at each other and we began laughing nervously. Someone had to go check and see who was up there. I was busy banging skillets around, pretending to cook for a dozen new guests. But there weren't really any new patrons for which to cook. Or was there? Being the spirited soul, Michelle gladly fell for my antics and up the stairs she went. But, of course, no one was there.
Once we were host to a sweet, elderly couple who spent the entire week with us. The husband didn’t get around well, so when the wife wanted to go explore the town, Michelle would sit and talk with the old man. Entertaining him for hours with her usual warmth and grace. At the end of the week, after settling up their tab, the gentleman pawed through a wad of cash, looking for something extra to give to Michelle as an expression of gratitude for her attentiveness. I don’t know the final gift, but the man became insistent that he should have a ten dollar bill among his huge roll of paper currency. The couple bantered back and forth about the ‘missing’ ten, in a loving way like many old couples do. The four of us searched up and down the stairs, and then throughout their guestroom, never finding so much as a penny. Finally, there were hugs and handshakes. And on their merry way they went.
After all the guests left us at the end of a busy weekend, there would be a ton of cleaning and laundry to begin. I still had a kitchen to clean that weekend, but tried to help Michelle with stripping beds. We were up and down the stairs for hours, from guestroom to laundry room and back again. The house seems extra quiet after the crowd would leave us and you’d find yourself deep in thought as you went about the inglorious part of inn keeping. I was snapped out of my trance by Michelle. Her beautiful smile always made me laugh and in the King’s best English, she began accusing me of something that I ‘must have done’. After countless trips over the blue, eight-foot Oriental rug that graced the grand stairway’s landing, she had noticed the green ten dollar bill lying there on the rug, for the entire world to see.
It wasn’t Michelle. It wasn’t me. There was no one else in the house. Or was there.