Jennifer Shaw

Three weeks ago, I wrote about how we keep witches out of our house.

The ghosts, I’m not so sure about. And honestly, I don’t really want them gone.

In 2021, right after we moved into our little 1800 Vermont farmhouse, we began experiencing things that were difficult to explain.

In those earliest weeks, Jer and I woke up multiple times to the smell of scrambling eggs and frying bacon. Seriously, it was like someone silently making a full-on breakfast downstairs.

“What the hell?” We’d look at each other, and after staggering down to start the coffee–can’t deal with spirits until you’ve had some caffeine–we’d see nothing beyond the dim kitchen and cold stove. The aroma, too, had subsided, or we’d quickly gone nose-blind.

Could that smell have been steam inside the floorboard radiators?

Except it was June. The heaters weren’t on, and, generally, steam doesn’t smell like bacon.

We let it go. There was a lot to do to settle in, and as long as this little old house was functioning in one piece, we weren’t too concerned.

These aromatic encounters didn’t last through our first year. Maybe the ghosts accepted the reality of new inhabitants. Who knows?

More recently, though, we’ve experienced other things, like being touched.

It happened to Jer first. He’d gone into the basement one day to get the dehumidifier to empty outside. When he came back up with it, he said something like, “That was weird.”

“What?”

“Something touched my head on the way down. I felt it very clearly.”

Then, earlier this year, I was washing dishes at the sink when I felt a cupped hand caress the side of my skull. It happened just once, but it was distinct.

I shrieked and nearly left my skin. Swiping frantically at my head, my first thought was a spider had somehow landed there. We have wolf spiders in our basement, and they occasionally make surprise appearances on the first floor. In my initial panic, I thought one had somehow landed on me Arachnophobia-style.

Hell to the NO.

I made my husband run both his hands all through my hair and down the back of my shirt. I even lifted up my shirt and bra for him.

“Nothing’s there, I promise.” Then he grinned. “But that’s nice.”

Only when calm could I acknowledge what I’d felt was more like an intentional, tender hand than the legs of an errant arachnid. I’d say a human hand except no one was in the kitchen with me.

The second time it happened, a few months later, I was much calmer. In fact, it was kind of nice.

“Hi, Lucille,” I replied, naming the odd, deceased aunt of the man from whom we bought this long-standing family property. She lived here alone in the 1990s and apparently still plowed the fields using a horse, according to Shane, the seller.

Another time, Jer was at the toaster and I was snacking at our breakfast bar, and he turned to me.

“Was that you?”

“What?”

“Something just touched my shoulder.”

“Oh… not me. Must have been the ghost.”

That’s become a not-infrequent saying around here.

We’ve never seen anything strange, but when my mother stayed with us a couple years ago, she was sleeping in Daphne’s twin bed, where she could see straight into our master bedroom. Daph was between me and Jer in our room and slept soundly through that night.

In the morning, Mom asked how long Daphne was awake.

“She wasn’t. Did you see something?”

“I thought I saw her up and walking around the foot of your bed.”

“She was between us the entire night, as far as I remember.”

“Oh.” Mom looked rather disturbed. “I thought I saw someone walking around.”

Hmm.

What’s been most frequent–and sometimes unnerving, I’ll admit–are the sounds.

A voice, once. Jer came out one morning after I’d dropped Daph at school, casually sipping his coffee. I’d just finished the chicken chores.

“How long have you been out here?”

“About fifteen minutes. Why? What happened?”

“Oh,” he shrugged. “Someone was just humming and singing upstairs.”

We hear bangs sometimes, too. Random whacks that might be the boiler or something related to it but don’t come from the basement. They sound much closer.

Uncle JT, who’s only four years older than my husband and visits us often, has said to Jer, “Your house is haunted as hell.”

He hears nocturnal thumping right outside his little guest room door, the door of our utility room where we’ve managed to fit a twin bed. The sound comes from the dining room, he says.

It freaks him out, he admits, but “I just keep the door shut and try not to think about it.”

For us, the sounds are usually footsteps. The sound of the old wooden floor creaking under shifting weight.

We hear these footsteps everywhere, including Daph’s room and our bedroom, and especially at night, when we’re already in bed.

At this point, we’re used to them. Often, when I’m just under the surface of sleep, I’ll register them, give myself a moment to decide if they’re actually outside myself or inside my head, and then I’ll turn over, letting them go, and the night is peaceful.

The energy in this old house isn’t malevolent. It’s only ever felt warm and benevolent. Super cozy.

Mostly.

So, if there are spirits here, I believe they approve of us. We’ve tried hard, after all, to be loving and respectful caretakers of this wonderful old property.

Maybe the ghosts even care about us. One time Daphne was on the edge of a meltdown, and she was cuddled up with my husband on the couch. Jer felt something like a warmth and phantom weight suddenly beside them, enveloping them. It was comforting, he said, like a phantom hug.

Isn’t that nice?

Only once have strange sounds truly frightened me. This was also my most vivid encounter with this weird energy to date.

It was late, around 3 am one Sunday morning last September, when we were still brooding a batch of baby chicks indoors.

I was wide awake, my rational brain hard at work. I was writing on my laptop downstairs in the well-lit living room, laboring to get a short story edited for a looming deadline. I was totally immersed in the piece, but then I heard that familiar sound. The footsteps.

I paused, wondering if either Jer or Daphne was awake, maybe using the upstairs bathroom or up playing. If Daph gets up in the middle of the night–rare, thank goodness–she requires supervision.

I listened, hearing the steps again. They were erratic, pausing and starting, wandering it seemed, like someone was shuffling around in the same general place. But the sounds were softer than my daughter’s steps; she drives all her weight into her feet, as sensory input I think, and she likes to stomp.

I realized–the noise was coming from the black dining room.

The outdoor floodlights weren’t on. I had not heard either bell hung on either outer door chime. I had not heard glass shattering.

Not an intruder. (That would be an entirely different scary story.)

I waited, fingers hovering over the laptop keys. Wondering how long these phantom sounds would last… what might happen next…

I was wide awake for it.

Then…

I heard our four chicks go nuts inside their plastic bin in the utility room, just off the dining room. All the sudden, they were squawking and flapping like little crazed banshees.

It was exactly the sound they made each time one of us lifted the screen off their brooder to change their water or shavings.

Dear. God. In. Heaven.

The blood drained from my body. My underarms were soaked, despite my goosebumps.

My lungs became lead, and I truly struggled for a minute to breathe.

All those classic symptoms, and I absolutely felt them.

It’s rare for me to remember specific past thoughts, but I remember these:

It’s probably nothing. Or it’s something you can explain.

If it isn’t, then it’s just energy. IT CAN’T HURT YOU…

My prefrontal cortex literally had to fight my lizard amygdala in order to calm myself.

After that, everything went silent. Susie, Jeanie, Mimi, and Daisy all settled.

Once I could breathe, and move, I saved my document one more time, closed my laptop, left it perched on the broad arm of the couch, and slipped upstairs, leaving the lights on, electric bill be damned. I slid by that two-hundred-year-old dining room as fast as I could, eyes averted. I made it upstairs untouched, thank you great, good Lord above, and slid into bed against my husband.

In retrospect, I was terrified not so much because I felt physically threatened, but because I was suddenly, and so acutely, experiencing something I simply could not explain. And it had gone on and on, it seemed, for several minutes.

That’s it, isn’t it, really?

That fear of the unknown. What we can’t rationalize, what we cannot in the moment understand.

That’s at the heart of it all, I think.

All the terror.

But, that was one moment, and it was mostly me, I believe. Caught off guard.

“Maybe Lucille just wanted to see the chicks for herself,” Jer said later. “To make sure we’re taking good care of them.”

Maybe?

I am a rational person. I believe in physics, science, and empiricism. I believe that the simplest, most logical explanation is often the right one.

But I also know there is so, so much none of us can understand about the universe.

Sometimes, Jer and I talk about how time, a human construct anyway, isn’t as simple and linear perhaps as we Westerners believe. Maybe it’s much more complicated and cyclical, like a chain, and these ghostly encounters are really just the past and present brushing up against each other, or momentarily overlapping, The Others-style. I like that thought (and the idea that I’m Nicole Kidman).

I don’t mind sharing space with benign spiritual energy, the warm-hearted residents of the past. They were here first, after all, and maybe they’re still here living their own lives, and I respect that.

“Can you imagine them hearing Daphne scream and stomp in their time, in 19- or 1825?” Jer has said. “How terrifying would that be?”

“‘That’s one pissed off ghost,’” I said.

We laughed.

But, I’ll be honest. I will never bring a Ouija board into this house. And I don’t go downstairs after midnight unless I have to.

Thanks for reading! If you feel inclined to share any strange or supernatural experiences of your own, please drop them in the comments! I eat this stuff up.

Happy Halloween, everyone! I hope it’s spooky and fun.

We all need some fun after everything that’s gone on this year (that’s the real horror, but I’m not getting into it here.)

See you next week!

XOXO,

Jenn