Friday, October 30, 2009
Peggy
**********
The house on 36th Street looked like every other outdated and worn down house in the neighborhood. Most of the view from the road was obscured by a large tree in the front yard that was frustrating to mow around during the Spring and Summer.
The landlords split the house into two separate apartments. Two girls shared the two-bedroom/one bath upstairs, and three shared the three-bedroom/two bath downstairs.
I'm not even going to attempt to explain the layout of the upstairs, partly because I don't remember, and partly because it has nothing to do with the events that follow. But this is the layout of the basement:
(Yes, I drew this. No, I'm not good with Paint.)Amy and Emily had lived at the house for awhile before I moved in. We were already friends and I was anxious to get out of an unpleasant situation, so when their third roommate moved out, I jumped at the chance.
I hadn't been there long before I started to notice things Emily had been hesitant to talk about. Shadows and lights that had no apparent source. Alarm clocks going off in the middle of the night when they hadn't been set. Whispered voices when no one else was home and no televisions were turned on. Dishes falling out of the strainer next to the sink.
Most of the strange activity seemed to be centered around Emily's room. If you look at the diagram, you'll see there is only one way into her bedroom and bathroom. There is also only one way into the Furnace Room. It was not uncommon for Emily to feel like something had wandered out of the Furnace Room and into her bedroom.
We didn't open the door to the Furnace Room often, but getting anywhere near it was always very uncomfortable.
(I would love to get an EMF reading of that room. Looking back now, it was probably off the charts.)
For the sake of time, I'll just summarize the strangeness by saying that things got progressively creepier in our house. It got to the point where I didn't like being there alone, especially at night. There was never any direct threat, of course, but it felt like whatever was in our house did not have good intentions.
I can't remember when, exactly, we decided we had finally had enough, but Emily and I went to a friend for some help. I don't want to get into a religious or philosophical debate over the course of action we did or should have taken, but we are LDS and we asked to have our house blessed by our friend, Justin.
Justin didn't judge. In fact, he believed us when we told him we thought our house was haunted. He agreed to come over that Sunday afternoon when all three of us were home.
He was calm and polite when he arrived and wanted to walk through the house. Justin had been to the house plenty of times before, but never to expel unwanted visitors. He took his time. Amy and I sat in Emily's room while she showed him the bathroom and then opened the door to the Furnace Room.
"What is this?" Justin asked.
Emily explained that the room contained separate furnaces for each apartment, and acknowledged the boxes and things that had been stacked up by tenants that had long since moved out.
"No. What's this?" he repeated, picking something up from a shelf beside the door.
It was a black and white Senior picture of a young woman, and someone had scrawled
across the back."I've never seen this before," Emily said.
"Oh my gosh!" Justin gasped, dropping the photograph.
"It's smoking!" They both stared at it in shock. It was not dust. Smoke came up from the wallet-sized photo. Not dust. Smoke. Actual wisps of smoke. "I'm getting out of here," Emily said.
"Yeah, that's just too weird," Justin agreed.
They joined me and Amy and we all felt a little bit creeped out. We kneeled in a circle in the middle of Emily's room. There was no particular significance to our configuration. It was just convenient.
Justin started the blessing, which in the LDS church is essentially a prayer. We don't use holy water or walk through the house carrying a Bible or anything like that. He had only said a few words when I heard it, as clear as anything.
The Furnace Room door opened.
And then it closed.
I kept my eyes shut tight, but someone walked right through the center of our makeshift circle and out the bedroom door.
Justin stopped talking for just a moment.
I opened my eyes and looked around. Everyone else had their eyes closed, but only Emily seemed calm.
Justin finished the blessing.
"That was really weird." Amy was the first to comment.
"What was?" Emily asked.
"I...I heard the door open." Amy looked at us, expecting us to think she sounded crazy.
"I heard it too," Justin chimed in.
"Me too," I said.
"What are you guys talking about?" Emily asked.
Justin explained what he had experienced. It was exactly what I'd heard. Amy nodded in agreement.
"I didn't hear anything," Emily insisted.
I still felt uneasy. I knew I was *supposed* to feel better now. I'd heard the entity leaving, hadn't I?
But I couldn't shake the feeling that this wasn't over.
After Justin left, the temperature inside the apartment plummeted. We turned up the heater, put on sweaters, huddled under blankets. Nothing worked. It was freezing the rest of the day.
Over the next couple of weeks, a lot of the creepy stuff subsided. Strange lights still appeared in the windowless Living Room, and I still heard disembodied voices from time to time. But I wasn't as fearful anymore.
One day, about two weeks after Justin's visit, Amy and I sat in the Living Room watching TV. Emily came home from school. It was a rare weekday afternoon that we were all home at the same time.
"Hey," Emily greeted us as she passed through on the way to her bedroom.
It was a week or so after Emily's birthday, and she had not yet thrown away the dried remains of the roses her boyfriend had given her. They sat in a vase beside her bed, brown and sad.
Emily disappeared into her room.
Seconds later, she came back and said, "Ha ha, guys. Very funny."
Amy and I looked at each other. "What?" I asked.
"You guys are dumb. Which one of you did it?"
"Did what?" Amy asked.
Emily vanished back into her room and returned with something in her hand.
"Which one of you put this in the roses?"
She held up a black and white photograph of a young woman.
"Peggy!" I gasped.
Seeing our confusion, Emily said, "This picture was sitting in the roses. I know it wasn't there this morning. One of you guys put it there."
"Emily, I haven't been anywhere near your room," I said.
I really hadn't. In fact, I hadn't been home very long myself.
"I was in your room yesterday," Amy said. "But I definitely didn't put the picture there."
Emily tore the picture to pieces and walked into the kitchen to throw it in the garbage. "I'm done with this thing!"
I don't know how the picture got there. I don't even know where it came from in the first place. We had never seen it until the day Justin found it sitting on that shelf. But I know that things were mostly quiet after it was destroyed.
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"You know what they say. If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me."
~Clairee Belcher, Steel Magnolias