OPINION: Our house is haunted and the ghost seems to like us

I live in a haunted house. It’s been haunted for at least a century now by all accounts . . . I mean by all the neighbours’ accounts. As a writer I rely heavily on the neighbours for inspiration and they have always been a reliable source of suspect information.

There was a woman who lived here many years ago . . . Mad Katherine . . . she developed rabies, lost her mind and leapt to her death from the upstairs window. The neighbours heard her shrieks and ran to the scene but by the time they got here it was too late. The house was abandoned after her death. People tried to live in it but all of them were driven out by the ghost. Kenny Jardine, the old bachelor across the road, told me after I bought the place that each tenant heard a scratching sound like fingernails scratching at the window-pane. They said that was Mad Katherine trying to get back into the house.

I’m not superstitious. I wrote up Kenny’s ghost story for a laugh in one of my magazines and promptly received an angry letter from a reader, a Doctor Jardine, a cousin of Kenny’s from the other side of the country who said no member of the Jardine family had ever contracted rabies and some may have fallen off barn roofs but none had ever jumped out a window to their death. The doctor pointed out that my house is a storey and half and the upstairs window offered a fall of only 12 feet, which in his experience was seldom fatal.

I thought that laid the thing to rest and after the renovations were complete and it came time to spend my first night in the house I had no particular concern. I was alone. It was a dark night in the fall, just about like tonight. The wind was up. Our wind leaves Winnipeg, travels 1,500 miles across the Great Lakes, swoops down off the Escarpment and the first solid object it encounters is my house. Each gust slammed into it, straining the timbers to the breaking point. The house would lurch to the east, creak and go ‘wubba-wubba-wubba.’ And then it would lurch back into its rest position. This went on for more than two hours during which I experienced a period of sleeplessness. That word doesn’t quite capture it. It was the most severe case of wide-awakefulness I think I have ever known. Then about one o’clock in the morning the wind suddenly dropped and the moon came out, throwing shadows across the floor. In the stillness I heard a faint sound from downstairs. Scratching. It sounded very much like fingernails on a windowpane. Scratch. Scratch, followed by a flutter, flutter and then a thump.

The scratching went on and on. The part of my brain I like the best said, ‘Don’t go downstairs.’ I went downstairs. Scratch, scratch . . . flutter, flutter . . . and then a thump.

The scratching was not coming from the window pane. It was coming from behind me, in the corner of the kitchen where the wood stove sat. I approached the stove. There was a flutter in the stovepipe and a muffled cry. Scratch, scratch . . . flutter flutter . . . thump. There was something in the stovepipe. A bird.

I opened wide the kitchen door (darkness there and nothing more), unscrewed the stove pipe and out hopped a raven. . . . a grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore. . . Well, it wasn’t big enough to be a raven. But it was very black and covered with soot. Okay, it was a starling.

It sat there, staring at me with a beady eye. It blinked a few times and then leapt off the stove and flew straight into the kitchen wall, which I had just painted. Then it hit the ceiling and the wall again. Then it flew into the living room and hit a lamp shade. It did about four laps of the downstairs, leaving black smudges on everything it hit. Finally it found the door and flew out into the night.

That seemed to lift the curse. I wrapped some chicken wire around the top of the chimney and repainted the kitchen and I have not had any more visitations. My wife is a farm girl and very superstitious about people passing each other on stairs or leaving new shoes on the table. She says there is a presence here and it is a friendly one. She thinks it was just lonely with that long stretch of emptiness. But now the place is full of dogs and people and chaos and our ghost isn’t lonely anymore.

There is still a faint smudge from the raven on the wall. I’ve tried painting over it but the shadow is still sitting just above my kitchen door.  Unless I wallpaper it, I fear that shadow shall be lifted . . . nevermore.