Bed, Breakfast & Beyond (eBook)

Chapter 11

Ghosts of Fairwinds Past

I pestered Ted to the point where he finally called Dan back.

“My wife wants to know about the…ghosts,” I heard him say in a “you know how women are” tone. I stood by and watched as he listened, rolled his eyes, mumbled “uh-huh, hmmmm…really?” every so often as the story unfolded on the other end. When he finally hung up, I pounced.

“What did he say?”

“Well, it is kind of interesting, actually,” Ted admitted. “But I still don’t believe it.”

According to Dan, several unexplained incidents had occurred when he and his sister moved in. The first came from the construction workers hired to work on the house. It seems that the men heard someone knock insistently on the door one day during a light snow. When one of them went to the door, no one was there. He turned back to his work. Another knock. Again, no one there. Stranger still, when he looked out into the yard, there were no footprints in the snow leading up to the door. The workers also discovered on several occasions that their tools, which they had placed in specific spots, had been moved, or even hidden.

And Dan had a story of his own. One night he and his sister walked through the kitchen, turning out the lights before retiring. The next morning when they came downstairs, lights were on, kitchen cabinet doors were open along with the drawers, and chairs were pulled out from the table in the kitchen and the dining room.

“Wow!” I said. “I wonder who the ghosts are?”

“There aren’t any ghosts, I tell you!” Ted insisted.

“Oh, stop it. There could be ghosts. How do you know there aren’t?”

“Well, he did say one more interesting thing…”

“What?”

“A young man who used to live here hung himself in the barn.”

“WHAT?” I screeched. “And you don’t believe that his tortured soul may still be wandering the property?”

“Oh, brother,” Ted sighed. “Can we stop worrying about ghosts and start to get some work done around here?”

The truth is, I wasn’t worried about ghosts at all. I was fascinated. I thought it would be kind of cool to have an apparition or two floating around. After all, have you ever heard of a ghost hurting anyone?

A few weeks later, after I had dropped the kids off at school (they were still attending their school in Delaware, and we were still living and working at the other farm part time) I drove out to Fairwinds, planning to rip more of the old green cabinets off the kitchen wall. When I entered the kitchen, I heard a noise upstairs. I stopped and listened. It sounded like a woman walking across the floor in high heels.

“Hello?” I yelled. I fully expected an answer. We were getting used to friends and family coming to visit, walking through the house, checking it out. “Is anybody up there?” No reply.

For some reason I didn’t think much of it. I knew what I heard, but I was too busy thinking about the work to be done to give it a second thought.

When Ted arrived with the boys later that night I suddenly remembered the incident and told him about it.

“Oh, yeah?” he said distractedly. Like me, he was thinking about his next project. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that he suddenly became interested. I came into the house to find him hanging up the phone with a strange look on his face. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“That was Dan,” he said. “I called him to ask him about some of the wiring in the house.”

“And?”

“I was just about to hang up when he said, ‘by the way, have you heard the woman walking around upstairs in high heels?’”

We stared at each other. I got chills.

A few weeks later, we decided to stay in the house over the weekend. The boys took the opportunity to invite their two cousins of the same age over for a sleepover. All we had at that point were mattresses on the floor in two of the rooms, but to four young boys, this was an adventure. They stayed up past midnight, listening to the radio and playing cards. After we had finally settled them down in their room, we fell into an exhausted sleep on our mattress in the room across the hall.

Suddenly, I sat bolt upright, startled awake by deafening music. Ted and I both jumped from the mattress and ran to the other room. The radio was playing at full volume. I fumbled with the dial in the dark, finally getting it turned off. Ted found the lamp switch. The light revealed an empty room.

“Zach?” I yelled. “Nick? Where are you guys?” No answer. We ran to the other end of the hall, only to find another vacant room.

I started to panic.

“Calm down,” Ted said. “They probably went outside.”

It was the end of October, chilly enough for me to stop and put on a sweater as I followed Ted out. Approaching the bank barn, I noticed a faint glow in the dark. As we rounded the corner, there stood all four boys, just outside the lower entrance of the barn, huddling around a small bonfire they had managed to build. In the wheelbarrow—the plastic wheelbarrow.

“What the…?” As the words came out of my mouth, the fire melted through the hard plastic. Fire and wood came crashing through the bottom of the wheelbarrow, sending up a shower of sparks and lit paper, some of which flew into the bank barn where a stack of straw bales sat near the door.

“Ted!” I yelled. We ran into the barn. Sparks were glowing on the top bale. I grabbed a saddle pad and started beating out the sparks while Ted ran to the end of the aisle and flew back with a bucket of water. He dumped half the bucket on the bale and the other half on the fire outside. I ran to get another bucket. The boys had backed away and were standing in a semicircle, mouths agape. I threw water on the smoking embers on the ground. Ted was in the barn, throwing bales out the door to make sure there were no wayward sparks inside. Then he emerged.

With one look at Ted’s face, the boys took off running. When we got back to the house, they were on their mattresses, lights out, pretending to be asleep.

Minutes after collapsing on our own mattress, I sat bolt upright for the second time that night.

“Hey!” I whispered, shaking Ted’s shoulder.

“What? I’m awake,” he mumbled.

“Hey! What about the music? The radio came on out of nowhere! I bet it was the ghost, warning us that something was wrong!”

I expected a skeptical groan, but there was no response.

“How do you explain that?”

“Hmmmph,” he grunted.

We never did come up with an explanation.

***

A couple of years later, we had two other ghostly occurrences, both involving guests. In the first, a single woman traveling with horses left her barn boots in the office overnight. The next morning I was in the kitchen when she came down to go out and feed her horses. She spent a few minutes in the office and then stuck her head into the kitchen.

“Excuse me,” she said, “did you happen to see my bootlaces?”

“Bootlaces?” I answered. “Aren’t they in your boots?”

She shook her head as I followed her into the office. She pointed. Sure enough, both boots stood forlornly, missing their laces.

“I, I, I have no idea.” I sputtered.

Just then Ted came in from the barn. At the sight of two women staring at boots, he asked the obvious question.

“What’s going on?”

“Did you take the laces out of her boots for some reason?” I asked stupidly.

“No, why would I do that?”

“Well, they’re missing.”

He joined us in staring at the hapless boots. If someone had taken a picture of the three of us, it may have been funny. Then he pointed his finger in the air.

“I bet the cat did it,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Oh, yes, that’s it.” I said, “The cat grasped the laces carefully in her claws and untwined each one from its hole, and then carried them off. The cat is talented, but not that talented!”

The guest eventually left sans bootlaces. We never found them.

In the second strange case, a single father checked in with his two boys, ages five and eight. After settling them in, Ted and I went out to dinner. Our own boys were staying with my mother for the weekend.

When we got home, our guest was sitting on the couch in the living room. He said that he had put his boys to bed. We sat down, and after a few minutes of small talk, he suddenly said, “You know you have ghosts, don’t you?”

“Ghosts?” Ted said innocently.

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen several tonight.”

He proceeded to describe each ghost, and exactly where he had seen it in the house. Apparently we were hosting a couple of women in colonial type dresses and a tall...