10-17-2022 4:33am

Resident Spooks Haunt Joan and Mike

[According to renowned ghost story writer Charles J. Adams III, the Boyertown area has more than its fair share of ghostly events. If you know a good local ghost story, please contact us. We would enjoy sharing it. Contact Lesley at: expressioneditor1@gmail.com or Contact Jane at: Janeestahl@comcast.net ]

Today’s ghostly events are submitted by Craig Bennet, excerpted from his soon-to-be-published book More Things in Heaven and Earth. Craig is a familiar persona at Studio B Art Gallery. He often participates in the gallery’s writing events and has offered excerpts of his previous book, Nights on the Mountain, a spiritual journey, for the gallery’s annual anthologies of poetry and prose from local writers. Former students of English who attended Boyertown Junior High East may remember Craig as their teacher.

Resident Spooks Haunt Joan and Mike

by Craig Bennet

I have friends who live in a haunted house. Several years ago, Joan, whom I’ve known since high school, inherited a grand old Victorian home dating from late in the nineteenth century. It’s situated on a corner property a block above the main street in my home town, and I used to pass it every day for several years on my way to and from elementary school. When her uncle died and willed the property to her, she and her husband, Mike, decided to move in. Unfortunately, the house had not been very well maintained in recent times, so extensive renovation was necessary. But, within a relatively short time, they were living in a beautifully restored Victorian-era home back in the area where Joan had grown up.

At the time that they were getting the house ready to move into, I was living just around the block—literally. I quickly became re-acquainted with Joan, whom I had seen only a few times since graduation from high school, and found that she had married someone who seemed just as pleasant and unaffected as she herself had always been when we were classmates together. I’ve since spent some very enjoyable times visiting with them and swapping tales of our various adventures in growing up—and, much to my surprise, listening to their experiences with the ghosts who also live in their house.

I should mention here that Joan and Mike are both intelligent, well-educated people. Mike is a retired university department head with a doctorate, and Joan is retired from a career as a public school teacher. They have their feet solidly on the ground. They are not given to gross exaggeration, spinning fictitious yarns for effect, religious fundamentalism, or holding a general world view that is significantly different from that held by most of the population. Consequently, when they told me something, I had no reason to question it. That’s why I was rather surprised with Joan fist mentioned the ghosts

Not long before, she had to get up sometime through the night. There was enough light coming through the windows from the street outside that she didn’t bother turning on the beside lamp. But as she slid out of the bed and stood up, something in the nearest corner of the room caught her eye. It was a small group of about five people who were standing there watching her. As she described them in an email, there were “an older gentleman and a young boy in the foreground, wearing clothing from the 1920’s. The older man resembled Jim’s grandfather, and the boy resembled Jim as a child. In the background, there were 3 women dressed in the same period of clothing. They resembled Jim’s mother, Ellie, and her two sisters, Kate and Lilian, who grew up in the house.” (“Jim” is Joan’s uncle, from whom she inherited the house, and she recognized the others from old family photographs.) They did not move or make any motions toward her; they simply watched her in silence

She said that she felt no fear at this encounter. They apparently posed no threat. She went ahead and did what she had to do and crawled back into bed. But when she somewhat hesitantly told Mike about it the next morning, he looked a bit stunned and asked, “You saw them, too?” He had apparently seen them some time before, down at the end of an upstairs hallway; but he was reluctant to say anything, even to his wife. In our culture, this seems like a perfectly logical reaction. His eyes may have been playing tricks on him, or some other explanation may have accounted for what he thought he saw, for what he thought he saw surely could not have been real. And then his wife reported having seen the same thing

In fact, it may not have been quite so much of a surprise to either of them as it could have been. It seems that while the house was still being renovated, one of the workmen informed them that he would not work in the house without someone else present. He said that he had never actually seen anything that might have accounted for this, but he was convinced that there was “something” in the house of whose presence he had become uncomfortably aware on a few previous occasions when he was working there by himself.

The Clock
The incident I find most intriguing, however, is that of the clock. One of the antique items left in the house when Joan and Mike moved in was a Regulator-type wall clock. Not surprisingly, it was not in working order. Having it repaired, however, was not especially high on their priority list. So the clock remained still, its small pendulum stationary, and its antiquated face showing the same hour and minute from one midnight to the next. After a while, however, Joan began to feel is if she’d like to have the clock running. They had gotten pretty well settled into the house, things in general were going smoothly, and there was little that demanded their attention at home except for a few loose ends here and there that had previously been ignored in favor of much more pressing concerns. Mike is uncommonly handy for an academic, and she began to ask him now and then if he could take a look at the clock and see if it was repairable.

However, Mike has his own projects that keep him occupied and out of trouble, so he did not respond immediately to his wife’s request. Then one day after a little time had passed, she happened to notice that the clock was working: the pendulum was swinging back and forth behind the glass plate of its enclosure, the works inside the cabinet were emitting a quiet tick-tock-tick-tock—and the face was showing the correct time. Taking this as a pleasant little surprise from her husband, she thanked Mike for finally fixing the clock. But he looked at her with a slightly puzzled expression and declared, “I haven’t touched the clock.” And he was not kidding.