Musical Ghost

From: Arlea Anschutz (anschutz@ucsu.colorado.edu)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA
Source: EMail Submission

When I was five years old, our family moved into a Victorian house in which we experienced a lot of weird phenomena. I lived there until I was eighteen. I'll recount here the one experience that I remember most vividly.

The house I grew up in was the prototypical "spookhouse". Old and creepy with nine rooms, a creaking spiral staircase, a trap-door to the cellar and another trap-door to the attic. When my mother dug post-holes for a dog-fence in the backyard, she unearthed several tombstones.

The house had been built by the Swain family and had remained in their possession from (approx) 1865-1965, when the last family member, Jesse Swain died of old age. Curiously, Jessie had a good friend and boarder who stayed in the house for several years by the name of Ann Schutz. Hers was one of the gravestones dug up in the backyard. Our family name is Anschutz.

My mother is obsessed by things Victorian and wanted to buy the house as soon as she saw it. The house seemed to want her too, since it suddenly hit the market at exactly the price my parents could afford (and they were quite poor) at just the time they decided they needed a bigger house (my Mom was pregnant with her fifth kid). Over the years, my parents told us about several encounters they'd had with ghosts in the house.

Late one Saturday night when I was about 14, I was up watching "The Ghoul" host silly 50's monster movies on TV in the living room while the rest of my family was asleep. Around 2 am I heard some noises coming from the adjoining dining/music room --the room which contained the dining room table and china hutch as well as a piano and old Victrolla phonograph. There was a "bump, bump, bump" noise, and, as I listened, some discourdant sounds from the piano. It sounded as though an enthusiastic child were hitting random piano keys. I got up, turned on the lights in the living room, and turned off the TV. I attributed the fear I felt to the monster movie and logically deduced that one of our three cats must be trapped in the dining room and running across the piano, although none of the cats had previously exhibited this behavior.

I opened the door and reached in to turn on the light before stepping into the dining room. I immediately discovered the source of the bumping noise. The phonograph needle was down and the turntable was going around. No record was playing, so the needle was just bumping against the turntable and being amplified by the speaker. The old Victrolla was operated by a crank --you have to wind up the turntable, so it was strange to find it going by itself. I searched the room for a cat, but didn't find one. I rationalized that perhaps someone had wound up the turntable and not played it, so that maybe a cat jumping on the phonograph could have dropped the needle-arm, and moved the switch to the "on" position. And a cat could have been running across the piano keyboard. This same cat would have snuck out of the room as I reached in to turn on the lights. I went to bed telling myself that there was a perfectly logical, if unlikely, explanation for the noises I heard.

The next day I went shopping at the mall with my mother and as we were eating lunch at a restaurant she told me that she had woken up about 2 am and seen the ghost of Fred Swain (the man who built and originally lived in our house) hovering above her bed. We know what he looks like from a charcoal portrait that my Mom found under the floorboards in the attic and consequently hung on the parlor wall. She described him as wearing some sort of choir robe. At that point I told her about the goings-on in the music room that I had discovered at (apparently) the same time she was having her visual experience. It was a few weeks later that my Mom found out that Fred Swain had belonged to the same choral society as my great-grandparents. We still don't know whether there was any particular significance to the date upon which Mr. Swain choice to musically entertain us.