Haunted House Stories

My aunt Beatrice left me the farmhouse on Quarry Road, four acres of scrub maple, a barn with no roof left worth counting, and a note in the kitchen drawer written on the back of a feed-store receipt. It said: *Use the front stairs. Both directions. Every time.*

The house had two staircases, as many farmhouses do — a wide front flight for company and a narrow back flight boxed in behind the kitchen for the help nobody had employed in eighty years. The back stairs were closer to my bedroom by twenty feet. For a week I obeyed the note out of respect. In the second week I was carrying laundry and I did not.

Nothing happened on the stairs. That is important. The stairs were only stairs, cool underfoot, smelling of dust and old varnish. What happened was that when I came down into the kitchen there was a second cup on the table, upside down on a folded cloth, the way you set out a cup for someone you expect within the hour.

I washed it and put it away. The next morning it was out again. I used the back stairs deliberately that evening to see, and by the time I reached the bottom the kettle was warm. Not hot — warm, the temperature a kettle reaches about twenty minutes after it has boiled, which is the temperature of a kitchen where someone has just gone into the other room.

I stayed nine months, and I want to be honest about this: it was not a bad house. Whatever used the back stairs was tidy and early and made no sound. But every time I came down that way it set a place for one more person than there were people in the building, and by August it had begun setting two.

I sold in the spring. The buyers are a young couple with a baby. I left them the note in the kitchen drawer, and I underlined it, and I have never once heard from them — which I choose, most days, to take as good news.

The rent was two hundred dollars under market and the landlord met us in the alley rather than the office, which should have told us something. Thirty-one B had four rooms, a radiator that knocked, and a shared wall with thirty-one A, which had been vacant since the previous winter.

We heard the neighbours the first week. That was how we thought of it — the neighbours — even after the landlord confirmed the other half was empty and showed us the padlock to prove it. The sound came through around eleven at night: two voices, a man and a woman, talking at a pitch just below sense, with the rhythm of people who have been arguing so long they have both stopped listening.

My roommate Dana was the one who noticed the pattern. She had been on the phone that Sunday complaining about her thesis advisor, a long looping complaint she made in the same words most weeks. At eleven o'clock the wall gave it back to her. Not her voice — the woman's voice — but her sentences, her pauses, her small self-deprecating laugh in the right place.

We ran the experiment because we were twenty-two and frightened people do stupid, systematic things. We sat against the wall and told it something specific: a made-up story about a dog named Pilot who could open the refrigerator. We told it twice, on a Wednesday. On Friday at eleven the wall told us about Pilot, and it had improved the story. It had given the dog an ending.

We moved out in March. I went back once, years later, and thirty-one A was occupied — curtains, a bicycle in the yard, a wind chime. I stood on the sidewalk for a while and I could hear, through the open window, two people having the kind of argument that has been going on longer than the people having it.

I did not knock. I have thought about that decision more than I have thought about almost anything else in my life.

The Ashgrove Hotel closed its west wing in 1971 and never reopened it, and my job as night clerk included exactly one duty relating to that wing: on the first of each month I walked up with a flashlight and confirmed that the radiator in room eleven was still on. Not adjusted. Confirmed.

The manager, Verna, gave me no explanation beyond the practical one — pipes freeze, plaster cracks, insurance men ask questions. But she gave the instruction the way people give instructions they have inherited, without curiosity, the way you pass along a family recipe you have never questioned.

The wing was dark and dry and smelled of dust and salt. Every door stood open except eleven, which was closed but not locked, and behind it the room was warm — genuinely warm, twenty degrees above the corridor, warm enough to fog the little window that looked out at the sea. The bed was made. There was a chair by the radiator with a blanket folded over the arm.

In February the blanket was unfolded. In March it was on the chair seat, gathered, the way a blanket sits when someone has just stood up out of it. I mentioned this to Verna and she said, without looking up from the ledger, that the room got drafts.

In June I did something I regret. I turned the radiator down — not off, only down, two notches, because I wanted to know. For eleven nights the lobby was cold. Not the whole lobby: a column of cold about the width of a person, standing at the end of the front desk where a guest would stand to ask for a key, and it stayed there from midnight until four, and on the ninth night the desk bell rang once, politely, the way you ring when you have been waiting a while and are trying not to be rude.

I went up on the twelfth night and turned the radiator back to where I had found it, and I apologised out loud, which felt ridiculous and worked immediately. The lobby was warm again by morning. I worked at the Ashgrove another four years and I never missed a first of the month, and when I left I trained the boy who replaced me exactly as Verna had trained me: no explanation, no curiosity, just the one duty. Some hospitality is owed to guests who never checked out.

The cottage on Spruce Head came cheap in August, which should have warned us. It sat on a ledge above the water, painted the colour of old lobster traps, with a single door that opened onto a stone step worn smooth by the sea. The agent handed us the keys and said, as though it were a joke, that the house liked to be alone at high tide.

We laughed. The tide came in twice a day; we were not going to plan our meals around it. On the second morning I was still inside when the water reached the step, not over it, just level with it, and the cottage changed. The air became heavier, the way a room feels when someone has been breathing in it for a long time. The floorboards creaked in a pattern that matched no one walking.

My daughter found the photograph in a drawer in the bedroom: a woman in a long dark dress standing in the doorway with the sea at her ankles, smiling at whoever held the camera. On the back, in pencil: *Every high tide she walks through, looking for the one who promised to come back.*

We made a game of leaving before the water rose. It was easy enough for a week — a picnic, a drive into town, a walk on the rocks. Then one evening I stayed behind to wash dishes. The water came over the step while my back was turned, only an inch, and the woman walked through the kitchen. She did not look at me. She went to the window that faced the harbour and she waited there until the tide turned.

I did not tell my family. We left the next morning, a day early, and I left the keys on the step the way the agent had asked. From the car I saw the water reach the stone again, and I saw the door open, and I saw someone in a long dark dress look out as though she had heard us go.

The agent never returned our deposit. He said, when I called, that the cottage was always rented by people who left early, and that the owners were grateful for the extra cleaning day. I asked him who the woman was. He was quiet for a moment and then he said, 'I don't know her name. I just know she still believes somebody's coming.'