The Haunted House

My parents had been hesitant about sending me to St George’s because I’d have to cross busy Halsted Street to get to school. But by spring, we’d moved to an apartment on Halsted anyway. The move must have been strictly economic, because the place was not an improvement. It was on the second floor of a dark 19^th century tenement behind another building fronting on Halsted. Our neighbors were mostly adults, war refugees from Lithuania and Germany, and there was no yard to speak of, just a mud square laced with clotheslines and lined with chinkers from the old coal furnace. Stray ailanthus seeds from the tree next door collected there and sprouted into tropical fronds. Ailanthus leaves stink when you crush them, and the long stems make resilient whips. But the landlord always came along and tore them out before the roots could undermine the sewers, so the few kids in the building played in the alley. Children who lived on Emerald Avenue, the residential street that shared an alley with Halsted, used to hang over their backyard fences and taunt us while we played, "Alley girl! Alley girl!"

Grandpa was alone now, so it didn’t make sense for him to keep his big apartment on Emerald Avenue. But he was reluctant to move back to Indiana where his other children lived. He had a part time job as a night watchman that was easy and paid well. And he felt at home in Bridgeport: it had a big Lithuanian community, and his sister and brothers lived there. Our Halsted Street flat had a third bedroom, so there was room for grandpa to live with us. From my parents’ perspective, his income would be an advantage. And when mom could find a job, which she surely must, grandpa would be available to baby-sit. So when we moved to Halsted, Grandpa came along.

We only lived in the Halsted Street apartment for about two years, but even now, 45 years later, I visit the place in dreams. I duck into the gangway next to Rose’s Dress Shop and walk the long narrow passage past Rose's and the flats behind. Past the dark square of dirt and ailanthus shrubs to another brick building in the rear-- our building-- an old three-flat with an elaborate crisscross of porches and grey painted stairways.

I am a grown up now. I don’t believe in ghosts. But if I were to choose an urban setting for a haunting, the Halsted Street flat would be perfect.

The place was a hold over from another century. There were pressed tin ceilings in the kitchen and jets for the original gaslights protruded from the walls. We used them to hang umbrellas and damp coats. Heat was provided by two gas space heaters vented into the leftover pipes from a coal-burning stove. And there was a creepy rear exit off the living room that was always icy cold even on the hottest summer day. You could see your breath.

No one in the building ever used the rear exit except for storage. The lights didn’t always work back there, and the steep winding staircase ended in a narrow door at the bottom that had been painted shut. We kept winter clothes on our landing and some things that had belonged to my cousin Johnny, an old record player, stacks of 78s. And there were some items the previous tenants had left, including a box of old toys. My mother thought they might come back for it someday.

We pushed the couch across the exit door to make more space in the living room. Sometimes, when I was left alone, I’d put on a sweater against the chill and push the couch away. Then, heart pounding, I’d fumble with the skeleton key and tiptoe into the hall to poke around in the toys I knew were there-- Mickey Mouse Club albums and a toy printing press. The other people wouldn’t come back to get them, I knew. Their children had outgrown them or maybe died, like Johnny, and that’s why they’d left their toys in this cold hallway.

We were in the apartment only a few months, when strange things started to happen. One afternoon I was counting the change from my piggy bank, when I heard a deep voice counting along with me, twenty-one, twenty-two. I was frightened. Was it the devil’s voice I heard, since money was the root of all evil?

Or was it grandpa’s? In one version of the memory, grandpa is there, laughing at me for throwing me off my count. But it wasn’t his voice I heard. In another version, I’m alone. I cap the lid on the bank and take it back to my room, tell no one. Only crazy people heard voices.

Another time I heard a voice counting my steps as I walked across the kitchen floor. I was sick that day, and I’d just woken from a nap. Maybe I was still dreaming.

Then one day, I was alone. My mother had recently found a job at a paper factory, and grandpa was supposed to be watching me, but he often slipped out after breakfast to buy a copy of Draugas, the Lithuanian newspaper, and gossip with his friends at the Lithuanian club. I’d promised not to leave the apartment, but he’d been gone a long time, and I was bored.

I was in the living room working on some drawings, when a movement made me look up. I glanced up just in time to see the blur of a small figure sprint across the kitchen at the end of the hall--a child, not much bigger than I was. Its features and shape were too blurred to tell whether it was a boy or a girl.

I froze. Stood up. Listened.

After a moment I called softly "Who’s there?" as if someone had knocked at the door. There was no sound. I could see that the front door was still closed. I knew it was locked. The chain was still on. How could the child have gotten in?

I clutched a pair of scissors to use as a weapon and slowly crept down the hall as quietly as I could, one step at a time. My heart was pounding in my ears, and I could barely breathe. At the end of the hallway I peeped my head around the corner to look into the rest of the kitchen.  My scissors clattered to the floor.

No one. No one was there.

Then what had I seen?

Later I would try to draw the figure. It looked like a horse-child, a blurred figure running with hair, or mane, streaming out behind. I couldn’t get it quite right.

The experience was similar to my first dream: the vision that can’t be explained, the urge to draw what I’d seen, the inability to really convey what I’d experienced.

I am a grown-up now. I don’t believe in ghosts. I think the voices I heard, the shape I saw, were flutterings of something in me, sprung from disruption in the family that came at about the same time, the tensions I must have felt but not understood.

But I keep thinking about going back to the Halsted Street flat one day. I’ll knock on the door and explain I’d lived there when I was a kid. Then, after a look around and sharing some reminiscences, I might ask if the new people had any of the experiences that I had there: ever heard the counting or saw a child dash across the kitchen when no one else was home....