The Upstairs Hallway

I grew up in a big, old house in a former railroad town. The house is two full stories plus a full attic and full basement, so like, 4 full levels of house. When I was a kid, only the main floor and second floor were finished, but even just those floors were enough to make it big. The main floor has a dining room, a parlor, a sitting room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The second floor has four beds and a bath. It was built by one of the higher ups in the railroad who had lived in it for a few years, and then moved as the track reached further west. By the time my parents bought it in the late 80s, the city had had fallen into horrible disrepair, as had the house, and so they got it for a song.

The woman who sold it to them was middle aged, and oddly wasn't that concerned about money. She had received a higher bid for the house, but gave it to my parents because she thought they were a cute couple. She said something about how she had never found true romance in her life, and she was so happy for them.

So, the house has these giant glass windows and beveled glass doors that lead into the living room, and the first night after my parents moved in, about 1 am, they were awakened by the sound of glass shattering. Not just a rock through a window kind of crash, but a thundering crash that shook the house. Dad said it sounded like something out of the mall scene from that one Jackie Chan film. So he goes down stairs. Nothing is broken. He goes outside, nothing is broken.

The next night, same thing. He could feel the vibrations from the crash, but when he would go to check the living room, there was nothing. This went on for a few weeks until, at their wits end, they decided to have an exorcism performed on the living room. Nothing dramatic like a movie exorcism, just a consecrating sort of ceremony, and it worked. After that, the crashing in the middle of the night stopped.

A few years go by, and my parents start accumulating a lot of stuff, so they have a yard sale, and a nun shows up, and talks to my parents for a long time. This wasn't odd. They live in a highly catholic neighborhood. In fact, three of the neighboring houses were nunneries when I was a kid. The nun, who was older, gets to talking about the house. The house had been owned by an older catholic man with no family, and apparently he was going to pass the house on to her order when he died.

She informed us that, having no family, and few friends, he also traveled a lot and was in good health, but that he was getting older. On one of his travels he met a middle aged single nurse and they hit it off. They hit it off so well that he told her that if she would move in with him and take care of him until he died, he would leave the house to her instead. She agreed.

Now, he had expected to live another 5-8 years, but this arrangement only lasted for a few months before one morning she awoke to find the healthy old man dead in the living room.

The nun said the neighborhood suspected foul play, but nothing could be proven. The woman didn't stick around long after he died, and sold it to my parents.

I never heard the crashing in the living room, but for as long as I can remember, all of us (5) kids were afraid our upstairs hallway. There was some nameless fear, ever present, like you were being watched, but there were no windows. Like someone was listening intently to every move you made.

The hallway wasn't bad at all if my dad or mom was with us, but if it was just us kids, it could freak us out. The worst thing ever was when you were alone. So, every night, my older sister and I would make sure to go to bed at the same time, we would walk hand in hand until we got to her door, and then stretch our hands as far as they could go, before releasing, and running into our bedrooms.

My bedroom was closest to the bathroom, and if I ever had to pee in the middle of the night, I would actually climb on the wall from my door to the bathroom just to avoid stepping in the hallway, and on the way back I would flush and run as fast as I could out of the bath, and try to be in my bed and under the covers before the tank started to refill. Stupid kid logic, but whatever, it made us feel safe.

So, anyway, one night, when I was about 7, my parents sent me to bed before anyone else. I was in trouble for something, but I can't remember. At that point, I was old enough to be getting over the fear of the hallway, but just as I reached the top of the stairs, it came back, and it was worse than ever. My heart was pounding. Hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I broke out in a cold sweat. I could feel someone watching me, and out of no where, I heard a man's voice mumbling above my head. It was moving up and down the hall, like someone pacing. I'm actually getting goosebumps as I'm writing this.

That was it. I booked it down the stairs crying, and jumped into my dad's lap, who was sitting on the couch. He got angry and told me to get to bed. When I told him about the voice, he said I was just hearing things and that I better get to bed before my punishment got any worse.

I walked back to the base of the stairs, and stood for a while, gathering my nerves, and then I ran. I ran as fast as I could up the stairs, and down that freaky hall, right through the mumbling voice and into my bed. I pulled the covers over me, still crying. I don't think I slept at all that night.

However, charging headlong through the hallway that night actually made me less afraid, and over the next year I'd all but forgotten about the incident, and lost most of my fear of the hallway. It had to just be a kid thing. Right?

One night a few years later. Everyone was still awake. Everyone was downstairs, and my littlest sister, who was maybe three years old had wandered upstairs by herself. She was an early talker and had been able to carry on pretty sophisticated conversations from the time she was a year and a half. She could say "Hi" when she was 5 months old. I kid you not. Anyway, so after a few minutes of wandering off, she comes back into the room where everyone is sitting, and starts pulling on Dad's shirt wanting to ask a question. He bends down and she says, "Daddy, who's the man in the upstairs hallway?"

My dad freaks. Grabs a bat and books it upstairs. Nothing. No one. He checks every room. He checks every closet. It was winter and every window was latched. Nothing. Our neighborhood is oddly a pedophile relocation neighborhood for the state, which is nuts because there were a ton of kids back then. There are three elementary schools within 10 blocks. Good Job, State. Needless to say, my parents were always on high alert.

That was the last creepy incident that ever happened at my parents house, and after a few years, as all of us kids got older, we all pretty much forgot about how creepy the hallway had been. I probably never would have thought of it ever again if my parents hadn't decided to finish the attic.

I was in my late teens, and one night I came home from my stupid food service job to find my parents up in the attic. From the time I was born, no one had ever gone up there. I didn't even know it existed. It was an utter mess. There were no floors up there, no walls. Just a 3 ft tall layer of blown in insulation, ancient electrical wiring, and a massive space that was 12 ft tall at the peaks. Like I said earlier, this house is massive.

So my parents hire this master carpenter/gc to do the job. He's restored multiple mansions in the city, and his work is perfect. It turned into a 2.5 year project converting the entire attic space into one giant master bedroom suite that included rewiring the entire house, building multiple dormers in the already massive roof, that perfectly matched the architectural style of the house, adding a third flight of stairs, a third bathroom, a full radiant heating system, a library, a built-in sauna, a massive walk in closet, a sewing room, and the list goes on and on and on. I was the free labor on the project. Which was okay. I learned more about building and finishing houses than you could ever want. In addition to the project, this GC was a city historian, and did a full comprehensive history on the house, and even got it put on the city's historic register. We became very close friends, and spent hours, days, months, talking as we worked, often about the house's history.

One day while we were shoveling insulation out of what is now the Library, we were just shooting the breeze when his dust pan suddenly scrapes up a bunch of old newspapers from the early 1900s. We start looking through them, and the papers are just full of the most bombastic language. Seriously, every journalist back then must have thought they were Shakespeare. Even the most mundane stories left a trail of rose petals behind them. So, we start making fun of people back in the day, and after a minute we start reading again, and he points out the date on the newspaper. "Weird." He says, "these must be from the second owner of the house. Funny, I was just reading up on him last night."

"Oh, yeah?" I said.

"Yeah. I think he was manic-depressive."

"Huh, why's that?"

"Well, he was a big-time business man from Chicago, who bought the house from the railroad mogul. A few years later, when he and his family had settled in, he planned this big trip with his wife and three girls, but then bailed on them at the last second, and decided to stay home and work."

"That seems pretty normal for a business guy," I said.

"Yeah, well, the day after they left, he wrote a really rambling and scattered note, dated it, and then shot himself in your upstairs hallway. When the wife and girls came home, they found him, right at the top of the stairs."

It had to be just a kid thing, right?