This account of a haunted house, printed in the American Journal of Ophthalmology in 1921, came to my attention from the Halloween episode of This American Life.
The haunting began in November, after this family moved into a ""large, rambling, high-studded house, built around 1870, and much out of repair."
An excerpt:
"That morning after breakfast, as was my usual custom, I sent for the children’s nurse, a Scotch woman who had lived with me for several years. She looked worn out, and when I asked how the children had slept she burst out with, 'It has been a most terrible night. This house is haunted.’"
"I laughingly told her that that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. 'I would have said the same thing three months ago,’ she answered, 'but I have had such experiences that I am now convinced of it, and everyone in the house has had experiences too.’ She said that after being in the house two or three days, things had begun to happen. She had not told me before, as she and the rest of the household had made up their minds that I ought not to be disturbed about it. 'But last night,’ she continued, 'when the children were attacked, it became my duty to let you know at once.
"'While you were at the opera,’ she went on, 'about half past eight, B woke up and ran screaming through the hall to my room, "Don’t let that big fat man touch me." He was terrified. It took Fraulein and me until ten o’clock to calm him. He slept the rest of the night with me, in my room. Fraulein slept in B’s bed, besides G Jr., to protect him. "G Jr. did not wake up all night but the muscles of his face kept twitching, as if someone was continually pinching him. In the morning when he woke, he said indignantly to Fraulein, "Why have you been sitting on top of me?" And when she told him that she had not been sitting upon him, but had been in the bed next to him, he said, "No, you have been sitting on top of me, and you were awfully heavy, too."
"'Often in the evening, after the children have gone to bed, never until after dark and the lights are lighted, Fraulein and I may be laughing and talking, when all of a sudden we hear the heavy tread of an old man walking slowly and steadily along the hall on the floor above us. It has not been one of the servants, for I have often run up stairs to see, and I have found the whole upper story of the house in darkness and empty. Sometimes as I walk along the hall I feel as if someone was following me, going to touch me. You cannot understand it if you have not experienced it, but it is real.
"Much amused as we were by all these tales, we nevertheless felt as if there was a serious aspect to it. Why had all the servants whom we had had for several years, gone practically mad all of a sudden? We began to trace back the history of the house. The last occupants we found had exactly the same experiences as ourselves, with the exception that they stated that some of them had seen creeping around their beds visions clad in purple and white. Going back still further, we learned that almost everyone had felt ill and had been under the doctor’s care, although nothing very definite had been found the matter with them.
"...Mr. S, came at once to our house...He found the furnace in a very bad condition, the combustion being imperfect, the fumes, instead of going up the chimney, were pouring gases of carbon monoxide into our rooms. He advised us not to let the children sleep in the house another night. If they did, he said we might find in the morning that some one of them would never wake again."
The family moved out of the house and never experienced hauntings again. It turns out that all of the symptoms of the haunting--the visions, noises, listlessness, and feeling as though someone where sitting on their chest--are all symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. The website where I found the article in its entirety points out that "...Carbon monoxide is still the most common cause of toxic poisonings and deaths in America, it is probably still a common cause of haunted houses."
Read the full article.
This American Life: And the Call was Coming from the Basement
