The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Deborah Taylor- Hollis

A trip to the dark side of the moon

Hill House has stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet, floors are firm and doors stay sensibly shut. Silence lies steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and we who walk here, walk alone.--Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

With All Hallow's Eve coming, I went out and knocked on some doors, and although in each case no one was home, something knocked back. Now I'm settled in, with the cauldron on, ready to reveal some of the dark secrets I've unearthed in the Glen.

Stephanie--last names have been omitted to protect the living-- lives near me and has found few people who believe her tales about the house she bought here more than four decades ago. Her English breaks down at times, and her arthritis bothers her, but her eyes are sharp and her hearing is fine. And she's sure her home, built in about 1927, had a terrible secret.

From the time she and her husband moved in until the day the place was bulldozed, there was "a problem in the basement." Wherever you were in the house, you could hear the footsteps. Someone would open the front door, close it behind them and move to the stairs, walking down the basement steps and into the dark below the house. A few minutes later, they would leave the same way. "You could be sitting in the living room and watch the front door open and close just as the walking sounds started," Stephanie explains.

Stephanie says that the first owners of the home were killed by their eldest son--in the basement. He was never caught, and the house had "several owners" before she and her husband bought the place. Now that they have rebuilt a new home on the lot, the trouble has ceased, but the unfilled basement still sits under their modern home, empty, open and desolate.

On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses? -- Meatloaf, Bat out of Hell

Linda, another Glenite, has lived in her home for just nine years, but she has also had "visits." Most of her brushes with the supernatural have been slight, but one incident made her keenly aware of her unknown "boarder." In her words, here is the story:

"I was home alone, getting ready to bake something, but the Cuisinart lid was stuck tight, and I couldn't get it off. I'd tried everything and was just about ready to go ask a neighbor to unlock the top for me when I had to leave the room. The phone rang, so I left the kitchen and went back to the bedroom to answer it. When I came back into the kitchen, there was the lid, unscrewed, sitting all by itself on the counter. I hadn't touched it, it wasn't plugged in and there was no one in the house but me."

For the most wild, yet most homey narrative I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. --E. A. Poe

Tammy and her family have lived in the same home for 18 years, along with at least three exceptional spirits. Her "guests" have closed doors, shaken beds to the point of pounding the floorboards and wafted through rooms with an unmistakable breeze. One, a particularly frightening elderly woman, woke Tammy up on at least three separate occasions. She has also been spotted by Tammy's skeptical husband. In her last appearance, the specter gave Tammy a convoluted message, warning her of family news. Later, Tammy deciphered the message and contacted her relatives, who confirmed the facts this shadow foretold. Tammy loves her haunts and would never push them out of their home, though she wishes they would leave the furniture alone.

Either he was born in a strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate.--H.P. Lovecraft

Me, I've had a few odd encounters over the years with things that science cannot yet explain. Maybe it's my family history. My father's grandmother was a touch healer who once stopped the femoral artery bleeding of a man who had been thrown into a thresher, by holding him in her arms for about three minutes. Or maybe it's farther back in that same family tree--we have ancestors from Salem that were killed during the witch hunts.

Both my sister and I have simultaneously heard family members' voices when they weren't with us. And then there's the problem we have shopping at the Sunnyvale Toys "R" Us. Dana gets very cold and starts to hear things when she shops there, and I can't even make myself go in the store. Both of those things happened years go, before either of us learned about the well-documented "haunt" that baffles employees by stacking things in towers, silently destroying aisles of toys and floating by passing shoppers.

But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night.--E.A. Poe

Yes, even with all these encounters, I sleep just fine. Except, of course, on Halloween. Too many bumps in the night.

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