Home Is Where The Haunt Is

I found Paul sitting alone in the rental car.

I climbed in. He was watching his tablet as he sat in the car on the driveway. I sat in the front seat, and turned to face him.

"How you doing?" I asked.

"Good." Paul was fine. He just likes rental cars, the same way he's always liked hotel rooms.

"I had a thought," I said. "You know your mom's gonna be away on a business trip Monday to Thursday. Gonna be just you and me at the house. First off, let me know what you want for dinner and I'll make it. Whatever you like."
"I'm going out with Sissy on Monday."

"Wednesday, then."
"Okay."

"Second. did you know we've lived in this house for twenty years this month? Your mom and I moved in here twenty years ago. I figure, I'll let you stay up late a bit, and you and me will do some ghost hunting. It's been a while. How about that?"

"Yeah," Paul said.

"Sounds good."

We'd first moved into the house in the Hill Section in October of 2003. Michelle and I had been married for just over a year, and my mother had died the previous May. We'd looked at a few houses within our price range, most of which invariably fell into the category of "Better than homelessness, probably."

The house, a smaller one with a nice view of the neighborhood, had appealed to us. I'd liked the basement, which I'd planned to use as a secret headquarters until I realized that it flooded and I'd moved operations to the second floor. 

We'd begun hearing unexplainable sounds and having experiences almost immediately. I'd dug into the history of the house, and gotten back as far as 1905 when I'd found Ida Yost.

Ida was seventeen. Her mother had died, and she'd been abused by her father. On August 19, 1905, Ida had committed suicide on what is now my back porch.

We'd heard footsteps in the hallway and on the stairs. Things move around. Sometimes at night, with everyone else in bed, I'd heard Ida walking around in the room with me.

You get used to it.

"After dinner, Daddy, do you want to hunt for some ghosts?" Paul asked. 

"Sure." We were sort of foraging for dinner, which Paul tends to do anyway. I was eating a leftover hot dog from the weekend, and Paul was making himself a bagel. We were wearing our matching Bigfoot Patrol shirts, which were as good as anything else to hang around the house in.

"Can I stay up late with you?" Paul asked.

"Not too late, because you have school tomorrow. But I'll let you stay up until ten."

"Ten-fifteen?"

"Okay. Ten-fifteen."

I went upstairs to my office. I didn't need the entire tactical vest; I was just hanging around my own house. I got out my laser thermometer and my EMF detector, and then grabbed Paul's, too. I squeezed the trigger on the thermometer, and it flickered to life and went out again immediately. The exciting life of a ghost hunter.

I walked downstairs. "Think I need a battery replacement in my thermometer," I said. "I think your EMF detector is acting up, too. Might need to get a nine-volt to replace it."

I replaced the batteries, and we checked around a bit. I said,"Baseline about seventy degrees. No outstanding EMFs. Anything on your end?"

Paul shook his head. "Nope." He picked up the 9-volt battery. "Can't you start a fire with this and lint?"

"Steel wool. Lint burns quick, but you need the steel wool to make a spark."

"Can we do that?"'

"If we have steel wool."

I found some in the cabinet and pulled it out. "Let's do this in the sink, so we don't burn something."

Paul touched the steel wool to the battery terminals, and it sprung into sparks immediately. It's always nice when he remember these survival techniques I taught him. I said,"You have homework?"

"I left my folder at school."

"Okay. Tomorrow, then." How much math can the kid need? He can already negotiate fifteen more minutes of bedtime.

I walked through the house with my EMF detector. I got a small flicker in the TV room, which is not unusual. I called,"Got a little bit of a spike in the TV room. Went to orange."

"Could be Ida," said Paul.

"Could be. She does act up in there sometimes, especially when I have Charlie's Angels on."

First thing in the morning. Paul and I waited outside the house next door, with Butters on a leash. We'd been waiting for five minutes when the little girls next door came outside.

"You brought Butters!" said little Sekiya, delighted.

"He likes to go to the bus stop and see all the kids," I said.

We walked down the street. I said,"You'll like this, Serina. This morning, I have to go over to a house to arrange for moving some gravestones. You know how there used to be a cemetery down the street, and they moved it in 1919? Some stones have turned up in someone's yard, and we're arranging to move them to Highland Cemetery."

"This morning?" Paul asked.

"Ten-thirty."

"And I'll be in school?!?"
"I'll bring photos to show you," I said. "I promise."

I reached down and overturned the stone, embedded in the ground. Carefully, I laid it down as Justin and Dave watched. It was the gravestone of Clarissa Mahan, sister-in-law to our town founder.

"Clarissa," I said.

Justin was the head of the Genealogical Society, and Dave managed Highland Cemetery. Justin said,"We can have these moved up to Highland and placed there, where they belong."

"Probably moved up in the spring," said Dave. "We can keep them there, but right now Highland has no money."

"That's okay, we can put them in the ground for free. CCGS can contribute a bit toward repair."

"These things have been here, undiscovered, for over a century," I said. "Now we're going to put them in Highland. I want to break this story."

"You can have the front page," said Justin.

Dave got out his dowsing rods and started testing them, looking for other gravestones. I'm not a fan of dowsing and he knows it; we'd had some of those discussions over a few beers. It's a little like being friends with SaraLee; you can see where the science ends and the wild stuff begins. You learn to not comment on it.

I stood up. "Justin, I've heard some rumors that Great Island Cemetery extended further back than what we'd thought, maybe even over toward Maple Street. You ever come across anything like that?"

"It's possible, but I never heard anything. Have you checked the 1869 map?"

"Yeah, but there's a lot of empty space nearby. The 1869 map has north pointing in the wrong direction; I'm not sure it's as accurate as you think. Besides, I suspect there was some unofficial interring outside the gates....You know John Michael Conley?"

Justin grinned. "Criminal buried somewhere in Great Island. Headless guy."

"Not at first. but yeah. His skull was stolen. He was never found when they moved the cemetery. Hell, maybe he's here."

Justin grinned. "He wouldn't be alone."

I grinned back. "You know the Woman in White and the Woman in Black?"

"Yep. This same cemetery. People saw the two ghosts walking around."

"A while back, I figured out who those might be. There were two female bodies here that were petrified. Both were moved to Flemington. It stands to reason that they were the two female ghosts; their names were Madeline Yost and Catherine Phillips."

"Are there more gravestones?" Dave asked the dowsing rods, and they swung apart, pointing widely to his right and left. I watched him with my arms crossed. 

He glanced in my direction. "Where's Lou?" he asked.

Both of them swung immediately to point at me.

I grinned. 

"Well, I'll be damned."

Paul and Serina caught me in my office. "You ready to go out, Daddy?" Paul asked.

"Yeah, buddy, I'm good." I was sitting in my chair, working on the tac vest.

"What're you doing?"
"I'm making a couple of adjustments to the vest; making it a bit easier to use."
Serina squinted at it. "This pocket---" She pointed to the first aid pouch. "---Was on the back before."

Serina's pretty perceptive when it comes to my ghost-hunting stuff. "Yeah, I removed a panel of pouches on the front right side. Moved first aid from the belt up to where I can reach it better; safety first. I'm adding the comlink pouch and a storage pouch, too, for now."

"Looks good," said Paul.

"Hoping for an investigation sometime soon, try it out," I said. "Let's go out."

We were in the vehicle, eating Taco Bell. My wife was driving, with Paul and Serina in the back seat. I said,"Once we're done with our food, you guys want to take a ride up to Highland Cemetery?"
"Sure," said Paul.

"Yeah!" said Serina.

"I  want to take a look, see if Dave managed to stake out the area we're moving the stones to yet."

Paul turned to Serina. "Ida's grave is in Highland."

"Ida? I want to see."

A few minutes later, Michelle turned the jeep into Highland Cemetery and pulled up the road. Paul pointed. "Isn't Ida up there under that tree?"

"That's right," I said. "That's her family plot."

"Is this where you want to stop?" Michelle asked.

"Yeah. Just for a minute."
Ida's grave is under a tall tree on a steep slope, at the lower part of the cemetery. We walked up the concrete stairs and up to it, the small stone with her name and the dates on it.

"So here's Ida," said Serina.

I nodded.

"Here's Ida."

I was flipping through the cemetery indexes when Tif rolled into the library. I said,"Oh, hi, honey. Just so you know, we're having rat loaf for our family dinner tomorrow."
"Rat loaf?"

"Yeah. It's like meat loaf, but rattier." 

I flipped open a haunted cookbook and showed her the photo of meat loaf in the shape of a rat. She said,"Can't wait. Anything new on the job?"

"Nothing yet. Radio silence. They're taking forever to get around to announcing. I been keeping myself busy," I said. "I'm working on Great Island Cemetery."

"Don't you already know everything about Great Island Cemetery?"

"I only talk like I do. I was looking into the Great Island ghosts---One of them is named Lena Yost. Look, she was moved to Flemington according to the Great Island records. She was only sixteen; her parents died later and were buried in Highland. It looks like she was moved there; she's on the Highland listing. Now, I have reason to think she's one of the ghosts, the woman in white, or in black, I'm not sure of the color."

"Okay."

"I was curious; I decided to check on the last name. I looked at Ida's genealogy book. Turns out, Madeline and Ida were distant cousins. One of the Great Island ghosts is related to the ghost in my house."

I stood with Justin on the hill, watching as the guy unloaded the gravestones. He said,"We'll call Dave, make sure these are where they're supposed to be. We can readjust them in the spring, but for now, we'll have them up here where they belong."
I had my "Paranormal Investigator" shirt on, and my cold-weather vest. It was thirty-eight degrees out. I said,"I'll write it up for the Express."
'We've made history today," he said.

I nodded. "The stones are where they belong. And maybe, once I get my article in, we'll hear from other people who've found their own stones. Maybe one day, we'll be able to collect up all of the old Great Island Cemetery."

At night, before bed, I always take the dogs out. With Butters on his leash, I walked outside in the cold, standing on the dark sidewalk  by the "Tami For City Council" sign.

Twenty years. Over a third of my life, I'd lived on this street. I looked down toward Bellefonte Avenue and thought about all the other people who'd lived here, over the years. Rebecca Gross. William Elliott. Roy Probst. Isadore Lipez. All part of Lock Haven's history.

All of them.

And me.