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Ghosts: True Hauntings In MontanaBy David Francis Curran
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Copyright©1986 D. F. Curran. All Rights Reserved.
Brautigan, Richard, A Pilgrimage, August 1982
A
Ghost in
Billings
There is a beautiful two-story house built in the early 1900's on 1st Ave. North in Billings. Its many windows face the morning sun, the high peaked roof reaches for the clean Montana sky. From the outside it looks like an ordinary house. But inside, there is, or was, a festering wound between this world and another. And more than once that wound has exploded into violence.
Justin* used to play cards with his sister Tina and her husband Rob at the house before he actually moved in. They'd play cards until one in the morning. After one of those card playing sessions, they all went out to a restaurant for something to eat.
Justin was 17 at the time. Tina and Rob were 21. The diner they had chosen to eat in was quiet. Rob started teasing Tina while they were finishing their salads.
"Hey, monkey, why don't you tell Jus here about your friend Beverly?"
"Robby!"
"You know there's a witch in our attic Jus?"
"What? What's this?" Justin asked.
"There's a witch in our attic. Tina dreamed about her. Come on, Tina, he's your brother. Tell him!"
Tina sat there silent, scowling at Rob.
"Okay," Rob said, "I'll tell him. It seems your sister (Maybe you didn't tell me about some mental defect she might have before I married her?) has dreamed there is a witch in our house. Right dear?"
Tina was not going to say anything, so Rob went on.
"It, she, lives in our attic and her name is Beverly. And our witch does very strange things to Tina. At night, when I'm sleeping, Beverly attaches a chain to Tina's neck, and then makes her do all sorts of tricks. Just like a little monkey. Maybe you could show us some of them now, honey? Come on, jump Tina, jump."
Justin had started laughing. Tina, angry, just continued with the meal in silence.
Later Justin moved in with them. When he moved in Rob took him on a tour of the house. That was the first time Jus had seen the cellar. Rickety old steps descended into a box-like earthen walled room. From the main cellar a heavy oak door lead off into a 5-foot long coal room. The steel coal door leading outside had been welded shut.
In the center of the main room there was a support post. Jus saw something hanging on the post and went over for a closer look.
"Hey, this is garlic!" Jus said when he discovered what the small bulbs strung together were.
"So?"
"Isn't that what the good guys use in Dracula movies to ward off evil? I hope its not here for a reason?"
"That's a bunch of baloney," Rob said. He took the string of garlic upstairs and threw it in the kitchen trash.
Soon after that Jus discovered the house was alive with sounds. Creakings and strange noises could be heard whenever it was quiet. And there was the problem with his closet door. His bedroom was at the end of the upstairs hall, across from a smaller bedroom used for storage. The head of his bed was near the closet door. At first the closet door had always hung partly open. But it did have a latch and one night Jus decided to shut and latch it. He did. But soon after he went to bed there was a "creeeek" as the door came open. He got up, went to the door, and shut and latched it again. He pulled on the doorknob to make sure the latch held. Then he got back into bed. It wasn't long before he heard the "creeek" of the door reopening. He never did figure out why the door would seemingly open on its own, nor did he get used to it.
A large ruddy maple-brown spot was coming up through the bathroom floor and staining the rug when Jus had first moved in.
Eventually, one weekend, Jus and Rob spent the day tearing the bathroom floor out. They stripped the old floor to the joists.
"I can't figure it out," Rob said, when they were done, sweat pouring off both of them. "There doesn't seem to be anything that could be leaking."
They worked hard putting in a new plywood floor, tile, and linoleum. The final step was Tina's touch. She wanted a rug to walk on in the bathroom. So Jus and Rob laid down a new rug on top of the linoleum under the sink.
The next morning Jus had been awakened by Rob calling for him. Rob had been the first one up. Jus had followed his voice into the bathroom. Under the sink the ruddy spot was back on the new rug.
It was September when Jus had first moved in. In November, Jus was alone in the house one day. He went down into the cellar looking for something. The oak door to the coal room had always been stuck open, part of it was buried in the dirt. They had stored some things in that room, and Jus decided to search there. As soon as he was inside the oak door suddenly slammed shut closing him in. In a sudden fit of panic, he kicked the door open and ran out. He ran from the cellar with a terrible feeling that if he had waited an instant longer the latch on the cellar side of the door would have been thrown and he would have been locked inside.
One morning, about two-weeks before Christmas, Jus was awakened around 3 a.m. by shouting. He jumped up from bed and ran to the stairs. In the living room, Rob was swatting a now burning Christmas tree with a towel. Flames licked up toward the ceiling casting the room in an eerie light. Tina, also awakened by the shouts, appeared at Jus' side.
Tina and Jus helped Rob put out the fire. When they had gotten the main flames under control, the room was filled with smoke and pieces of tree lay crackling and burning holes in the carpet.
"You forgot to unplug it!" Rob accused Tina. He leaned over and pulled the plug out of the socket.
"I forgot; why couldn't you unplug it?"
"It's just a good thing you woke up," Jus said.
"That's weird," Rob said, "I don't know why I woke up. I just did. I came in here and found the tree in flames."
The following night shouts rang again. Jus and Tina came downstairs to find Rob again fighting a blazing tree. This time the tree was completely destroyed. Melted wires hung with heat shattered bulbs. They hauled the smoldering stalk out of the house into the snow. Standing in the freezing cold in their slippers and bathrobes. They put out the last remnants of fire with snow.
"I don't understand it," Rob said, "It wasn't even plugged in."
They returned to the house and halfheartedly cleaned up. When they had made sure that there were no smoldering cinders they all went to bed.
Then, later around 7, Jus again was awakened by shouting. This time it was Tina.
The family was in the habit of putting their Christmas presents under the tree before Christmas Eve. During the first fire, the presents had been pushed to safety against a far wall.
Now the presents were scattered all over the room. It was a peculiar scattering. Each present had been opened. They way they were arranged it was as if someone had sat in a different spot to open each present. Nothing had been taken. All the presents were there.
Soon after the banging started. Each night at about four in the morning there would be three or four loud creakings, each followed by a boom. It got to the point where a couple of neighbors complained. The sound seemed to be coming from the coal door which was welded shut.
Rob told people, "I don't know what's going on."
According to Jus nothing ever did happen when people other than those living in the house were around. Many of the strange events happened early in the morning.
One occurred New Year's morning. They'd all gone out to celebrate and had gotten back late. They were sitting at a heavy oak table with thick legs. Suddenly Jus and Tina both saw a plate move a few inches along the table.
"Did you see that?" Tina asked.
"Maybe we've had too much to drink," Jus said.
Then a glass moved at the edge of the table. They decided to go to bed.
The next morning when Jus came downstairs the dinning room table was turned over on top of the dining room chairs. The table was the kind that extends by adding leaves and can seat 10 people. It was so heavy Jus and Rob had difficulty putting it back in an upright position. No one person could have moved it alone.
When they were done putting the table back the right way Rob laughed.
"You did this, didn't you?" Jus accused.
Rob just kept laughing. Jus didn't really believe that he had done it. Rob seemed to upset about it.
It was May before Jus saw anything. One cool night Tina and Rob had called to Rob from the hallway. He awoke and they pointed to his window. The window was two stories up. When Jus looked he saw something there in the window. He jumped up out of bed so quickly, it wasn't until he stopped at the end of the hall that his bedding fell off him.
At that time Jus had been working for a local company for a month and a half. He alternated working day and night shifts, and on this day was working the day shift. His sister was working nights and Rob was away. It was 11:30 and Jus was watching Johnny Carson in the beamed living-dining room on the first floor. He was sitting on the couch with his back to 1st Ave. North. To his right was the stairway going upstairs. The front door was between the stairway and the couch. The door was partly open.
At the bottom of the stairway was a banister post. On it Tina had a beautiful fragrant designer candle she had brought back from Virginia. Jus liked the smell of the candle so he lit it before sitting down to watch television. The candle blew out. Jus got up, lit it, shut the front door and sat back down again. The next time he looked up the flame had blown out again. He didn't want to keep getting up to relight it so he resigned himself to it being out.
A little later Jus was feeling tired. He stretched, and then put his face in his hands. It was then that he caught a flicker in the corner of his eye. When he turned to look at the now lit candle, it fell from the stand. There wasn't any breeze in the house. He had shut the door. He had heard of candles that relit themselves and figured this might be one of them, but he had no idea why the candle fell.
He got up. The candle had spilled wax all over the floor and had broken into a few pieces. He picked up the pieces and set them back on the stand. Then he walked back over to the couch and sat down. When he turned to glance back over toward the candle, there was a girl of about sixteen on the steps looking at him. She was a hazy blue and he could see the wall through her. She was about 5' 6" and must have weighed a hundred pounds. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and swept down to a few inches below her shoulders. She was wearing a white party dress that puffed out at the shoulders and then narrowed to reveal a slim waist. She had shiny, patent leather shoes on and she was very pretty. Jus says, "She had the kind of beauty that would have guaranteed all the male admirers she could handle." But what hit Jus most of all was the sad, sad look in her wet, glassy looking eyes.
The girl on the stairs had her hands folded in front of her. She was looking, with that sad expression, directly at Jus. For some reason, he didn't know why, he took a step forward towards her. She didn't walk, but seemed to float away so rapidly that by the time Jus had taken his step she was at the top of the stairs. He took another step and she disappeared down the hallway.
Jus ran from the house and went to where his sister worked. He arrived sweating, shouting I saw her, I saw her. It took him a long time to calm down. He refused to go back to the house and stayed in a motel that night.
Jus did eventually go back to the house. He stayed there for another two months until the house was sold. Things did not get better. The creakings seemed more frequent than before. At one time he was sitting on the porch, and something pushed him off onto his back. Another time, two eight-foot cabinets full of dishes fell over in the night--the dishes were all smashed. The refrigerator was also overturned. Although Rob, Tina and Jus were in the house sleeping at the time, no one was awakened by the noise.
It was Tina who was able to shed some light on the mystery. She tracked down an old woman who had lived in the house in the early 1900's. The woman had a teenage daughter. One Christmas Eve there was a party going on in the house. The girl was upstairs. For some reason she was running, she tripped at the top of the stairs and fell down them. They carried her up to the bathroom, where she bled to death. Her name was Beverly.
Brautigan, Richard, A Pilgrimage, August 1982
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