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Selections from "I Never Believed In Ghosts Until ..."
Soldier on the Beach
The Ghost Who Played Violin
Alone In The House
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Soldier on the Beach
By Michael Dennis
I was a frightened young draftee, unable to sleep, that black and misty March night in 1969. Leaning against the shack out there on the beach, I felt my world quickly coming to an end. It was just after 3:00 a.m., and I was smoking a cigarette, listening to the China Sea lapping softly on the sand. I got a whiff of dead fish in the salty dampness, and I was dripping with sweat from the heat. The night was blacker than any I had ever seen.
This was Vietnam. I'd been there just three days, living in this tumbledown shack at a place called the Reception Center. It was where you waited for permanent assignment.
Slowly it came to me that I was not alone out there in the dark. A lone soldier was walking out of the foggy blackness along the water, coming toward me. He was in full infantryman's battle dress: badly worn jungle fatigues, crushed jungle hat, a battered rucksack with field equipment strapped to its sides, and he carried the ever-present M-16 automatic rifle. He came right up to me as if he had known I was there.
"Got a cigarette?" he asked.
"Sure," I said and held out the pack, feeling a tug as he slid out a single cigarette.
"Thanks," he said.
I offered my lighter, but he had his hands up well before I struck the flame. He then turned way around, twisting sideways and down for the light, so I didn't see his face. In retrospect, I don't believe he had one.
We spoke quietly for a few moments. He told me his unit and asked where I was going. I replied that I hadn't been assigned yet and that I was afraid of where I might end up. Then he turned to face me, but in the blackness of the night I still couldn't see his face.
"Oh, you're going to be fine, just fine. You're going to be okay," he said. His words were said with punch, real depth, and I have remembered them to this day. Overcome with emotion, I had no reply. But he seemed to understand.
"Well, gotta go," he said. "Thanks for the cigarette." He adjusted the rucksack on his back, picked up the rifle, and walked off down the beach, disappearing into the gloom.
Five months later, hurrying through an After-Action Report for my unit, talking on the phone with a clerk down at the firebase in Duc Pho, I asked about the lone soldier's unit.
His calm reassurances had sustained me through some frightening times. I'd been to the Reception Center that very day, trying to recruit the best of the newly arrived soldiers for my own unit, and had been summarily thrown out by the cadre that ran the center. This was a highly restricted and secure area, they insisted. Suddenly it seemed very odd that the lone soldier had been in there, especially in battle dress, especially with a rifle, especially at 3:00 a.m., especially on the beach, especially all alone...
In Vietnam we always knew our calendars--we remembered dates--when we got there, when we were going home. All very important. So I knew the date of that night on the beach. The clerk down in Duc Pho looked it up-it took only a few minutes.
"You picked a hell of a date, buddy. That unit was totally wiped out that day. There was no one left alive!"
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The Ghost Who Played Violin
By Patricia Bracker
My mother still jokes about the stories we used to tell her when we were growing up in our one-hundred-year-old house in Michigan. To us, as children, the tales of footsteps with no one there, creaking floors, people standing beside our beds who disappeared when the lights were turned on, and something trying to pull our blankets off our beds were all very real. But we could never prove to our parents that any of them were true.
One experience, however, I shared with my mother, and she doesn't joke about that one.
On a cold December night in 1961, I shivered in my unheated upstairs bedroom, unable to sleep. In the distance, I kept hearing the faint, screechy sounds of strange music. I thought it sounded like the song "Ten Little Indians." Weird. The music seemed to be coming from inside my bedroom. I turned on the light beside my bed and looked around the room. No radio. No record player. I turned off the light. The music started again. This time the stairway door opened, and my mother yelled up to me.
"Turn that screechy music off. It's keeping me awake."
I waited until morning to question my mother about what she had heard. She repeated that the music had had a tinny sound, something like an old windup record player would make. She said she had even caught herself singing along to the tune of "One little, two little, three little Indians..." She asked me why I was playing such silly music. I replied that I had heard the same music, but since I had no radio or record player, I could not have been playing the music. We decided that we wouldn't tell anyone about our experience.
Later I was curious about the history of the house and found a living relative of the man who had built it--his granddaughter. She told me that it had been built in the mid--1800s and was one of the first homes in the area. Originally, it had been a farm, which explained the numerous fruit trees in our yard.
But the big surprise came when I revealed my strange experience to the grand- daughter. She listened quietly and motioned for me to follow her into the garage. She pulled out an old dusty box and produced a faded photograph of a bearded man holding a violin.
"This man was my grandfather," she said. "He built your house and loved it dearly.
Before he died, he lived in your bedroom and used to tune his violin at night by playing "Ten Little Indians."
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Alone In The House
By Bonnie Smith
When I was thirteen years old and my brother was eleven, our family moved to a small town in North Carolina. We were able to rent a huge old house next door to a church.
From the very first day, strange things happened. We would hear someone calling us by name from elsewhere in the house and, upon investigating, would find that either nobody in the family had called us or that no one else was home.
It was not uncommon for any of us to be followed from room to room when we were alone in the house. "Something" whistled softly in our ear as if someone were hanging over our shoulder. We were awakened almost nightly by loud footsteps in the attic, and we would find the attic door wide open in the morning. Articles that we set down in one room would suddenly disappear , only to be found in the basement or on the back porch. Most of the things that happened could be explained away as forgetfulness or overactive imaginations, yet two specific incidents convinced my brother, my mother, and me that there truly was a ghost in our house.
The first incident occurred on Christmas Eve while our parents were attending a company party. My brother and I were left with the family dog for a couple of hours. We were sitting in the living room watching television when loud banging sounds came from the upstairs hallway. Then the stairway banister shook with such force that I was sure it would break into pieces at any moment. The dog barked and howled.
Dressed only in slippers and pajamas, we hesitated to run out into the snow. But sure, that our lives were in danger, we dived into the tiny bathroom beneath the stairway -- it was the only room equipped with a door latch. We sat on the floor together with our backs pressed against the wall and our feet firmly planted against the door. We held the dog as she whined.
Within moments, heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs over our heads. They stopped at the bottom of the stairs. We heard no sounds other than our own breathing for many minutes. Suddenly we heard the front door open and felt cold air rush under the bathroom door. Just as suddenly, the front door slammed shut. There was silence for what seemed like hours, yet we were still afraid to leave our hiding place. We heard the front door open and close again, but we did not emerge until we heard our mother's voice call to us.
After we told our story, our dad checked the house but found no way for anyone to have entered in their absence.
The second incident occurred several months later. My brother and I arrived home from school to an empty house. There was music blasting so loud that we had to shout at each other to be heard. We followed the music upstairs to his bedroom. My brother's only radio was unplugged and in pieces in a box under his bed (he had taken it apart to see how it worked). Once we had built up the courage, we walked over to his bed and pulled the box out into view. The music stopped immediately! The two of us ran out of the house and sat on the curb until our parents came home from work.
As children will do, we adjusted to the everyday antics of our live-in ghost. We named him Oscar and began to tell our new friends at school about him. It was then that we found out that we lived in a well-know "haunted house" and that was why so few of our friends were permitted to come to our home. We were told the story of why people never lived in the house more than a short time.
Many years ago the church-owned house was a rectory inhabited by the minister and his family. He and his seventeen-year old son did not get along and frequently fought. The boy would usually take refuge in the huge attic. One day in the midst of a heated argument, the minister chased his son from the attic. They both made it safely down the steep attic stairs, but the boy tripped and fell down the stairs leading to the first floor. When he hit the wall at the bottom, he broke his neck and died. The minister and his remaining family were driven out of the house soon afterward by a ghost. Supposedly, the house had been haunted since then.
We lived in that house for nine months, and then we returned to Michigan.
Some twenty years later, my parents revisited that small town in North Carolina. The haunted house is gone now with only the chimney still standing. I only hope that poor Oscar has finally found peace.
-- Stories from "I Never Believed In Ghosts Until ... "
Collected by the editors of USA WEEKEND Magazine.
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