Ghosts of Newberry Street

A Story by BelAir

About memories of old friends, and how they haunt us as much as other less tangible things.

His Ghosts of Newberry StreetBelAir

The house was tall and uncanny in its way, although the families who resided in the town long ago thought otherwise and would have said differently: the house was like a menacing stare from a wounded man. This was until 1937, when Mr. Sam Edward Housen bought the homestead with his clever smile and the chump change in his pockets. He planned to rebuild the house to be a beauty with the rest of them, but, as the town will tell you, when the remodeling came halfway to perfection, with taxes and the heating in the winters, his change ran out, and he left the house unfinished. The small talk about his "Newburry project"—with a small smirk at the edges of their mouths, of course—ceased, and no one was surprised by this. Sam Housen moved into a house of much lesser class toward the riverfront.

In 1939, Marla and Scoggs Mellnick took up the place on Newberry Street. See, the town took pride in their homes and, better yet, the fortune they had happened into from being a fishing hotspot on the Mississippi. Housen’s efforts were completed in little less than a year, completed to be the giant that he looks at now. Under ordinary circumstances, it would chill his spine as he passed by, clutching the layers of books under his arm slightly tighter. These certainly weren’t ordinary circumstances anymore.

How many stories had they heard about the house? How many had they passed around at lunchtime in the schoolyard? The walk home? Campouts? A smile rises, almost, on his lips.

Yes, many, many. And the others had gathered around the speaker, eyes bright, eyes horrified when he came to those parts, and that was simply the magic of storytelling. He tries to recall those days back to him, but they die away as soon as he sees their young faces.

The first family to move into the house had been the Speers. Diana and Phillip Speer had two daughters and one on the way, yet to be pronounced. The town described them a happy, respectable bunch: Phillip Speer worked down to the riverfront in the shoe factory, helped around when he could, Diana was a stay-at-home Mom, and their daughters stayed out of trouble. Typical . . . But, as there always is, there was another side of the story, buried in families until it suffocated and died. Yes, Phil Speer certainly did help around town . . . Diana knew this, she most surely did, and she became lonely and jealous, and it was reputed to have been said that "the bun she’s got ain’t with no Speer’s flour." The two daughters, age fifteen, knew more about Mr. Hampsen’s Chevy getting totaled than they were speaking. Only the right pick of families knew these. None knew if they were true. It didn’t matter, just the same. The Speer family moved away (together) before anyone knew.

If he can remember right, their name was Barren, the second family to settle in the place. Unlike the family before, locals knew them personally. The Barrens had lived in a two-bedroom flat across town, and even more that they were disappointed at this fact—the fact their gossip would not be as rich—they were also not surprised—the Barrens had three girls and one boy.

William Barren was a stove builder. Good job. Nice money. Eileen became a part-time

nurse at the hospital in 1943, while the war overseas raged on, and everyone around them seemed to be buckling to their knees financially, or either praying to God their families wouldn’t be broken apart on the draft. All was well.

That July.

3:40 a.m.

William Barren, as it has been told, was use to waking at this time, and it went back to his childhood, when the train to St. Louis would pass their home. This morning it sounded as yet that train was still rushing by because he could hear the vague screech of the freight’s railing, buried beneath the WHOOOONNNK it blurted out to them, and William saw its single headlight flash over the window, the endless copper-skinned carts that trailed after it—

No. It was a dream, and he had sat upright beside his sleeping wife. He had not remembered waking, sitting, but it was a dream. 3:41.

The young man standing on the sidewalk remembers that one, not really scary, but it was okay, made them kind of wonder.

"One night Sharinn, the oldest girl, was in bed," he would have started . . .

There was a small tug on her blanket. She stirred and lay still again.

The second pulled her blanket down below her chest. Sharinn groped blindly down for it and drug it back over her.

The blanket was jerked down to her waist.

This time Sharinn woke, sat up, and squinted through the darkness. She sat in this manner for a moment, grabbed her covers, and—

—she was drawn up into a sitting position again, her hands grasping the edge of the coverlet. Her eyes had become wide and alarmed, and they searched the end of the bed. The blanket had stopped moving. Her siblings came into mind, but . . .

Sharinn laid flat with the coverlet pulled to her chin, and then it was out of her hands and at her feet. She yelped and scrambled up and backed to the post of her bed, watching, and soon she would run to her sister’s room across the hallway, and there she would wake in the morning.

Now Pete would say how that would have pissed him off. The others around him would nod, urge the speaker on.

Leaves drum across the street.

Sharinn confided in her sister, Tammy, of what happened, and so, from this, many could conclude it was just Tammy’s imagination that contracted the same fever when she told her mother she had seen a man in her doorway one night, a dog at his feet.

Her mother looked at her. Oh did you? her eyes read. "Well, sleep together if it makes a difference. Whatever."

So that is what they did, and when they didn’t see anything the following nights, it looked more and more as though the fever had cooled.

Jeane was the youngest girl. She had long, dark hair, with a spray of freckles across her nose. He knew her, actually. The entire gang had. That look on his face, a smile trying to appear, has arrived again. Ole Johnny thought she was cute, he remembers that. In any case, they had not dared to ask her if the stories were true, and this is how they went:

Jeane was particular about the way her bedroom was, and that was apparent to anyone who stepped into her room. Dolls and stuffed animals with glassy eyes sat in rows on her bed, her things packed neatly away on the shelves of her closet, and her Avon dolls, each a different color and a various scent but all the same classic southern bell woman that her grandmother had given her, were lined across the back of her vanity dresser, in front of the mirror.

She would hear those Avon dolls, in order of her favorite color to the least, in the night.

Tnk, tnk . . .

the realization the window wasn’t open, or she would tell later on, as much as it irritated her. After some nights of this, Jeane would occasionally flip her coverlet back, wipe her eyes, and set them again in the dark, almost unaware of it.

Other nights, especially during the winter months, she would roll over and into a comfortably warm spot, as though someone had been lying there.

And because Jeane’s neatness was an essential part of her personality, her mother was surprised to find things out of order in her room one evening. She said nothing, supposing her daughter may have grown out of it.

Jeane had not; she was . . . playing, if you will. Playing in a way most kids she knew would not believe. She had a small red rocking chair pushed against the closed door, a bear in that chair, a coat hanger on the doorknob, and her closet door opened only to a crack.

When Jeane woke up the next morning, everything had been moved. Her closet door was flung open, dolls and animals sitting against the foot of her dresser, the wooden chair toppled over in the corner, topped neatly with the bear that had been sitting in it, and the coat hanger in bed next to her.

Susie, a German Shepard mix, had always been Jeane’s dog from the time Daddy came home with the canine riding shotgun. "That’ere’s a huntin dog," Mr. Allen had told William Barren down at the general store on Jefferson. They smiled at the thought. William didn’t; one-fifty was no petty cash for a mut that didn’t hunt. Thus she slept at Jeane’s side most nights, and it was Susie who woke her one of them.

Susie was growling deep in her chest, eyeing the doorway. Jeane soothed her absently, and the growling stopped.

That was when the first door slammed shut.

Jeane shot awake, Susie barking to the right of her, toward the source of the sound. She moved closer to the dog.

The door swung open to her sister’s room across the hallway, which flew shut and blew open again. Her bedroom door mocked the action, then the closet door. She could hear Sharinn’s door joining in.

Spittle flew from Susie’s mouth.

The door did not slam randomly but all of them together. The girls were screaming, and she could hear them, and Sharinn down the hall was calling for their parents.

They stopped.

Things would happen in the daytime, too. William Barren had followed footsteps to the top step in the staircase. Eileen had seen a floating "mist" above Randy’s baby carrier and took him away. Jeane would bring friends home after school to shoot pool in the basement, when there would be footsteps above.

"Your sisters’re home," one would say.

"Why don’t you go check for me?" Jeane would reply, with a slight grin on her lips.

They would, and, of course, they would find no one.

The family was barbequing one afternoon, and one of the sisters (whom was never said) had went inside to get her Frisbee. Instead, she found something else, saw it. The girl claimed to have seen a pink, furry, man-sized figure crouched under the kitchen table.

Overhead the skies are forming grey thunderheads.

Another diddy they would tell—and this one was mostly for Pete because he slept the same way—was about Sharinn’s Tickling Phantom. The story goes that she slept in the same position most every night: on her stomach with one hand pushed down between the wall and her mattress.

"Well," someone would have said, "she was sleeping this way one night . . . and she felt something pull on her fingers. Then bite."

The sound of someone rolling down the stairs and climbing back up could be heard throughout the house some of those nights.

William and Eileen Barren made fair money, as said before. There had been one time that they took it and Randy and went to Chicago for a weekend, and the girls were left home.

. . . And they were given a completely different story of what they expected to hear from their neighbors next door. The girls had partied all weekend, it was as simple as that. Mr. Kyle stated he just happened to look out of the kitchen window around ten-thirty while at the table with a cup of coffee (William imagined it more like a glass of bourbon), and lo and behold if he hadn’t seen people dancing by the windows and heard music playing.

They were grounded for half a month.

Other times, neighbors would find their gazes being exchanged from an upstairs window.

The man knows the Barrens moved out nine years later, so the "happenings" couldn’t have been too bad. He doesn’t know who lives in it, or what they do with the house now. A couple years ago they were using it to house disadvantaged and mentally-handicapped people.

A disturbing thought, really.

He also knows the house holds more than paranormal ghosts. It holds the ghosts of their faces, and the ghosts of memories.

The man sighs and starts away.

He has somewhere to be.

A dominos effect until every one had fallen. Tnk, tnk . . . This did not scare her,