Nick, Our Former Ghost

We purchased our old house in 1983, and spent about a month and a half working on it before we moved in. It was in dire need of some updating, so for a while we were working at our day jobs, then spending evenings and weekends at our new house, which was really an old house.

The house had been built in 1929, and was a 2 story with an unattached single car garage that had at one time been used as a chicken coop, but caught fire when a chicken knocked over a candle. That's all I know about that incident, honestly. We had the interior of the garage checked out and the wood was simply charred, not burned, so that was a definite plus.

Back then electricity wasn't nearly as important to people as it is now (point driven home after our power went out around 6:30 p.m. yesterday due to a nasty storm and didn't come back on until around 1:30 a.m.!), so one of the first things we did was get in touch with our electrician.

He added 29 outlets to our house, light fixtures in the kitchen, the bedrooms, the closets, the dining room, the hallway, the basement, the garage, and updated our service. Wow! The smaller two bedrooms each had ONE outlet before they started, and our bedroom had NONE! That's zero, zilch, and nada. They really had a lot of work to do.

While this was all going on, Ted was replumbing the house and I had decided to take down the wallpaper in one of the smaller bedrooms. Thank goodness our bedroom didn't have any wallpaper.

The "blue" bedroom was closest to ours and would be painted blue when everything was finished in there. I honestly cannot remember what color the walls were before I started stripping wallpaper, but I DO remember that there were SIX layers of various patterns of wallpaper on the walls AND the ceiling, AND the top layer was painted.

But I was ready for it! I was so excited to actually be doing something in the house. I had a garbage can, a couple of scrapers, a shop vac, and I was ready to go!

That first evening in the "blue" room was long and excruciating. It took me about four hours to clear off one square foot of wall space. I couldn't believe it had taken so long to do so little. That's when I realized that there just HAD to be something I could do to speed things along. Fortunately someone told me about some spray stuff to get and a special wallpaper scrapper. Of course since we now had a house payment in addition to rent for our apartment and we had hired an electrician, we didn't have too much extra money to toss around, so we were trying to do as much as we could without spending much. That plan sort of went out the window. It eventually took about 3 weeks to get that room finished, and my mom was a HUGE help!

As we were finally seeing moving day in the not too distant future, things were starting to fall into place. One typical evening we had a quick, early dinner at our apartment, then I told Ted I was going up to the house to wash out the inside of the kitchen cabinets. He said he would be up there in about an hour, as he had a few things to do at the apartment first.

So about 15 minutes later, I was sitting on the kitchen floor with two buckets of water and some old rags, reaching into the lower cabinets, washing things like crazy.

The house had three outside doors. There was a front door that opened to the front porch. There was a kitchen door that opened to the back porch, and there was also a side door that opened to the driveway. When coming in the side door, you could either go down the steps on the left side to the basement, or go straight up three steps into the little vestibule space between the kitchen and foyer.

And of course, being an older house, the floors, steps and doors all creaked.

So as I was sitting there, reaching inside the cabinets, I heard the side door open, and the steps creak. I said, "I didn't think you would be here for a while yet."

Silence.

"Ted?"

Silence.

I pull my upper body out of the cabinet and quickly glance toward the vestibule, then back to what I was doing.

Then I realized what I had seen when I glanced, and looked back at the vestibule. This time there was nothing there.

However, when I glanced over the first time, there had been an old man walking up the steps, turning the corner into the foyer. He had on a light colored shirt and dark pants. He was at least 85 years old, if not more.

Weird.

REALLY WEIRD.

When Ted got there, I told him about it and he told me it was just my imagination. Yeah, right. HE didn't see what I saw. It was NOT my imagination.

About four months later, I was home by myself for the evening, sitting on the couch in the living room. I heard the steps squeak, as if someone was walking upstairs. I glanced over, then looked back at the television, realized again what I had seen, and looked back again. There was nothing there. But I knew what I had seen!

I had seen that same old man walking up the steps, dressed the same way, but this time he had on glasses.

Again, I told Ted when he got home and he sort of acknowledged that I had seen something, but didn't make a big deal out of it.

That following summer, I was talking to my next door neighbor about it, and she told me that the old man who had lived in the house before us, had died at the bottom of the basement steps. She also told me that he was 87 when he died. Then I described to her what I saw and she went in to her house and came out with a picture of Nick, the former owner of our house.

I got chills and had goosebumps all over me. That was who I saw both times.

Before this, I had never really believed in ghosts, but once I saw the picture, that changed. Ted believed that I had seen a ghost too. I never felt threatened or uncomfortable when I saw him, so I'm going to assume he was a "good" ghost.

After that, anytime we heard an unexplained noise in the house (as will happen quite often in an old house) we blamed it on Nick.

The rest of the story is coming....tomorrow!