By Hal Walter
Believe in ghosts? I suppose I’m inclined to, mainly because I’ve had a few spooky experiences that apparently defy logic. In the spirit of Halloween and Day of the Dead, here’s a recount of some these events, and lest you think I’m making this stuff up, rest assured I’m really just not this creative.
Probably my first unexplained ghostly experiences occurred when I was working as a copy editor for The Pueblo Chieftain and lived in the West Park area on the outskirts of Pueblo overlooking the Arkansas River. I was renting space in a house that had been converted into three apartments.
There was a window seat in the dining area. The window looked out over the river and would not stay closed. I’d shut it. Latch it. And quite often I would find it reopened. Not all the way. Just an inch or so. Once Mary (this was a few years before we married) visited on a cold day and asked why I had the window open. I explained that it would not stay closed. That’s ridiculous, she said, closing and latching the window. We went running and when we returned the window was once again open.
Mary theorized the window was somehow opening because of vibrations from passing vehicles, though this street was not at all heavily traveled. As I recall, she closed and latched the window and then went outside and drove her car past the house a couple times. I stayed inside and watched as the window remained closed.
A few months later I got home late one night from work and decided to have a cookie and glass of milk. It was summertime and I had the window open. The air was dead still except for the sounds of insects outside. All was quiet as I sat down in the window seat. And then I watched as the door between the kitchen and dining area – a door I could not recall I’d ever closed during the time I lived there – started to swing. It moved very slowly at first … then more quickly … and then reached high speed, finally slamming with such force the walls shook. I put down the cookie and milk and went to bed right then.
Other strange things went on in that place … I’d find papers I’d left on the table scattered wildly about … Once I came home and found the toilet paper pulled off the roll, trailing through the kitchen and out into the living room. I learned from a neighbor that an old guy with bad war memories had actually died there. And then I gradually learned the other residents could recount similar experiences. The general spookiness of the place was part of the reason I found myself in Wetmore.
I remember the first time I entered the Wetmore house alone and could sense there was not some other presence there. But not long after moving there I had an even spookier experience out on the highway, the only time I’ve ever witnessed anything take on an actual visual form.
At the time I was publishing Mountain Athlete, and was returning to Wetmore late one night after distributing magazines up in Boulder. Just south of Florence I encountered what appeared to be an old woman along the road with a bag. I slowed down, wondering if it was someone needing help or something. She was just standing there alongside the road staring at me. Then suddenly I felt like her eyes were staring right through the windshield and actually right through me, like piercing diamonds. She did not appear to be real, more like a grayish image or something. As I slowed down there was some sort of internal dialogue and conflict going on inside me, and I realized I should not stop. I just kept on driving. Was it driving-induced hallucination? La Llorona? Some old lady out collecting beer cans for the aluminum? I’ll never know. But if it was the latter I didn’t notice she was carrying a flashlight.
A few years later I was editing the Leadville Herald-Democrat. The newspaper is housed in a former morgue. As part of my duties I developed all of the film for the photos that appeared in the paper. This was done in a basement darkroom that I believe had been converted from something to do with the morgue operations.
After developing the film the night before deadline I would hang it to dry, then pick up the negatives on my way to Salida for production the next morning. At the top of the stairway to the basement there was a switch for an overhead light. Also, downstairs there were two other ceiling fixture lights operated by pull strings. I was in a hurry one morning and flipped on the overhead switch as I ran downstairs to get the negatives. As I was leaving I flipped the overhead light off and for some reason looked back down the stairs. A light was on. Huh? I hadn’t noticed another light on when I was down there. I turned the overhead switch back on and went downstairs to turn the light off.
It was the light farthest back. I walked over, pulled the string, went back up the stairs and flipped the overhead switch again. But there was still a light on downstairs. So, back on with the overhead and back down the stairs.
This time the nearest light – the one I had just walked past and which had been off – was on. I remember simply walking over to the light and pulling the string sternly even though hair was standing on the back of my neck at this point. I went back up the stairs, flipped the switch and did not look back down the stairs.
In 1991 we moved into the house we live in now. One night that fall I walked out the back door. Something lifted off the deck, making a very strange and loud warbling sound. Though I couldn’t see anything, I could track it by the sound. It rose up and hovered slowly around a big ponderosa pine for a while, continuing with the strange racket. Then, like a rocket, it shot off to the north until the sound disappeared in the distance. I stood there in the dark, stunned.
When I came back inside, Mary asked. “What was that?” She was upstairs and had heard it too. I told her I had no idea.
And I still don’t.
Some say life itself is an illusion, and if that’s the case, these experiences could be just part of the grand scheme. I’ve often pondered whether these events had logical explanations, were actual paranormal occurrences or were some strange fabrication of the mind. Regardless, they left impressions that I’ll never forget.
Hal Walter writes and edits from the Wet Mountains. You can keep up with him regularly at his blog: www.hardscrabbletimes.com
