Little Shop of Nightmares

BACK IN THE late 1980s, my aunt moved into an apartment with her eldest son in a city in upstate New York. About a year after she moved in, downstairs from her on the street level a storefront spiritualist shop opened, where they sold everything from healing crystals to New Age books. More notably, they would hold spiritual healing sessions, attempt spirit contact, conduct séances, and other such practices down there. It was owned by a rather large woman who was supposedly a medium or clairvoyant.

As my aunt lived in the apartment almost directly above the shop, she became curious about it when it first opened. About a month or so after it opened, however, really strange things began to happen in the building, and she wondered if they somehow were connected to whatever that they were doing down there.

THE ACTIVITY BEGINS

In the fall of 1988, my aunt had gone to bed late one night and was just drifting off to sleep when she heard her son (my cousin), who was about eight at the time, screaming and freaking out in his room. She rushed to his room and found him pale and frightened, huddled up on his bed unable to speak, frozen in fear. She asked him what happened, thinking he had a nightmare. He was too scared to even talk about it and demanded to sleep in her room for the night.

The next morning, she asked him what frightened him. He claimed that a glowing blue man came up through his floor and began watching him. She shook her head, thinking this must have been a dream, but the boy insisted he had been wide awake.

A few days later on a Saturday or Sunday, my aunt and her son were out running some errands. They came home late in the day to find all of the cabinet doors in the kitchen wide open, even the cabinet doors down below. In the bathroom, the water was running in the sink. They had no idea what to think about this, but would soon find out it would only be the tip of the iceberg.

One night, my cousin claimed that he had a weird, eerie feeling that he was being watched as he watched TV. He said he began to hear sounds coming from the kitchen; it sounded like drawers being pulled out slowly, then a rustling in the drawers. Then it stopped. He looked back, but there was no one in the kitchen and the light was shut off. He paid it little mind, but still felt eyes on him.

A little while later, he heard his room door slowly creek open down the hall. By this time he was really "freaked". His mother, who was asleep at the time, remembers him coming into her room and waking her up. She was angry at him for not letting her sleep and scolded him. He then went back out into the living room to watch TV. As he passed by the door to his room, which was now wide open, he carefully and quickly flicked on the light… but there was nothing. Suddenly, something swiped him across the back of the neck. It felt like a cold hand. He ran back into his mom's room, slamming the door. He yelled at her to get up, telling her what was happening.

With a bit of anger, my aunt reluctantly got up to check the house. When she entered the kitchen, the stove's two top burners were turned on high and some of the drawers were pulled out all the way. My cousin swore to her that he was not responsible; he had just been watching TV.

Some nights later, my aunt woke up out of a solid sleep. There across the room was a woman sitting at her vanity. My aunt sat up, trying to get a focus on the apparition. She seemed to be a teenage girl in a puffy dress, and my aunt could see a clear reflection of the girl's face in the mirror. The young girl was brushing her hair and laughing. Then she seemed startled and looked back to my aunt, and with her eyes wide open she just disappeared.

My aunt was just dumbfounded and obviously a bit scared. She now knew this was more than her son's active imagination.

THE DOLL

My cousin was what they used to call a "latch-key kid", meaning that his mother worked while he stayed alone a good part of the day. At this point, however, he would not go into the house when he got home from school. Most evenings he would play outside or would sit on the doorstep until she got home. And he absolutely would not sleep alone.

About a week later, my aunt brought home some memorabilia from her mother's (my grandmother) house. One of the items was a small, dirty Raggedy Andy doll that she had won at a fair when she was a kid.

One night when she got home and went into the kitchen to make dinner, she found the doll sitting upright on the kitchen counter. She thought this was weird, but set it aside and eventually took it back to the hall closet and back into the box. She soon found that the doll had a weird way of getting out of that box. One night on the way to the bathroom, she found the doll lying in the hallway; another time it was in the living room on the sofa, as if it was watching television.

My aunt finally got the message that the place was haunted. After work one evening, she went down to the spiritualist shop and asked them if they knew anything about spirits. Not surprisingly, they were all answers and recommended a séance to help the spirit go into the light.

THE FIRST SÉANCE

My aunt invited them to come up to her apartment a night or so later. Led by the shop owner (a medium, remember), they began by using a Ouija board to contact any spirits. They reportedly contacted a man named Elwin Cobbes, who began to communicate on the board. He said that he lived in the building when it was a roadside tavern in the late 1900s. They asked him why he couldn't move on and he said he didn't want to, so there was no success in making him leave. The medium tried to contact the teenage girl my mother had seen. There was no response at first, but after a few more attempts a weird jangle of spoons and forks came from the kitchen. They asked if she was doing that, but there was no response on the board. So the spiritualists left.

A day or so later, my aunt began to encounter a new presence. One night my aunt was in her room dressing when out of the corner of her eye she saw a woman kneeling down over at a cradle. She quickly turned, but of course there was no one there.

The next morning as she was starting for work, she looked down the hall, and inside her open door was what appeared to be a woman walking around. She was dressed in a long, blue and white dress, like hospital nurses used to wear. My aunt carefully went back to the room. Although there was no one there, she felt eyes on her, as if someone were standing there watching her. She just left the house.

A few days passed and she talked to the spiritualist again. She asked her group to conduct another séance. She even offered to pay them for their help in getting rid of the ghosts. (I guess she couldn't afford to move.)

THE SECOND SÉANCE

That night, the spiritualists came up to her apartment with the Ouija board and tried another séance. This time they contacted the spirit of a young boy. They asked him his name. Emmet, he told them, giving no last name. The medium and her friend looked at each other. They said the boy was a spirit they had previously contacted downstairs at their shop. My aunt told them about the nurse apparition she had seen, and they said they had contacted a nurse, too, who died of tuberculosis after World War One ended.

It immediately clicked. Every spirit the medium had been contacting was moving into the building. My aunt asked if they had contacted a preteen girl with their Ouija board. They said that they had contacted a mother who was looking for her 11-year-old daughter in a fire and in doing so died of smoke inhalation.

The flames on the stove and the vision of the daughter now all made sense to my aunt. These women were contacting spirits who were staying in the building. My aunt then asked the women to leave, telling them exactly what they were doing with their methods and that, to say the least, she was not happy about it. All this made my cousin terrified to even be in the apartment.

A few nights later there was another incident. My aunt and her son had sat down to watch a video they had rented. There began what sounded like a rolling, drumming sound from the hallway. My aunt heard it, and after the movie she went to investigate, finding nothing strange. She hoped it was just an ambient sound from the street below.

THE LAST GHOST

Around that same period of time, my cousin was watching TV in his room with the lights low. (His mother had put a TV in there to lure him back to sleeping in his own room.) Suddenly, he got a chill and looked over to his left, then his right. When he turned to his left again, there beside him about three feet away was a weird-looking boy about his age. He had a mean face, blond hair, and was dressed in knickers and a button-down shirt. The boy coldly stared at my cousin. He jumped, frightened, and ran quickly out into the hall. This time his mom knew he was telling the truth.

My aunt had had enough. They both left the apartment and went over to live with my grandmother, who lived a few cities away. They told her nothing about the haunting, but instead made up a lame excuse about heating problems in the building. They decided to stay there until they could find a new apartment.

My aunt and cousin returned to the apartment only once, to gather the rest of their belongings. When they entered, there on the back of the sofa was the Raggedy Andy doll. They got their stuff and left it for good.

Here's one last bit of weirdness. About six months later, the building caught fire, burning almost entirely to the ground and leaving the whole building blackened. The couple who had lived across the hall from my aunt got badly burned by it. The shop downstairs was burned out completely. The local paper reported that the fire began on the first floor, probably due to faulty wiring (which means they really didn't know the cause).

Did one of the spirits cause the fire, or was it just a fluke? Was the ghost girl a pyromaniac who liked to turn on stoves? That has always been my sneaking suspicion, but I guess we'll never really know.