by Laura Roman
It is an old house. It sits on a corner on streets lined with umbrageous trees. On some nights in the darkness you can hear phantom knocks at a front door that no longer exists. And up and down the shadowy corridors roams the ghost of a man who once lived there.
I have seen him.
He is an interpreter of the dark, he exists in between worlds, and he chooses to reveal himself to anyone sensitive enough to see him.
He haunts because he is haunted. He cannot separate himself from a life that existed long in the past .
The house he haunts is majestic and Victorian, a mansion built, in 1904, by W.H. Bates, a San Francisco Bay Area architect well-known in his day. Bates built the house for his family. In 1918, Bates died of injuries sustained in a car accident. In 1938 the house was reconfigured into four apartments. In September 2009 I moved into one of them.
My apartment was in the downstairs part of the mansion. Its design of parquet floors, high ceilings, Victorian lights, and fireplace made it the perfect haven for my collection of Victorian art and rare books.
Over the first weekend on moving in, I had a disconcerting feeling that each time I came and went someone else had been and gone. Two nights later a peculiar incident happened.
Upon entering my house, I closed the front door so that it touched the frame. A moment later it opened, and I felt a presence at the entrance. I turned and saw a shadow in the doorway. I thought it was a neighbor from upstairs coming to greet me. I called out “ one moment” – and made my way to the entrance. When I arrived I found no one there. I was overcome with a dreadful knowing.
I called a friend. “It just wants to see who’s moved in . . . tell it to go away.”
“Whoever you are, I live here now, and you must leave.”
Later that night, I felt the presence in my bedroom. It was distinctive – charismatic, kind, and gentlemanly.
Two nights later I saw him.
Again I was in my bedroom. I slept lightly and woke bolt upright, with the sense of someone having entered my room. I saw him at the foot of my bed, watching me. I saw the outline of a person, the vaporized colors of his plaid shirt – I could see through him. And I saw his face. His eyes were soulful, and they locked with mine. He communicated a profound sense of sorrow, I felt drenched in his sadness. We stayed for a moment with our eyes locked, and then I watched him dissolve back into thin air.
The next day I called the present owner of the mansion. “Has someone died here?” Nothing had been set on record but it was possible. The next week the owner shared his papers on the history of the house.
“W.H. Bates, the Most Prominent Builder in the County” read the headline from June 1907. There was a picture of Bates with soulful eyes: it was the man I had seen in my room.
A few nights later my front light lit spontaneously in the middle of the night. In the morning the front light was off and the living room light was on. This happened a few more times over the next week.
“Spirits communicate through electricity” I was told. “He wants something from you. Perhaps he thinks you can help him.” The incident with my lights continued; it got to be exhausting. The presence coming and going got to be exhausting.
The ghost conjured myriad thoughts. Why was he still here? What tormented him that he could not move on? He drained the house: each time he came and went there was a distinctive change in the atmosphere of the room. He also liked coming into my room late at night. And the intermittent trick he did with the lights was most distracting.
I finally found respite when I left on business for two weeks. On my return I encountered my upstairs neighbor by chance; in the course of our conversation I broached the topic of the ghost.
She had felt him, too. He was fascinated by her laptop she said, and came up from behind to watch her as she worked. She described him in the same terms: “He seems kind, benevolent, and gentlemanly – I sense it is a man, and that he is lost.” If this is Bates who died of injuries sustained in a car accident, this is a ghost clearly drawn to technologies; in 1918 the automobile was an innovation.
Eventually I had to call in an exorcist.
I had no experience with such matters. I was told about Father Gary Thomas of Sacred Heart Parish in Saratoga. He is a trained exorcist and the focus of a recent book. I divulged the details of my paranormal experiences over the telephone. Father Thomas came to my house within the week. He brought a crucifix, a pail of water and a tincture of table salt. He explained the salt by pointing to passages in the Bible where Christ had used salt to cast out spirits. He also explained the difference between human and other presences. Human presences become trapped in some cases when the person died suddenly and under tragic circumstances. Unless they are encouraged to move on, they can stay trapped in between worlds indefinitely.
Father Thomas performed a moving ritual of readings, prayer, and the casting of purified water throughout the house. “This should hopefully encourage him to move on. But I’ve got to tell you – in some cases they can be stubborn and he may not leave this house, but merely confine himself to your upstairs neighbor’s apartment.”
After Father Thomas left there was a distinctive “before’” and “after” feeling in my apartment: all was at peace, and my lights no longer lit spontaneously.
Father Thomas was very kind, and his caring and concern were palpable. In the odd context of circumstances it felt perfectly normal for him to be present at my house performing an exorcism. The experience has since caused me to question the nature of life and death and what happens to the “animating principle” that departs from the body, as one of my literature professors had once put it.
Within the month I ran into my upstairs neighbor. She had still felt the presence after Father Thomas had performed his blessing. We had to call Father Thomas back to perform the same ritual in her apartment. After he returned, the mansion was finally at peace.