Many people have been writing about the parties and the wonderful combinations of roommates in their respective houses during the 80’s and 90s. I was never much of a partier and was somewhat of an outsider to most social circles, mainly because I was raising a kid and I worked two jobs for a long while and didn’t really have the opportunity to go out and socialize. The few people who hung out with me know about my very strange house on West 8th Street, just across the street from what is now Girls Inc. It was never christened with a special name, it was just “Holly’s House” or, later, “Holly and Eve’s House.” Zac asked me to post something about the house in the Haints thread, but once I started writing about the house I found that I had more to say than I thought and I don’t want to take over that thread. I’ve never written about my experiences in that house, and in recalling specific episodes, I really can’t believe I kept such a cool head. That place was just strange and it regularly scared the shit out of people. As a side note, I have to say that I’m not a fan of fiction—everything I’ve written here is exactly as I remember it happening. I know Zac can attest to bizarre goings-on, and perhaps Noah, although I don’t remember if anything weird happened when he was there. So, turn out the lights, pull up a chair, and listen to the story about the weirdest house you never visited…

I moved with my husband and 4-month old son into the house on West 8th Street in late July 1989. Our previous landlady sold our house on 4th Street and gave us a month's notice, so we didn’t have much time to find anything and even less money. A neighbor on 4th Street told me about a house that her friend ((Karen, of Material Plane) had just bought because the owner had died and she was looking to rent it right away. Karen was asking $300 a month for it, which was a steal then and even more of a steal now. It was a bungalow from the teens with two large bedrooms, a large stone porch, a sunroom on the front, a huge living room and dining room separated from each other by a beautiful wooden arch with built-in bookcases. The back of the house held the kitchen, the bathroom and a shed. It sat up on a hill and required the climbing of many steep stairs to reach the porch. The private areas, bedrooms and bathroom, were in the west half of the house, while the kitchen, living and dining rooms were in the east. A long, dark, windowless hallway divided the two halves. There was one closet in the house and it ran lengthwise between the bedrooms-- you could enter the closet on the east side of one bedroom, walk its length, and come out on the west end of the other bedroom. Therefore, you could walk a circuit of the main parts of the house without passing through the same door twice. It was fairly trashed and had a lasagna of wallpaper, lead paint, and coal dust on the walls , but I worked alone for a solid month before we moved in painting, cleaning, wallpapering, paste waxing the wood floors, trying to make it a nice home.

I did not notice anything odd about the house until my husband and I separated in 1991 and I was living there alone with Brenden, who was two and just beginning to really talk. Because of a frightening experience as a teenager with a man breaking into my house, I have never been comfortable sleeping alone in a house at night. Having Brenden there helped a little, but I was constantly imagining that I heard music or that someone was watching me from the hallway. It was not uncommon for me to sit on the couch reading and feel the lightest touch on the back of my neck. Late one night, I went down the hall to the bathroom and when I turned on the light, I saw just a flicker of a face (not mine) in the left side of the bathroom mirror. It really started to seem that the house was haunted when I started losing babysitters. It was hard enough to find someone to work my crazy hours, since I had to be at work between 7 and 9 and worked until the bar closed at 3:30, it was basically an overnight shift for the sitter. That first year on my own, I could not afford a telephone, so there was a feeling of isolation in the house as well. One night, I came home to find the sitter in a panic, which was unsettling, because she was a very level-headed person. She was nearly hysterical and kept saying that there was a man in the hallway watching her and she was afraid to go into the bathroom or down the hall. She kept repeating, "There's someone here. There's someone here." I paid her and she told me she'd never come back in the house (and she never did). After her, I went through a series of babysitters who would work for a night and report that someone was watching them or that they'd heard music in the house and I would never see them again. I tried telling new sitters the house was haunted, but fair warning didn't seem to help.

One night, as I recounted earlier in the Haints thread, I was home alone with Brenden (who was asleep) and I was doing something in the dining room when, with no warning, the heavy, wooden baseboards in the interior corner of that room began to BANG BANG BANG BANG back and forth along the floor like something was trying to come up through the floor. The house had a large basement that was unusually waterproof (for Bloomington) and free from cracks, so it wasn't an animal that had gotten trapped. The force used to hit those boards was too great to have been caused by an animal small enough to fit through any chink in the mortar of the stone foundation. At that point, I gave up trying to rationalize and realized that I was sharing the house with something else. I stopped telling the babysitters that there was something amiss (I feel a little guilty about this now). I started to pay closer attention when I would have the feelings of being watched or touched and I noticed that there were actually two presences in the house: one was angry and frightening and tended to hang around the bathroom and the front of the hallway, where it would peek into the living room (Brenden and I used the closet as a passageway between our rooms instead of using the hallway); the other was very gentle, hung out in the kitchen and near my bedroom and became very visible after a time. This second presence was responsible for the most famous characteristic of this house: she (for it was a she) brought the music.

Once my husband was gone, I began to get out and make friends. As they would come over to hang out after work I would let them figure out what was going on with regards to the other occupants of the house. I met Abby and she offered to babysit for me. As usual, I didn't say anything about the house. When I got home at 4 in the morning that first time she sat for me, she laughed when I came in the door and she said, "Did you know this house is haunted?" Abby became my regular sitter. At first, I would know my friends experienced something when they came back from the bathroom looking ashen and shaken. But then the singing started. I thought I was losing my mind or had developed an ear infection when I started hearing a mellow alto voice humming in the kitchen in the evenings when I was alone. Thinking it was the fridge the first few times, I would venture out there and try to locate the source of the sound. It would never get any louder or more distinct, it just remained a pleasant, comforting voice that sounded as if it were coming from inside a box somewhere. If I had quiet evenings at home with friends, inevitably someone would become antsy and finally say, "Where's that music coming from?!?" Brenden woke up one night and toddled out to sit with a group of us and someone asked him how he liked living in the house (I never talked to him about the weird presences or happenings-- he just grew up thinking that's how things were). In his little 3-year old voice he simply said, "The house sings me to sleep at night. She sings to me."

After the singing came the band. I loved summer nights in that house. I slept with my window open and on nights that I didn't have to work, I would crawl into bed and listen for the 2:30 a.m. train to pass through just beyond the trees across the street. I would count the clicks as the cars passed over a particularly crooked joint in the tracks and by the time the last car passed, I was nearly asleep. One night, after the train passed and I was coasting between sleep and consciousness, I heard big band music coming from far, far away. At first I thought it was noise drifting over from the B.G. Pollard lounge on 7th Street, but they had recently been closed during the investigation a shooting incident (I think that's what it was). Given the hour and the nature of the neighborhood, it was not conceivable that it was sound carried over from a neighbor. So I would drift to sleep listening to the sound of a spectral big band or a lady singing in some parallel universe. Very seldom, the big band would be preceded or succeeded by a loud bang like a heavy door slamming shut and it would jolt me awake. I never noticed a pattern of occurrence of that sound and it didn't happen often.

But I'm not telling the most interesting part of the story. When we moved into the house, there were assorted odds and ends left behind: an old fan, rotten curtains, some dusty books in subjects of no interest to me in the built-in shelves, and most interestingly, a huge trunk on the front porch. My husband never took an interest in the trunk and had no desire to break the lock to open it. I let it go, figuring I'd get around to opening it one day. It was probably full of junk, anyway. One night, must have been early '92, Jim the Fiend was hanging out and I told him about the trunk. He was dragging that enormous thing in the front door before I could say another word. He broke open the lock with a hammer and a screwdriver, I believe. We opened it and found a treasure.

The trunk was meant to be stood up lengthwise. When open, one side had a series of small drawers and the other had a metal rod for hanging garments. It was literally a portable wardrobe and I'd never seen anything like it. Everything was in a jumble inside, but astonishingly, the contents were not damp or moldy at all. Picking out item after item, we found that it belonged to a woman. There were wonderful foundation garments from around the 1930s-1940s, old silver powder compacts with mirrors intact, an evening bag made from colored metal scales and a dark green velvet dress. I pulled the dress out carefully, expecting it to fall apart in my hands. Instead, it slid right into my hands and revealed itself to be homemade, but expertly sewn and beaded. I couldn't help but notice it looked like it might fit me, so I ran back to my bedroom to give it a try. I was amazed to find that it fit as if it had been made for me. I ran out to show Jim, and he agreed. I looked through the rest of the trunk's contents wearing that dress.

Then we found the letters and personal papers. They were collected in one of the drawers and they were addressed to a woman named "Goldie". It rang a bell, and I went to the built-in bookshelves and pulled out the one volume in which I had seen handwriting before. Inside, signed on the flyleaf, was the name Goldie Cooke and the address of my house. Looking through the correspondence, we found that the trunk belonged to the same woman and that she had lived--and died-- in my house. While wearing her dress, I read letters from her son, who referred to "your husband" in a disapproving tone. It seems that her husband was an unkind man, possibly a drunk, and one who most likely abused Goldie, from the gist of her son’s accounts. The son asked his mother to leave, asked her to throw her husband out, and finally gave up, reminding her that she had a choice in the matter and that he would interfere no further. I read a letter from a man-- either Goldie's brother or cousin-- who was excited because his band was getting lots of work and traveling and they were getting ready to hit Boston. After reading, I saw that letter was in an envelope with a newspaper clipping about the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire and a newspaper obituary of the man who wrote the letter—he had been in the nightclub. I can't remember his name. There was a picture of Goldie in a white dress, diploma in hand, with her graduating class from Banneker School in 1921. After reading through all this correspondence and constructing a rudimentary history of this woman’s life, I have no doubt--NONE-- that she sat there with Jim and I while we looked through that trunk, nor do I doubt that she is the presence who sang in the house. I also suspect that her husband was the other presence in the house. It was so angry and had such malice it seemed to fit the personality created by Goldie’s son’s letters.

By the time Eve moved in as my roommate in the summer of 1992, I was rather protective of my ghosts-- well, at least of Goldie. I found that I wasn't afraid of the malevolent presence anymore, and if I felt it lurking I told it to fuck off and ignored it. Eve and I nurtured Goldie. If we felt her around, we said hello. We thanked her for the music if we heard her singing. Brenden regularly talked about the music in the house at night. Every now and then, there would be an odd circumstance when CDs would fly from their shelves for no apparent reason, or one of Brenden's wheeled toys would suddenly roll down the hall, but the house was really very peaceful. I remember becoming very ill suddenly-- one of those 24-hour things that comes on like gangbusters, kicks your ass and then leaves-- and lying in my bed in some liminal stage between sleep and delirium where I couldn't even open my eyes. Eve came in and I felt her sit on the edge of my bed and lightly stroke my hair. This went on for a few minutes-- five? ten?-- and then I heard Eve speak from the doorway of my room. I opened my eyes and saw with a start that she was wearing a towel and was somewhat wet. She'd been in the bath, not sitting on my bed stroking my hair. When Mike and I started seeing each other, I had left him sitting in my room while I went to the bathroom. When I came back to him, he was covered with goosebumps and he told me that someone was watching him from the bedroom door and when he looked up he saw a grey woman flit away down the hall. He never felt threatened by her, but I think that he, like many other people who heard us talk about the house, thought we were exaggerating until he saw something for himself.

Having a small child in that house was odd, but I never felt Brenden was in danger. He lived most of the first four years of his life in a house that sang him to sleep and that watched him play (and played with him, for all I know). He never knew that this wasn't normal and we never talked about it. The only bad thing that ever happened took place one night shortly before I moved out. I was there alone-- Eve had moved, I had no roommate at the time-- and in the middle of the night, I heard Brenden shouting angrily. I went into his room to find him sitting up in his bed, wide awake and glaring at the corner by the closet door. He was absolutely furious as he addressed me: "Get that man out of my room." Believe me when I say that every single hair on my body stood on end as I flipped on the light. There was no one there. Regardless, something upset my boy and that pissed me off, so my telling off of the man in Brenden's room was heartfelt and a couple minutes later, Brenden calmed down and crawled back under his covers. He then told me he didn't like his bed where it was because a large brown rabbit with big teeth looked in the window at him in the night and sometimes kept him awake. I picked him up and carried him in to my bed with me for the night. A few years ago, I asked him (he’s 19 now) if he was ever afraid of the ghosts in the house. He told me the only thing he was ever afraid of was a Sandman poster I had hung in the hallway.

I left that house in August 1993 out of mental necessity. A chapter in my life was over and I needed to leave that old life behind, as much as I loved (and still do love) that house. The new tenants knew about the haunting and the trunk and held some sort of cleansing ritual to release Goldie and the other presence from the bonds of the house. From then on the house was free of spectral incidents, as far as I know. I don't know what happened to the trunk. There was talk of donating it to the Monroe County Historical Society or giving it to one of the neighbors, who was purportedly a relative. I kept the green dress, the vintage lingerie, the powder compacts, the evening bag, and a few of the books that were in the bookshelves. One of these is the volume signed by Goldie. When I sought it out last night to check the spelling of her name, I noticed something funny: the subject of the book that was of no interest to me then has now become my life's work. That book's title is Mediaeval History.