An Uncanny Christmas Story

Note: Shannon Morris taught Spanish and French at Harding High School for twenty nine years before retiring in 2013. He told me the following story in September 2013 as we sat at the picnic table out behind the Harding Home, where he has worked for more than 20 years.

“Most people who hear this story are surprised at how well I remember the details. But I have hyperthymesia, which is a kind of extreme biographical memory. So even though the story I’m about to tell you happened when I was only 6 years old, I remember many of the details clearly.

“Now this is going to get weird.  It was December 10th, 1964, which was a Thursday. I was watching an episode of The Flintstones with my grandmother, who was babysitting me. My grandmother lived with us and had so since before I was even born. She was kind of like a second mother to me. We lived at 634 Lee Street.

“So my parents and my brother had gone Christmas shopping that night. I remember The Flintstones came on TV at seven thirty, so it had to have been dark. The house was already decorated for Christmas, quite elaborately. I had a little rocket launcher that I was playing with. I shot the rocket off, and it went up and knocked down some Christmas decorations. We laughed. You know, she was just entertaining me while my parents were gone.

“It was snowing heavily, and it seemed like my parents had been gone quite awhile – at least it seemed that way to me. Anyway, while we were horsing around, we heard what sounded like tires squealing out on the road there on Lee Street. And it was a little scary because we thought maybe there had been an accident. So my grandmother and I went to the door to see what had happened. Well the porch was snow-covered, and we noticed that there were man-sized footprints leading up to the door. I remember that kind of mildly scared me. As it probably would a kid. But I don’t remember necessarily that my grandmother made a big deal about it. In any case, we didn’t see anything. So we closed the door and we went back into the living room

“It probably wasn’t more that five or ten minutes before we heard another noise that sounded like squealing tires. And when I ran to the door to see, I remember my grandmother saying, “Don’t open the door!” But I opened the door. Well, those footprints were still there, but they were overlaid with footprints that looked as if they had been made by someone who wasn’t wearing shoes. And I remember very distinctly finding that strange.  I remember my grandmother yelling, “Close the door and close it now!” And she grabbed me and pulled me back from the door before closing it. Once that happened, that’s when, excuse the expression, all hell broke loose. My memories from that point on are very, very clear but also bizarre.

“Our TV was an old black and white Philco with the dials on the top. And it stood on legs – it wasn’t a floor model. And I can still see the pictures that my mom had sitting on top of that TV. In any case, for some reason I looked underneath the TV. They had it sitting in the corner of the room. And I remember looking under the TV, and I saw what looked like dog’s legs. But we didn’t have a dog. They were grey and I only saw two. I remember screaming because I didn’t know what that was. At that moment I didn’t know where my grandmother was. I have no memory of that, which is strange for me. I only remember seeing those two animal legs. And they moved. From somewhere out of my field of vision, I heard my grandmother tell me to hide. And I hid behind the couch. There was a space behind the couch, and just above the back of the couch was a window. I distinctly remember hiding, but I didn’t know why I was hiding. I never did find out why I was hiding. And at that point I still didn’t now where my grandmother was.

“I was sitting there with my back to the window when I heard a noise above me. The curtains were open. I looked up over my shoulder and at the window, and there was a goat looking in and staring directly down at me. That’s all I can remember – a gray colored goat – at the window! Now I’m not saying it was the devil or anything of the sort. It looked like a barnyard variety goat! I remember screaming, but that’s the last I remember.

“The next thing I remember was sitting on that couch crying and shaking, and my grandmother was in the room, but she wasn’t sitting with me. She was standing up, and I remember my mother, my father, and my brother (who was much older that me) coming in with all kinds of Christmas presents. Bags and bags of stuff. And I remember my grandmother telling them, “We have to talk.” And she took them off into another room and left me sitting on that couch right by that same window! Since then, to this day, I always close the window shades wherever I am.

“Here’s another strange thing about an already strange story: to this day, I’ve never been able to get anyone in my family to talk to me about what happened that night. My mother is 91 and lives with my sister, who is 73. I was by far the youngest. If I bring it up, mother says, “There are things better left unsaid.” I’ve asked and asked, but she won’t talk about it. My grandmother, who died when I was 21, wouldn’t discuss it, either. I would try to get her to talk about it, and she’d only say, “Now, now, don’t worry about it.” And my brother claims he doesn’t remember it.

“Even all of these years later, I have so many unanswered questions. Was it paranormal? It sure seemed like it at the time. But other possibilities have also occurred to me as well. Maybe it was a home invasion. Maybe someone was trying to break in, and that’s why my grandmother told me to hide. I was talking to an acquaintance one time, and he said that maybe these strange memories I have of that night are replacement memories for some traumatic event. But what a heck of a way to deal with it! Because that memory has caused me a lot of long-term stress. Another possible explanation – at least in my mind – had to do with a rumor going around town about a man named Mr. McGregor. My brother, who would’ve been in his late teens then, had some friends over a day or two after that incident, and I remember there were a lot of hushed conversations about a Mr. McGregor out in the county and his having seen something on his property that no one could explain. (I remember the name because Peter Rabbit who was always getting into Mr. McGregor’s carrot patch.) What this man had supposedly seen was never clear to me since these conversations always died out when I went into the room.

“To this day I can’t explain what happened that night, and I wish I knew what it was I experienced. Even telling this story has given me goose bumps.”

The Haunted House on Cherry Street

Note: the current residents of this house have asked that I not use their real names in the following article. They have also asked that I not reveal the address of the house.

It’s a lovely house – really it is. Built in 1910, the 12 room house occupies a spacious lot on Cherry Street. A crumbling carriage house (this isn’t a pretention – in its day, the building housed actual carriages) sits at the back of the property. Inside the house, the high ceilings and ornate woodwork suggest an elegance and solidness missing in modern houses.

Like I said, it’s a lovely house; it’s also haunted – really it is.

It was a warm fall day in early October when I first went to see Tina and her mom, Delores. I rang the doorbell and heard a mechanical ringing from deep within the house, which was immediately followed by the sound of barking dogs. (I soon learned that the doorbell, like other things in the house, dated to the construction of the house but still continues to work reliably.) Tina opened the door briskly, shooed her three dogs away and led me into the living room. After a few minutes of small talk, Delores joined us.

Tina and Delores have lived in the house since 1991. Up to then, the house had only been in the hands of one other family, the Berrys, and perhaps it’s best to start with them.

The Berry Family

Berry family patriarch Arthur “A.J.” Berry as he appeared in the “Who’s Who in Marion” piece that ran in March of 1925 in The Marion Daily Star. Image courtesy of the Marion County Historical Society.

Born in Marion in 1876, Arthur “A.J.” Berry spent his entire life living and working in Marion. After graduating from Marion High School, he worked as a reporter for The Marion Star (owned, at the time, by Warren G. Harding). Later, he managed the Marion County Telephone Company and, later still, served as vice president at the National City Bank and Trust Company. Perhaps it’s no accident that all of these companies had deep ties with Marion because Arthur Berry was also deeply civic-minded. Among other things, he organized the Marion Chamber of Commerce in 1919 and served as secretary of the building committee during the construction of the Harding Hotel in 1924. In 1918, at the relatively late age of 42, Arthur married Alma Reading, a woman 20 years his junior, and they settled into Arthur’s grand house on Cherry Street. In 1921 Alma gave birth to their only child, a daughter they named Joan.

Whereas Joan’s father appears to have spent his entire life happily living in Marion, Joan, it seems, couldn’t wait to get out. An aspiring actress, she left town for Missouri to study at Stephens College, which, even today, is considered one of the best schools for theater in the country. She later came back to Ohio to study at The Play House, a theater in Cleveland. During World War II she served as a Red Cross volunteer in Jacksonville, Florida, and married a service man named Kennedy. They had two children together, a son and a daughter. The details of what Joan did in the years after the war are scarce, though the public record shows that she and Mr. Kennedy divorced and Joan married another man, a fellow by the name of van Atta, and they eventually had a son together. However, Joan and Mr. van Atta also divorced. By 1969 Joan was once again living in the Berry home on Cherry Street (Arthur Berry died in 1961) with her third husband, a man named Kayatin. They, too, eventually divorced.

If the facts of Joan’s life suggest a bit of personal turbulence, the stories related by Tina and Delores only confirm it. For starters, Joan had a serious drinking problem. According to Delores (who was an acquaintance Joan’s daughter), she remembered seeing Joan staggering around uptown from time to time – sometimes in nothing more than her slip. On those occasions when Joan wasn’t up to leaving her house, she had alcohol delivered to her via taxi.1

And so Joan seems to have spent her later years with her dogs – Dobermans which were, to quote Tina, both “huge and mean” – for company. Though she gave occasional piano lessons, Joan appeared to be well-off enough financially to be more or less a woman of
leisure.2 However, Joan’s health began to fail in the ‘80s, and she died in 1989 of cardio respiratory failure in the house in which she had grown up. Tina told me that when the paramedics arrived, they hard time getting into the house because of the viciousness of Joan’s dogs. (The dogs were eventually euthanized.)

Jan van Atta, Joan’s son, inherited the Cherry Street house, and he eventually sold it to Tina’s parents in 1991.

The New Owners

By the time Tina’s father, Russell, saw the house, it was already starting to decline. However, Russell could still see the possibility for grandeur that the house possessed and bought it with plans to fix it up into the family’s dream home. Unfortunately, Russell, who was a long-distance trucker, died in 1993 while on the road, thus leaving the house to Delores and Tina. In the twenty years they’ve lived there, their awareness that strange things are sometimes afoot in the house has been gradual, though both women have experienced enough weird activity to be convinced that the house is indeed haunted.

As I sat with Tina and Delores that October afternoon, they recounted some of the strange incidents that had happened in the house over the years.

Some of the incidents Tina and Delores described are odd but essentially harmless: Pictures routinely fall from the walls. Once a whole series of photos fell off in the order in which they were hung. Another time the upper pictures fell off the wall while the lower ones remained hanging. Cupboards sometimes open by themselves. Occasionally, they hear enormous crashes only to find that nothing has fallen.

A photo Tina took immediately after the top two pictures mysteriously fell from the wall. Note the undisturbed bottom picture.

Other stories, however, are a little creepier: When her family moved into the house, Tina said there were scratches all over the walls from Joan’s Dobermans. These scratches were perhaps a sign of the role the dogs – both Tina’s and Joan’s – would play in the haunting. Tina said her dogs have been afraid to enter some parts of the house. The dogs’ toys have disappeared only to reappear after a good stretch of time. One of the strangest incidents happened during the summer of ’91. Tina, who was 14 at the time, said she was lying on her parents’ bed talking on the phone with her feet were dangling off of the edge of the bed. Suddenly, she felt something animal-like run by her legs, and this was accompanied by the sound of jangling chains. It was an experience that was still vivid in her memory when, months later, she and some friends were exploring some of the rooms in the house’s large basement and came across some chains hanging on the wall. They were choker chains that had belonged to Joan’s Dobermans. When one of Tina’s friends lifted a chain off of the wall, Tina immediately recognized the sound that she had heard while lying on her parents’ bed that night.

The hand print that appeared on the inside of the window one night.

Tina also talked about the time she woke up one night to use the bathroom and, on her way back to bed, saw a very large hand print on a fogged-up window. Tina thought at first that perhaps someone outside had placed his or her hand on the outside of the window to make the print. However, the window was double-paned and, in any case, upon closer examination, she realized the hand print was on the inside of the window. She said she immediately “freaked out” and woke her sleeping mother up. Tina said that the thought did cross her mind that maybe her mom had done it to scare her. Delores, however, denied that it was hers, and Tina was quick to tell me that her mom has never intentionally scared her.

In another incident, Delores related how she and her granddaughter once saw small footprints, side by side, on the floor of the bathroom. The prints, Delores assured me, were human-shaped and not from one of the dogs. In fact, the bathroom seems to be an ‘active’ part of the house. Tina said that both she and her niece have, while taking showers, seen shadows moving across the surface of the shower curtain as if someone is in the bathroom with them. However, every time they looked out from behind the curtain to see who was there, the bathroom was empty. Tina told me that one time, after one of these incidents had occurred, she was standing in the shower trying to calm down when there was a distinct smack on the shower curtain right near her face.

Outside of Delores and Tina’s family, other people have also had unsettling experiences in the house. Tina said that one time her friend Heather was over and they were up late talking. There was a TV in the room, but it was turned off. Tina had her back to the TV, but Heather was facing it. Suddenly, Heather’s eyes welled up with tears for no discernible reason – Tina pointed out that Heather was not prone to crying – and she seemed to slip into a trance. When the spell was finally broken, Heather said that she had seen a man reflected in the dark TV screen. Tina said that she thought perhaps it was her deceased father, Russell. Scared and upset, the girls spent the night dozing together on the couch. Many other friends and relatives have also visited the home and, unprompted, said that they feel very uneasy there, as if someone is on their heels when they walk from room to room. Some family members even refuse to go to the second and third floors alone and at night.

Although they believe other spirits dwell in their house, both Tina and Delores agree that Joan (and perhaps her dogs) are at the heart of the haunting. For her part, Delores said that she’s never felt threatened. In fact, whenever weird incidents are happening, she just says, “Now Joan, behave.” A paranormal investigation carried out by the now-defunct group Eerie Paranormal in 2011 concluded that the spirit (or spirits) have a certain affinity for Delores (though for reasons that remain unknown). Tina, on the other hand, feels more threatened, perhaps because she’s had more negative experiences in the house over the years.

What the Future Holds

When I asked Tina and Delores whether they ever considered moving out of the house, they both grew quiet, which was odd considering how chatty they had been up to this point. Tina later told me in an e-mail that, “We really don’t like to discuss plans for moving out [while] inside the house. I know it sounds silly, believe me.” In fact they have decided to use code words when talking about finding a new place to live. It turns out that both of them wouldn’t mind moving out of the house, but whenever they have discussed leaving, “Something here interferes with our health. I have survived three bouts of respiratory failure and been hospitalized for it many times, the last time being the worst. My mom has been in similar situations, too. [This has happened] too many times not to be suspicious!” In fact, both Tina and Delores once ended up in ICU with respiratory failure at the same time. Hospital staff informed them that this was the first time they had seen members of the same family in the hospital with this affliction. (Normally, respiratory failure is the result of something unpredictable like a car wreck or a fire!)

The thought of selling the place – a place that is probably too big and hard to take care of for just two people with compromised health – is often on their minds, and that’s part of the reason they have asked me not to reveal the exact address of the house. After all, trying to sell a house these days (let alone a haunted one) is hard enough.

_____

1 While leaving, Tina pointed out the light switches installed on the baseboard next to the front door. It turns out that Joan had them installed so that if she came home too drunk to stand, she could simply turn on the lights from down there as she crawled over the threshold.

2 Joan often hid money in books but then forget which ones, exactly. As a result, she would sometimes pay kids in the neighborhood to come over and look through her books for the money.