I’ve been writing a ghost story this month. That may surprise some of you, because I haven’t written a lot of ghost stories in the past. Possibly this is my first, although I don’t pretend to remember every single story I’ve written over the past fifty-plus years.
I’m writing this one because an old friend asked me to do one for a book of them that he was editing, and while I was considering the invitation a perfectly good story idea popped into my mind. Though nobody who knows my work would ever associate me with ghost stories, I’m been fond of them as a reader ever since I discovered, around 1948, the classic Herbert Wise-Phyllis Fraser anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. There is something about Victorian England that fascinates me, the fog, the hansom cabs, the Sherlock Holmes atmosphere, and many of the Wise-Fraser stories are set in that era. So I reveled in its vast array of spooky and wonderful Victorian tales by the likes of Arthur Machen, Oliver Onions, J.S. Le Fanu, and Algernon Blackwood, and, ever since, when seeking a change of pace from the robots and spaceships and time machines, I’ve pulled a collection of ghost stories down from the shelf for a little guilty pleasure.
I call reading the stuff a guilty pleasure because I am, at heart, a rational-minded, logical sort of guy who stopped believing in ghosts around the time I figured out the truth about the Tooth Fairy. The supernatural world has no substance for me. Spooks, haunts, phantoms, revenants—I lose no sleep in dread of them. If it can’t be seen, measured, and explained, I figure, it isn’t real.
That doesn’t stop me, of course, from reading and even (these days) writing ghost stories with pleasure. There’s a lot that I read and write about that seems just as devoid of real-world substance as the Great God Pan. I don’t believe that we’re likely ever to go zipping around the past or future in time machines, but writing tales of time travel has been a specialty of mine for decades. I don’t think there’s much of a case for telepathy, but that did not keep me from writing Dying Inside. I doubt that the Earth is ever going to be invaded by beings from another star, and yet I wrote The Alien Years. And so forth: I’m a writer of fiction, not a journalist, and I write about all sorts of things for which I demand (from myself, and my readers) the willing suspension of disbelief.
Having said all that, I need to tell you something that will startle you as much as it does me, because it contradicts my basic view of myself as a rational being. Although I don’t believe in ghosts, I think that I live in a haunted house.
Let me try to explain.
The house I’ve lived in for nearly forty years, in the hills above San Francisco Bay, is quite unusual, architecturally speaking. It was built in 1947 by an unusual architect named Carr Jones, constructed out of recycled brick, slate slabs, and huge beams left over from World War II ship construction. Everything about it is original in concept and very ingenious for its time, which means that doing any sort of maintenance on it is a nightmare. (For example, the heating system was so complex that only one living person, the stepson of the builder, understood how it worked. When he started to show signs of age, and the heating system was doing the same, I had the whole bizarre thing ripped out and replaced with a conventional set of pipes that any capable plumber would be able to work on in the years ahead. But, since I don’t want to tear the entire marvelous house down and build a new one, I have to put up with the other strangenesses that the place provides.)
I am the third owner of the house. It was built for a local automobile dealer named Remmer, who after living here for about fifteen years sold it to Rollo Wheeler, an architect. He owned the place for about a decade. In 1971 Wheeler sold it to me, and I have been here ever since.
Both Remmer and Wheeler are long dead. Right after I bought the house, the Wheelers went sailing in the Gulf of California and never were seen again. (They may have been killed by Mexican pirates.) Remmer, the car dealer, died of natural causes somewhere way back. As for the car dealer’s wife—well, around 1980 Rollo Wheeler’s daughter, who had grown up in the house, came back to visit her childhood home and regaled me with anecdotes of the old days, one of which was the tale of Mrs. Remmer’s suicide on the premises here. I hadn’t heard about that, and I wasn’t particularly eager to know more, so I turned down her offer to tell me where on the grounds Mrs. Remmer’s body had been found.
Then in the summer of 1981 I had the house re-roofed. The old roof was the original 1947 one and after thirty-four years it wasn’t doing a good job of keeping the winter rains out. I hired someone to strip away the crumbling old shingles and brought in Doug Allinger, Carr Jones’ stepson, to do a new roof in keeping with the style of the previous one.
We have two buildings here, the main house and a smaller building that is my office. The workmen dumped the shingles from the main house over the top and down into the driveway, which runs just behind the building. But the office shingles had to be removed in a two-step process: strip them off and pile them up in front of the building, and then haul them the whole length of the property to the driveway. The first step of this job produced a great filthy heap of stripped-off old shingles about three feet high in front of the office door, completely blocking access to the building. Keep that image in mind: a knee-high stack of ancient shingles piled up against the door to the office, and a second such stack in back, where there is a second door. You should also know that I’m a passionate gardener. In Northern California’s relatively benign climate I’ve long been experimenting with subtropical plants that are really a bit too tender even for here (since our winter temperatures do drop below freezing for brief periods every five or six years.) Back then I set up an alarm system programmed to awaken me if the outside temperature ever dropped below 32 degrees. I had some fantasy in mind, I guess, of staggering out of bed in the middle of the night to throw protective covers over the most tender plants if that alarm ever went off.
Two nights after the shingle piles had been dumped in front of my office doors, that bedroom frost alarm went off, about two in the morning. I had no idea at first of what was happening, because the alarm had never gone off since I had installed it. But eventually I figured out that that weird sound was coming from the temperature-reading gizmo on the windowsill; and then I noticed that the gizmo was telling me that the outside temperature was 28 degrees.
It was a mild August night.
Twenty-eight degrees would be unusual in my area at any time of the year. But in August it’s simply impossible. The temperature alarm has malfunctioned, I decided, and went back to sleep.
In the morning I realized that I needed to get some reference item from my office that I had forgotten to bring out before the shingles were stripped. I spent a nasty half hour clearing enough of the piled-up old shingles away from the door so that I could squeeze myself inside.
As soon as I entered I smelled smoke.
Sinking feeling in chest. I have already experienced one house fire, in 1968, and I wasn’t ready for another. My office was originally the cabana for the adjacent swimming pool. It is equipped with a small refrigerator and a little electric stove. I had never used either one. The refrigerator, disconnected, has served as a storage cabinet for books. I had piled more books on top of the stove.
One of the burners on the stove had been turned on.
The smoke was coming from a slowly charring book sitting on that burner. Probably it would have burst into flames in another hour or two; but I quickly turned off the stove and pulled the book away. Mind you, that burner had never been used in the nine years that this building had served as my office, and access to the office had been blocked for the past couple of days by those shingles, besides. Nor was there any sign that anyone had pushed the shingles aside to enter. Somewhere during the night, though—the same night that the frost alarm had registered a sub-freezing temperature in August—that burner had been turned on.
Had some ice-cold thing walked past the sensor of the temperature alarm in the night, then drifted through the wall of my office to turn the stove burner on?
When the workmen showed up that morning, I asked if anyone had had reason to enter the building the previous day. No, nobody had. (The shingle pile would have shown evidence of entry, anyway.) And when I showed Doug Allinger the book that had been burned he immediately said, “Well, it’s Mrs. Remmer’s ghost, isn’t it?”
The book? Volume Two of The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, edited by Leslie A. Shepard.
I don’t believe in ghosts, of course. I’m a rational, skeptical man. But there is a useful concept known as Occam’s Razor, named for the medieval philosopher William of Occam, which says, “Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily”—that is, the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is probably the best one.
What Occam’s Razor tells me is that it is simpler to believe that a wandering supernatural being turned that burner on in the night than it is to believe that the burner turned itself on. Maybe the erroneous frost signal had been the result of some electronic malfunction, but the stove did not have electronic controls. Physical force had to be exerted to turn the burner on, and no one had been in my office to exert that force—except, I suppose, the malevolent ghost of Mrs. Remmer.
Would a ghost be able to turn a stove burner knob, though? I don’t know. Since I don’t believe in ghosts, I have no idea what they can or can’t do. One would think that a spirit immaterial enough to pass through the wall of my office would be too ectoplasmic to turn that knob. But no one of this world had entered my office those two days past, and the stove had been turned on, and I can just as readily believe that my house is haunted by the ghost of Mrs. Remmer as I can that a stove can turn itself on.
Since then, all manner of odd things have happened around this house. While we were traveling one winter, the main house’s roof sprang a leak during a storm and the narrow stream of water that ran down one wall just happened to descend onto the burglar-alarm keyboard, shorting it out. During another trip, my office sink apparently turned itself on and by the time we got home and noticed that water was running there was a flood in a storage room on the floor below. We have had computer settings mysteriously change themselves, and stored e-mail mysteriously delete itself. Et cetera. Our housekeeper of some years back, going into my office to give it one of its rare cleanings, said to my wife, “I feel a presence here.”
“Yes,” Karen said lightly, indicating my papers strewn all around. “It’s Bob.” But she knew—and didn’t want to say—that what the housekeeper was sensing was the presence of Mrs. Remmer.
As I say, I’m not a person who believes in ghosts. But I do use Occam’s Razor as an aid to thinking, and Occam’s Razor tells me that all the weird stuff that happens around here can best be explained as the work of some malign invisible spirit, and so be it. A couple of years ago, I told this story to a friend of mine, the anthropologist and artist Winfield Coleman. He is an expert on shamanism, and offered to perform a rite of exorcism for us. I turned him down. I don’t believe in ghosts, I said; and in any case, I didn’t want to discover that by ejecting Mrs. Remmer I had simply made room here for some even more malevolent apparition.