Other Johnson Family Ghost Stories
The Haunted Windmill
by Sue
In the mid 1980's my partner’s father was on sabbatical at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He and his wife had rented a renovated windmill for the year – to live in, I mean. It had been a real, working windmill dating back to God knows when. It was built on a hill overlooking the city, St. Martin’s Hill, and so was called St. Martin’s Windmill. We were very amused that they had secured such quaint lodgings, which seemed more the stuff of New Yorker cartoons about Americans living abroad than real life.
The important thing about the windmill, to those of us remaining Stateside, was that it had a guest room. Which meant that those family members who could scrape up the airfare could have a vacation in England with lodging thrown in for free. Grandpa visited first, and later my partner, his sister and I went over. Grandpa ran into it first, so we sort of knew what to expect.
A word about what live-in windmills are really like. If I recall, the sails or vanes or whatever they are called had been removed, so that they wouldn’t be blowing around all the time. Other than that, it was just like a picture-book windmill, round and tapering from bottom to top. Each floor was circular, but except for the ground floor had been divided up with walls to make rooms. The circular ground-floor living room, with its thick walls and deeply recessed windows, struck me as unusual, and definitely an interior decoration challenge. A steep flight of stairs led up from this level to the next, where the guest room was. There were three more levels, each one smaller than the last, each flight of stairs narrower and more ladder-like. The girls’ and then the parents’ room came next, with the very highest, tiny (and freezing cold) level being the wife’s work room for sewing and writing. It was hers by default, since no one else had the energy to climb all the way up there.
When Grandpa came to visit, he got put in the guest room on the second level. Now, he has worn hearing aids ever since an accident with fire crackers when he was a teenager. He wears them during the day and takes them off to sleep at night. Another thing, he is a rather sober, taciturn man. So when he reported being woken early one morning by a woman calling out from just outside the bedroom door, in a language that sounded like English but was not quite understandable, this was duly discussed and commented upon at the breakfast table. An alibi check proved that no one else had been up and about at that time. Even if they had, he would not have been able to hear them – his hearing aids were not in.
After Grandpa left, the next contingent arrived. My partner and I were given the guest room, and his sister was put in the girls’ room as they were away. Before going to bed, we all rehashed Grandpa’s strange story. It seemed so vague to me that I was hardly worried. The tiny, narrow stairs were much more frightening – you wouldn’t want to go groping for the bathroom half-asleep in the middle of the night; it would be a toss-up as to whether you died from falling down them, or freezing to death, but one or the other seemed certain.
At bedtime, we settled into the room with the comfortable thrill of sleeping in a real live windmill. The room was small and would have been cozy if it hadn’t been freezing cold. There was a double bed with a down mattress, down comforter, and down pillows on one wall, and a dresser and chair between the windows on the opposite wall. I unpacked some things from my bag, setting out some clothes for the next day on the chair and placing my sandals underneath its rungs. (My partner would have unpacked, but his bags had unaccountably gone to Bombay.)
It was only when I got into the bed that I started feeling strange. Something about the heavy, warm, dusty-smelling bedding made me feel as if I was really in a very strange place. And I really didn’t want to hear that woman’s voice. So I folded the pillow over my ear and fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.
I awoke with dawn well under way, and a glorious British spring dawn it was. Lying there without moving, I could see through the window that if the sun wasn’t exactly shining, it was coming very close; the air coming in through it, pushed by a polite and understated breeze, smelled damp, warm and fragrant. Birds were singing. And there was something on my face. Something slick and cold against my cheek. What the hell?
I put my hand up to feel my face. There was a large object nestled against it. I grabbed it, sat up and looked at what I had in my hand. It was one of my sandals, that I had put under the chair across the room before turning in last night.
My partner woke up, yawned, stretched, and generally detected what a wonderful day it was. I shook the sandal at him and asked what the hell THIS was doing on my pillow. He looked at me blankly and said he had no idea.
Ghosts tend to go for what will get you. To Grandpa, it said something he couldn’t possibly have heard, since he couldn’t hear. To me, it tweaked my nose by putting something on my pillow, because I had been using my pillow to keep it out. You just can’t win with a ghost, as my sister says. But that’s another story.
The Haunted Bookcase
by Anne and Sue
Around the time Sue was born, we were living in Lowville, a tiny town that is the capital of Lewis County in Upstate New York. The former owner of the house we lived in was Harold Johnson, and he died in the bathtub. Heart attack I think. He was the guy who designed and built the house. Mommy and Daddy said they would hear someone calling (or rather moaning) "Harold, Harold" through the chimney area upstairs, where there was a built-in hall closet (you know, where Mommy found the Steifel tiger toy). One night I was asleep in the room Carol and I shared and I woke up with a start because I heard a huge crash in the bathroom. It sounded like the medicine cabinet fell off the wall and crashed onto the floor. I was scared but got up and looked and everything was in place. No one else had heard the crash.
The other story about Harold concerns a tall narrow bookcase our parents had. I'm not sure where this happened, as we had the bookcase for many years and it stood in many of the houses we lived in. The way I heard it is that everyone was sitting around in the living room one night, the way we used to do. The bookcase was also in there and suddenly it started to shake, to quiver really. Mommy and Daddy looked over at it, surprised, and then there was a sudden cracking or splitting noise and a voice called out "Harry!" Then the bookcase reverted to its normal self. They examined it for cracks, but it was intact. Certainly for as long as we had that bookcase afterwards and heard the story, I've never been able to find any cracks or problems in the wood. And it was never haunted after that.
The Haunted Dorm Room
by Anne
Winchell Hall was a women's dorm at Syracuse University in the early 1970's. There was a poltergiest there that would turn up annually or semi-annually. One year it was in my friend Barb's room. It moved the soap around and other small things. The next year it was in my friend Marilyn's room, the room above mine. Popcorn would come out of the ceiling and muscular dystrophy candies and so on. One of the people in the room, Karen, said she woke up one night and found a bible between her legs. She also said she found a hammer next to her in bed one night.
Karen was sort of an oddball, so I think we never particularly put much credence in what she said. But our friend Marilyn was trustworthy and she said she saw and experienced things that could not be explained, so we started to pay attention. (We was me and my roomate). We spent a night or two up there, since the one wierd roomate had bailed and would no longer sleep there. I slept on the floor. After we had turned out the lights and were quiet for a while we heard a thump somewhere and turned on the lights. Next to me on the floor were two sugar packets and a safety pin which was open, all neatly arranged by my head. That was odd because I would certainly have noticed someone coming over there and putting them down, but no one had. We slept the rest of the night without incident.
The other night I stayed there is the night the odd roomate, Karen, woke up in bed with a hammer next to her. Like I said we were not completely sure of her so did not take that to be irrefutable fact.
Once the upstairs people came running downstairs yelling. We left our room to see what was going on. Little hard candies (with muscular dystrophy wrappers) were coming out of the air, apparently out of nowhere. Another time it was popcorn (I did not see that one).
We experimented by closing and locking the door and posting guards outside and on the fire escape (the one in our room connected to the room above, where the ghost was). We waited a half hour or so, keeping watch all the time, then went back into the room. A shower cap that was hanging on the closet doorknob was moved, and a small wastebasket had been moved to the middle of the floor. Next to the wastebasket was a tissue that had been ripped up into four equal and very neat squares. We tried ripping a tissue and found it was impossible to rip it like that. Another time all the stuff that was on one dresser had been moved to another dresser.
We thought there might be some access through the attic as this was the upper floor, and went to look. To get into the attic you had to go into someone elses room with a ladder and open a hole in the ceiling and climb up. We did that and crawled over to the haunted room. There was no floor in the attic, only beams. Over the room we found some empty little cereal boxes, the kind you would get at the dinning hall, and I think the wrappers from some other food. But no access to the room below. Odd. Then the disturbances stopped happening. We heard rumours later that this sort of thing had been happening historically through the years. The next year they tore Winchell Hall down.
The Haunted Farmhouse
by Anne
[In the early 1980's my sister and her husband bought an old farmhouse, dating from the 1800's, located in very rural, isolated farming country in Northern New York State. In 1998 the house was struck by lightning and burned down. Friends and neighbors came to help with the demolition and searched places exposed by fire damage for signs of an urn, but nothing was found. The ruins of the house were eventually ploughed into a pit dug in the back field.]
There was also the ghost that woke Ted up one night here. It was a little boy who asked him to bury his ashes. Ted got very cold and creepy feeling and was sure he was not asleep. Also of note was Spot, the dog who hated to sleep near anyone's feet, much less in bed where people could touch her while sleeping, was in bed with us and would not get out of bed.
We never made a concerted effort to find ashes, and then the house burned down and got buried out back in the pasture, so hopefully everything is okay now.
There was also the time when the TV changed channels by itself (it was an old manual TV, without a remote, one you had to get up and click over yourself). The public TV auction was on, a very annoying TV show, and Ted was outside and I was in the kitchen doing dishes. I was vaguely listening to the auction, thinking how annoying it was, when all of a sudden a commercial for McDonalds came on and I thought, "Oh, they must be auctioning gift certificates to McDonalds; how thrilling", then another commercial came on and I said "wait a minute!" and went out and looked and it was no longer on public TV but on commercial TV. Apparently the house ghost also hated the auction.
The Groaning Glass Smasher
as told to Sue
This one is from John’s family, and I’m not sure if I’m getting it right. But it’s a ghost story, so who cares?
When John was small his parents moved the family to England for a year while they did teaching or research or something like that. They were staying in funky lodgings the most notable characteristic of which was a noise that came, on and off, of someone groaning and smashing glass. This always happened in the depths of the night and there was never any visible cause for the noise. After a while the Groaning Glass Smasher got bored with its usual routine and did something different. Late one night there was a huge crash and splitting noise. Everyone started rushing all over the apartment to find out what had fallen over and broken. Nothing was out of place. Then someone looked in the walk-in pantry. Everything in the pantry was covered with broken glass, spread in a thin even layer. Even stuff on the back of the shelves were covered with the same even layer. Chins were rubbed in perplexity, brooms and dustpans were deployed, and then everyone went back to bed.
The Slightly Haunted LeRay Mansion at Fort Drum
by Anne
Get to work at 0645, open building, find someone left the other door open, log on to my computer, get training area 14 up on arcview and put the wetlands on it and print it out bit by bit at 1:5000. It's big - is going to take at least 4 sheets of E paper (36" by 44" or something like that), and will take forever. About 95 or more MB per layout. Then Jeff will take this over and start delineating landcover types in the afternoon.
At 0800 we listen to Laurie's talk on LeRay Mansion (she is my office mate and the cultural resources manager), which is very good and is a brief she gave to the EQCC (high up commanders and civilian personnel), then we tromp over to the mansion for a tour and of course first go down in the cellar to see if we can feel the ghost. So there we are, about 15 of us, poking around the cellar.
But the only really enterprising ones are Aaron, Angie, and me, who go poking in all kinds of nooks and crannies and little side rooms. No ghost exactly, but I did feel funny. I remember feeling funny last time I was there too. The cellar is the most interesting part of the house. It is a big house, not as big as Gertrude's historic manor, but big. And with funny interior curved walls and so on. Then we go in some of the outer buildings then back to the office. Of course after this no one feels like working so we all chat for a while about movies we've seen and so on.
There is a group of people (the LeRay Mansion Preservation Committee) who don't have anything better to do than cause all kinds of stupid trouble for as many people as they can. One of them complained to Congressman John McHugh that the army was not spending any money on the mansion and was letting it fall to pieces, and specifically mentioned the grand piano which is sitting out in the unheated land office/barn. So there was a congressional inquiry (which resulted in Laurie's EQCC brief, where she showed that the army has spent at least 1.1 million dollars on the mansion so far).
So we go look at this grand piano, which is sort of nice, but is not really nice, and is in REALLY bad shape. AND it has no connection with the mansion. Someone dumped off their piece of junk piano there, and now this preservation committe wants the army to FIX and restore it. A piano restorer came to give an estimate after the complaint to John McHugh, and it will cost $900 a square foot to restore the outside of the piano, and the guy said MORE than that to get it to be playable again (replacing strings and whatever). This is where your tax dollars could be going! To restore and repair some piece of junk grand piano that someone dumped there because they did not want to have to pay to dump it at the landfill. NO connection with the LeRay's or the mansion and not even of the same time period as the mansion heydey! We could go out and buy a brand new, really good grand piano for an order of magnitude less money than repairing this one!
Anyways.....Laurie has made a point of pointing this out to various colonels and generals and so on, and so probably no money will be spent on this. So I hope you, as taxpayers, appreciate our vigilance here on Fort Drum.