Leslie Rule - Coast to Coast Ghosts: True Stories of Hauntings Across America

Coast to Coast Ghosts: True Stories of Hauntings Across America

copyright 2001 by Leslie Rule. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC

an Andrews McMeel Universal company

1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

Photography by Leslie Rule

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rule, Leslie, 1958

Coast to coast ghosts : true stories of hauntings across America / Leslie Rule.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-7407-1866-5

1. GhostsUnited States. I. Title.

BF1472.U6 R85 2001

133.1'0973dc21

2001028970

Book design by Holly Camerlinck

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For Savanna Rudberg Schreiner

I Am Ghost

I am in the shadow that creeps across your wall

And in the fingers of the wind as it tangles up your hair;

I am in the corner of the eye of the stranger lurking by;

I am Ghost.

I am in the shriek that shatters your sleep

And in the dance of the branches of the dying autumn trees;

I am in the silence and in the shouting, too;

I am Ghost.

I am in the tears weeping on your window

And reflected in the puddle in a fold between the ripples;

I am in the loneliness as she reaches for the phone,

And in the empty house, that aches for a family who will never return;

I am Ghost.

I am in the echo of hollow laughter gone;

I am in the rip in the wallpaper and the old patterns peeking through

And in the yellowed newspapers stacked up in the hall;

I am Ghost.

I am in the invitation forgotten in the drawer

And in the legs of the spider who lives beside the light;

I am in the rusty ring on the claw-footed tub.

I am Ghost.

Leslie Rule

P AGE

P AGE

XIII

XIX

XXI

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

A s a child of two writers, it was probably inevitable that Leslie Rule, my daughter, would grow up with a silver pennot in her mouth but in her hand. She was born with an intense curiosity about things both seen and unseen, into a family where none of us ever said Thats impossible and some of us believed in angels, ghosts, and good and bad spirits. Moreover, she was born in the midst of a wild storm that knocked out all the electricity in Seattle, and Virginia Mason Hospital had to operate on auxiliary power. The other mother in the labor room that day had a boy she named Daniel Boone. All the portents were right for Leslie to become a chronicler of ghost stories, except that she was not born with a caul.

And then again, it may have been genetic.

One of my earliest memories is of going to the cemetery with my maternal grandmother, Anna Hansen, while she put fresh geraniums on the graves of relatives Id never known. For the adults, it was a somber occasionbut for me it was fun.

As I skipped among the tombstones, I wondered why my grandma was so sad when I knew everything was all right and all the people who slept beneath the green Michigan grass were now free and happy. I suspect most children know those secrets, too soon forgotten. By the time they can verbalize what they once knew, the memories are as wispy as smoke in a fierce wind.

All I can call back now of that sunny May day in the cemetery is the overwhelming sense of serenity there.

It is true that Leslie and her siblings grew up in a haunted house in a haunted neighborhood, although we never thought of it that way. There were simply things unexplainable. I never knew until I read this book just how many things my children saw that I did not. If the mass of humanity would admit the truth, I think the vast majority of us could describe at least one otherworldly visit from someone or some thing they could not actually describe in concrete, scientific terms. Some choose not to see what cannot be defined within the parameters of what is safe and familiar; others, like Leslie, are attuned to new dimensions and the fascinating if sometimes tragic world of those in the shadows of life.

As a writer of true-crime mostly murder cases, I work with facts that have to be supported by the very precise work of homicide detectives and criminalists who explore infinitesimal evidence in forensic laboratories. And yet, when I am writing about the life and death of particular victims, I realize I have come to know them better than anyone knew them in life. It is almost as if the victim is standing just behind my left shoulder, ready to help me find some paragraph in a police report, a certain photo among the stacks of pictures next to my desk, or a line in a statement. Homicide victims want their stories told, and they do help me; sometimes I just reach my hand out blindly and it touches the very piece of research that I was looking for, when common sense dictates it should have taken me hours of searching.

And because I am alone except for three dogs and five cats, Im not at all self-conscious about calling my victim by name and whispering Thank you.

Perhaps because I write about violent and unexpected death, I am more aware of the narrow precipice we all walk between being alive and moving on to another and, I believe, better world. I dont believe that the human soul dies when the body dies; nothing so perfect would be designed for such a short existence.

Do I believe in ghosts? Of course.

The house I live in now has its own complement of ghostsor, rather, the land on which my house sits has its residents from another era. I live so close to Puget Sound that I am almost in the water. A few years after I moved here, a violent storm literally pulled three feet of beach out to sea, revealing two parallel rows of stumps. I learned there had once been a ferry dock some fifty feet out in the sound, and this was all that was left of the pilings that had once supported that dock. More than a century ago, a ferry once stopped here to pick up passengers bound for Seattle. Passengers traveled by buggy along bumpy trails and then made their way down the wooded banks to the shore of Puget Sound and waited on the dock for the boat to come. Probably thousands of people walked down the trail in my woods during that time.

In my pantry, when I am facing in the direction of the hill, I can sometimes hear a cheerful cacophony of voices. My television is off and my radio is off and there is no one on the beach. If I turn even a few degrees, the voices stop. I think I am tuning in to an aural slice of time out of place, listening for an instant to the sound of excited travelers headed to the dock that is no longer there.