I was born and spent the first 15 years of my life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I grew up in a normal, Midwestern family, doing normal Midwestern kid stuff. I had a bunch of sisters and a couple of brothers, a dog, three cats and – for a while – we had a pet skunk. That might not have been so normal.
Anyway, when I was 15 we up and moved north to a small town named Washburn. It was something of a change, moving from the biggest city in the state to one of the smaller towns. My ninth grade class at Gustav A Fritche junior high school in Milwaukee had nearly as many people in it as the entire town of Washburn. There were 38 students in my Washburn High School class. So saying that I graduated 10th in my high school class sounds good but is pretty much meaningless.
We had a really nice, large house in Milwaukee with a really nice, large yard. The first time I saw our new home in Washburn I could barely see the house at all because the grass was three feet tall in the front yard. Apparently the house had been vacant for some time and it wasn’t too long before we learned why.
We were assigned rooms, carted in all the boxes, set up the furniture and I got to cut the front lawn – with a hand mower no less. Life was different and strange, but we moved on. My sister Kathy had a fit of course. She was always having a fit of one kind or another, and moving from her friends in Milwaukee was the biggest catastrophe known to man. The house was nice. It had two large rooms up front with a staircase in the middle of the house just opposite the front door. You went along to the left of the staircase into the dining room and along the right was the entrance to the kitchen. A short passageway under the stairs at the back connected the two. Also on the right, just before the kitchen was a bedroom which was given to my grandmother. Upstairs were four bedrooms and a bath. Built in the late 1800’s it was a snug and comfortable home. Off the kitchen in the back was an addition which we called the sun room because it was almost all glass and had a free-standing central fireplace.
We learned that the house had been empty for about six years. Rumor had it that the house was haunted, which delighted my mother who was into all things paranormal. My dad dismissed the notion of ghosts.
We moved from Milwaukee in mid-June and had been in residence for about two weeks when the first weird thing happened. We had three cats named Sam, LC (for little cat) and Mustard. I was sitting at my dad’s huge desk in what we called the Library (a large room up front to the right of the entry as one came into the house). LC was sitting on a pile of boxes in the hallway and I could also see Sam who was on a chair across the hall next to another pile of boxes. My mother was in the living room (the large front room on the other side of the house) and could see Sam and Mustard. As I sat there – I have no recollection of what I was doing but I remember it was early evening after dinner – LC suddenly stood up, hissed, humped her back and stared at the staircase. Sam did the same thing but without the hissing. Both cats were definitely on alert and staring fixedly at the stairs. Mom says that Mustard stayed crouched but laid his ears back and also stared at the stairs. After a few moments the cats stood down and things returned to normal, but mom and I consulted and decided that something weird had happened.
A week or so later we were sitting around the dinner table chatting after eating when we heard someone walking up and down the hallway upstairs. My mom looked around, didn’t see anyone missing and asked me to see who was up stairs. I went to the stairs and started up but the walking suddenly ceased. I didn’t see anyone up there and came back down to have seconds on dessert. After a minute or so the upstairs walking resumed and mom sent me up again. This time I looked into every closet of every room, under the beds, and even up the stairs that lead to the attic. Nobody was there.
This happened occasionally after that. We would be sitting around downstairs – or even upstairs in our rooms – and we would hear footsteps in the hallway. Nobody was ever there. My dad again dismissed it but no one could argue with what we were hearing – and everyone in the family heard it. After a while we took to calling it Mr. Walker and pretty much got on with our lives.
Mr. Walker kinda became a member of our family. One morning my mother – who always got up before anyone else – came down to the kitchen to find every cabinet door open and everything removed and stacked up on the counters. She assumed I had done it because that was the sort of thing I would do. I was not the guilty party but I must admit that I wished at the time that I had thought of it. We learned after a while that Mr. Walker was quite the jokester. There was the morning – a cold morning – when we found all of our shoes on the front porch. Then there was the hot water incident. My sister Kathy swears that she poured herself a tub of hot water to take a bath but it was ice cold. She tested the taps and sure enough, hot water was coming out of the cold water tap and cold out of the hot. She stormed downstairs to accuse the world of interfering with her life (once again) so my dad and I trooped upstairs to find the plumbing was perfectly normal. To this day she swears that it was reversed.
Mr. Walker got me one night. It was still that first summer and I was in my bedroom upstairs working on a car model. Now, being a normal, if somewhat geeky youth of 15, I had put an alarm on my bedroom door to keep my snoopy sisters and brothers out. So, I am sitting in my room, door closed and locked with the alarm set (the alarm by the way was an old doorbell attached to contacts on the door hinge) and rock music tuned low. I as concentrating on fitting two pieces of the engine together. I held one in my left hand and placed the other in front of me. I had already put a bit of model cement on the applicator and placed it where I could grab it quickly. I reached for the applicator … and it was not there. I looked around on the desktop but could not see it. I was just about to get up to look under the desk when it dropped onto the desktop right in front of me. WTF? I swear, there was no way that could have happened.
Mom used to stay up late most nights reading in the front room. She had some old, over-stuffed wingback chairs in there and dad had lined every wall space with book shelves. It was her favorite place in the house. One evening, after everyone had gone to bed, she was reading when she felt dad’s breath on the back of her neck. She chided my dad for sneaking up on her and looked to find no one there. She says she went upstairs and found dad asleep in bed.
Now, this did not upset her. As I mentioned, she was into all things paranormal. She was intrigued. Many a night after that, she would feel the presence of another person in the room with her late at night, sometimes looking over her shoulder, sometimes just sitting there in a chair across the room. She never saw anything (I believe this disappointed her to no end), but she definitely felt the presence. She would complain that the least Mr. Walker could do would be to refill her wine glass.
For some time we had noticed that when the cats went up or down stairs they would jump over the fifth step from the bottom. After that evening when the cats saw something on the stairs, they avoided the fifth step. Mom says that occasionally a cat would be around when she felt Mr. Walker in the living room with her and the cat would be fine. It didn’t even seem to notice. Then there were occasions when one or two or even all three cats would stare at something in the house that we could not see, but they might have just been being cats.
So mom did some research. She discovered that the house had been built by a retired Great Lakes Boat captain. He had lived there with his wife for several years before he died in an accident. She sold the house to someone who sold it to someone else and eventually it was sold to us. One day she came home and announced that the captain – I no longer remember his name – had died in a fall in the house. He had tripped or something, fell down the stairs and came to rest with his head on the fifth step. Even my dad agreed that that was spooky. My mom held a séance one time to try to contact the captain, but we ended up contacting someone else and that is a way different story.
So we lived in the house in Washburn for years, outlasting those people who thought we would run screaming from the building as others had done. Mr. Walker was just a part of the infrastructure. He was annoying at times, but we got used to him walking around upstairs or hanging out with my mother late at night. The cats totally ignored him, but cats totally ignore most everything.
Time went on and two summers later I was older and staying out later at night. It was the summer before my senior year in high school. Some nights I would come home and my mom would still be up, but most times there would be one light on and everyone would be in bed. Most often the house would feel normal and being a normal teenager I would stop in the kitchen to get a snack before heading up to bed. Other nights I would get this weird, creepy feeling – like I was being watched – and I would head straight up to my room.
On this particular night in August, I came home around 1:30 am and the moment my foot hit the front porch I had that creepy, being watched feeling. I skipped the kitchen and went straight upstairs. But I had had a few beers and had to go to the bathroom. Now, we had been renovating the upstairs bathroom. We had replaced the faucet, the hardware on the cabinets and the vanity, and were in the process of installing a new overhead light. That was my job since I was pretty good with electrical connections and such. Anyway, I had not finished the job because we didn’t have any wire nuts and I was against using plain old electrical tape. So, while the new fixture was up and hanging from the ceiling, the wiring was not connected – at the light. In the interim, we were using my sister’s lighted makeup mirror which had been moved from the vanity to the toilet tank. After doing my business, I remember standing there locking the location of the vanity stool in my mind so I would not trip over it on my way out the bathroom.
I pressed the makeup mirror light switch and suddenly the overhead light came on. I couldn’t believe it. My dad had found some wire nuts and had finished the wiring job. That was very unlike him. I stood there a minute wondering about this when I noticed my reflection in the mirror over the bathroom sink. There was my upper torso and shoulders but there was someone elses head on my shoulders. It was the head of an old man with longish grey hair. He had blue eyes and wrinkled skin. And he had this grin on his face like he was saying “look what I did.”
I went out of the bathroom – the light went off – and straight to my parents room where I woke my father. “Did you wire up the ceiling light in the bathroom,” I asked. “Are you drunk,” he replied.
“Not any more,” I said. “Did you wire up the ceiling light in the bathroom,” I repeated.
He looked at me and just shook his head.
“The light just came on Dad,” I told him.
“No,” he said, “I have not touched that light.”
He got out of bed and we both went to the bathroom and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened.
We turned on the makeup mirror light and looking up I could see the wires hanging there – unconnected. I told dad what I had happened and what I had seen. He asked me again if I was drunk, but I could see that he didn’t really believe that I was. In fact, I hadn’t been although I had had a few beers.
The next morning I told my mother what I had experienced. She had me repeat the story again. Then she dug out her research on the house. We did not have a photo of the old lake boat captain, but she had a description and it basically fit the face I had seen the night before. To my knowledge, she had not previously shared the description with anyone in the house. Mom had me repeat the story several more times and then had me write it all down – which is one of the reasons that I remember it so well. We had no explanation. Mom believed every word of my story and Dad kinda did. We had gotten used to having Mr. Walker around, but to my knowledge, I am the only one who ever actually saw him.
It’s been a long time since we lived in that house – it’s my favorite of all the places we lived. And I have a lot to remember from that summer (also a different story), but one thing I shall never forget is the grin on Mr. Walker’s face and the gleam in his eye as he looked at me and enjoyed my reaction to the great trick he had played.
Years later, well after I had gone off to college and they had moved to the country outside Washburn, my mom told me that the people who had bought the house – a doctor with a young family – had no interaction with a ghost or any unusual experiences in the house. They didn’t have any cats either.