Real Origins of Ghosts: Part 9 The Bruce Avenue House Ghosts



Something I couldn't see shared the house with me that summer.

Origin of Ghosts: Part 9

The Bruce Avenue House Ghosts

     I began to look at the house with a slightly askew perspective when I knew it had ghosts. I mentioned it to very few people. I never said much to Steve about it after Frank moved out. He just refused to believe anything about ghosts. I did ask one of the two girls downstairs. They spent a lot of time chanting and had meetings in their apartments each Sunday with several other girls. A few of them were what I considered very attractive. I just wasn't interested because they were all too weird, and that kind of weird meant trouble for a man. They all chanted, burned incense, and knocked things over. They also ignored where they parked and often blocked driveways so neighbors couldn't get out. They were always getting parking tickets, and a few times the police came to the door to make one of them move a car. They claimed to be a Buddhist group, but I figured they were more of a witch coven. I asked one of them, her name was Vesta,  if they had experienced anything weird in the house.

"Like what?" she said.

"Footsteps, weird smells, or thumps."

"No," she said. "Why have you?"

"Yes," I said. "All the time."

Her eyes went narrow and she touched my wrist for a moment.

"You know you are a warlock, don't you?"

I laughed about that.

"What exactly is that?"

"You're a male witch," she said. "You have powers."

She turned away and entered her apartment. After that, when I saw her or the other girl, or any of their Sunday guests, they all stared at me like I was an enemy. If someone asked me or Steve why we didn't hit on them, we either said they liked girls, or messing with someone where you live does nothing but cause problems.

The girls moved out a month later. I never found out why. The first floor remained vacant the rest of the time I was there, and neighbors could get out of their driveways on Sunday once again.

 

If I'm a warlock, it has never given me any special powers I could use at will, except maybe to experience ghosts and a few other things I can't control, like premonitions. The bizarre became regular for me in that house. It was 1987, a year of the locust in Cincinnati. Every seventeen years they swarmed into town and drove everyone nuts with the noise and their dead bodies getting into everything. I lost track of many days during that time.

At night I usually went out or worked part time singing in a band or kind of as a DJ/bouncer in a local bar. But often during the day I would wake up at five in the morning and then it would be four in the afternoon and it had seemed like only a few minutes had passed and I couldn't remember what I had done all day. I had just been service-connected for PTSD, and I thought maybe it was part of my war experience causing memory lapse. But I believe, since it only happened while I lived in that house, that the house had caused it.

I hated coming home at night alone. Each time I mounted the stairs to the attic rooms, I would get a chill up my back and a sense of being watched. That drifting piss smell would often hit me as soon as I opened the door to my room. The closet door in the vacant attic room was unlocked and open each day. I continued to close and lock it, but I just left the key in the lock then because it didn't seem to matter. It would be open every morning. I often heard thumps and scraping sounds in the vacant attic room when the air was off, but when I checked I found nothing except the handprints up on the wall. Something continued to run up the stairs to scratch at my door. The door was all scratched up.

The power to my room should have been placed on a separate line from the rest of the house, but it wasn't wired that way. Often during hot summer nights, if I turned on a light, the overload would kick the circuit breaker in the basement. The entire house would go black. The first time it happened I couldn't find the flashlight and had to go down three flights with a candle. Steve was home and went with me so I could show him the circuit box when I found it. It was like being in a horror movie with the dead quiet and the pitch dark. Steve never went into the basement again. Since it was my room causing the problem, I had to reset the breakers.

This was also the first incident, since a hand grabbed me as a small child, that something touched me. I had been coming down the steps one day when something jerked my hair from behind. It wasn't a hard pull, but enough to let me know the ghost was real. I also had problems with sleeping on the bed because something would lay down next to me. I could feel the movement of a body sit on the edge of the bed and then stretch out next to me. No matter how many times this happened, it was always a surprise. I would quickly roll over to face it or jump up. Nothing would be there. It was a crazy way to live, but more things would begin to happen the longer I lived there.


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