Tales From Connecticut
When I was sixteen, my mom woke up one morning and announced that our house was haunted. There was little doubt. For one thing, my mother is not the sort of woman given to flights of fancy, hallucination or anything of that nature. She's a rock. In addition, the house was built in the 1800s. This all happened where I grew up in Roxbury, Connecticut. Ours wasn't even the oldest house on the street. Roxbury people speak of ghosts without smirking. They're like "Oh yeah, the ghost." Like everybody's got one. We lived with our ghost for about four years. Nobody minded.The Grave
There was some sort of flat stone slab that we found out back in the underbrush. It was probably just an old well, but isn't that kinda creepy on its own? Of course our imaginations led us to "unmarked grave!"
Mom Told Us About The Woman in White
This is how it went.She'd been asleep. She heard a scraping metal sound, and that's what woke her. She thought she might have been hearing an animal outside eating the dog's food, so she got up to chase away whatever-it-was messing with Grover's food dish on the porch. There wasn't any animal, and the dog was snoozing. So then she did a walk-through, as parents are wont to do when they're woken up by a sound at night. Nothing was amiss, so my mom got back into bed. Before settling back into sleep mode, my mom asked Lou, "What time is it?" No answer, so she leaned over Lou to look at the clock on his nightstand. She leaned far over—that's important to know. She explains, "Picture that I left my whole side of the bed open, plenty of room for someone to sit down there. That's what she did." Because when my mom sat back, she startled a tall woman in a white nightgown. "She leapt back, then she sunk to the floor, back against the wall like she was terrified." They locked eyes. We asked, was she transparent? "No, she was solid." The woman in white was tall, too, which my mother says she could tell because when the woman sat on the floor she drew her legs up close, hugging her knees which were right under her chin. As short women, that's something we would both notice about a tall woman with long legs. My mom tried waking up Lou but he couldn't be roused. That's the last thing she remembers until morning. "The second I woke up, I asked your father if he remembers me asking him if he hears Grover's food bowl, and me asking him what time it was," and when he did remember, that made her certain that it wasn't a dream. It was firmly established: she was definitely awake.
The next person my mom told her story to was Eleanor Hurlbut, the lady of the house across the street. A lovely old couple, Eleanor and her husband Alden were multi-generational farmers with a large, well-respected family. Cream of the literal crop, you couldn't find nicer neighbors. And there were a lot of Hurlbuts. There was a street named Hurlbut. My mom and I both loved Eleanor. We visited with Eleanor a lot. When my mom described the Woman in White, Eleanor didn't even stop pouring the tea. She just said, "Now who might that be, hmmmm."At some point, it was suggested that this tall gal was someone named Ruth.
I Told the Warrens
The next person to hear about Ruth was Lorraine Warren, and she heard it from me. I grew up assuming everyone in the world knew about Ed and Lorraine Warren, but I would later find out that it was kind of a Connecticut thing. I met them at The Curtis House (Woodbury, CT) one night when me and a friend went to hear the Warrens speak. During the Q&A, I got up the nerve to ask my question."When my mom saw a ghost in our house, she couldn't wake my father, and he's usually a light sleeper."
Lorraine said that happens, actually. She said the theory was this: when a spirit manifests, it draws the energy from the room, and that's why my father never woke up when my mom was shaking him. Also, Lorraine Warren added, the room might get very cold." Funny she would say that, because there was one bedroom that we didn't use as a bedroom, because it was always cold, even though you could feel the heat if you put your hand directly on the radiator in there. It was the room next to her bedroom, on the other side of the wall where the Woman in White was last seen, and my mom used that room as her closet. She's something of a vintage clothing and accessory maven, and it was suggested that the vintage finery might have encouraged Ruth to make a connection.
Though we weren't afraid of the ghost, to this day, my mom does everything possible to avoid any sort of portal. "I could never do a Ouija Board," she told me matter-of-factly this weekend, "because I know I'm the kind of person they'll seek out." That's what Lorraine Warren advised, too.
Good advice. Don't provoke the spirit realm, because once the portal opens, anything might come through. 👻
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