Your True Tales
April 2008 - Page 9
Haunted Door
by Connie Tucker
My mother was quite an attractor of ghosts, and I have many stories to share about growing up, but the one that sticks in my mind is the time my father brought home an old door. This was in the late 1950s or early 1960s. He'd found it it on top of a heap of trash in front of an old house that was being demolished in Northeast Philadelphia and brought it home. Dad had been doing some renovations to the second floor of our home in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and he needed the door to close off his and mom's bedroom from the upstairs hallway.
The second floor was actually a half-story with slanted walls starting about three feet from the floor leaving a crawlspace under the eaves. My sister and I shared the other bedroom on the same floor. Our room contained an access panel to this crawlspace that ran along the entire front of the house from our room across the stairway and into my parent's room. They slept in twin beds with their headboards right up against the crawl space.
The first night after dad hung the door, around 3:00 a.m., we were all awakened by loud pounding coming from the crawl space directly behind my mother's headboard. Everyone jumped out of bed! My father ran into our room with a flashlight and removed the access panel. We were petrified, but when he shone the light inside the crawl space, he saw nothing. He was even brave enough to enter the crawl space, but didn't find anything out of place. Dad said it might have been something hitting the roof, a tree branch perhaps, and he'd check it out in the morning.
We all went back to bed, and about a half-hour later we were all awakened again by loud pounding! Again, dad checked the crawlspace and then went outside finding nothing on the roof or the lawn. Now we were really scared. And for the next week, every night the pounding happened. We were all exhausted.
Finally, my mother told dad to take the door out. She said she thought it was haunted! We all laughed, but she was serious. She told us spirits could attach themselves to an object, and this one followed the door to our house. Grumbling all the while, dad removed the door and mom insisted he should chop it up and burn it. He did, and the pounding stopped!
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