A Northern California Ghost Story
part four

by Margaret Brighton, © 1999
(as reported in Fate magazine, under the title of "Boots")
(Continuing a story that started here)

Our ghost was considerably quieter--but not silent--after that.

Within a couple of weeks, the house was filled with workmen. We gutted most of the house to remodel it. After that, we did not hear the boots upstairs on our new wall-to-wall carpeting.

We began using the new bedrooms on the second floor, and there were no further significant incidents in the house.

However, soon after that our marriage began to fail dramatically.

My husband proclaimed that he was somehow driven to cheat on me and, each time, he returned home tearfully promising that it'd never happen again. I believed him the first few times.

For awhile, I moved into another bedroom. Looking back now, I realize that I selected the room with the two little closets, but now I was the woman quietly weeping.

My husband responded to my unhappiness by insisting that he was a victim too. He had become the man storming around the other bedrooms, and pacing in the hall.

About six months before we finally separated, we moved out of our lovely Victorian home. My husband was convinced that something, perhaps invisible, was affecting him. That sounded a little nutty to me but--at my wits' end--I hoped a change of environment might help him.

As we prepared to move, the ghost resumed activity in the one upstairs bedroom that had not been remodelled. This was the room with the strange closet and unexplained "filled in" areas in the walls.

I've often wondered if there was a body in those walls, but that's probably a wild fantasy from too many Bothic novels and scary movies.

The windows in the unremodelled bedroom were funny, each opening like a cabinet door. They swung in, with latching hardware like a medicine chest. Because we rarely used that room after the hauntings started, some of the windows' latches were stubborn, or still rusted closed.

During the weeks before we moved, our ghost did something he had done infrequently before we remodelled the house: He opened the windows, one by one, in clockwise fashion. And, even on windless days, each window would thwap-thwap-thwap against the wall next to it.

I'd go upstairs to close the one that had opened, and check all of the latches.

Then I closed the bedroom door behind me, to prevent an cross-draft, although these were always hot, breezeless days.

About five minutes later, the next window would open, thwap-thwap-thwap. I'd go upstairs, close it, and check the windows again.

This routine would go on, with the windows opening in clockwise sequence, for over an hour.

Sometimes I'd leave the house just to get away from it. When I returned, all of the windows would be closed, or all of them would be wide open; there was no pattern to this.

At other times, I'd stay at home, and hear a low male laughter, and sometimes a woman quietly sobbing, as each window-opening session slowly drew to a halt.

This annoyed me, but it didn't really frighten me. The windows only opened during the daytime. At night when we slept upstairs, the house was as silent as any other older home. There were merely the usual creaks.

After we moved out, my sister-in-law lived in the house briefly. I don't know if she experienced any ghostly phenomena.

My husband was drawn back to the house even before we agreed to separate, and today he lives there, alone.

I'm thousands of miles away, and while I miss the midnight blue carpeting and other details I'd personally selected when we remodelled this lovely home, I do not miss the ghosts.


This house was the subject of an article, "Boots," by Margaret Brighton, which appeared in FATE magazine in the early 1980's.

YOU ARE HERE: home > haunted places > a northern california ghost story, part four


Hollow Hill is a ghost information site; our information is only as reliable as readers' reports. We assume no credit for your ghosthunting adventures, and accept no liability for your misadventures. Use common sense. Read our ghost hunting recommendations. Before visiting any "haunted" site, verify the location, accessibility, safety, and other important information.

All photos and text at Hollow Hill are copyrighted by the authors: Fiona Broome, Eibhlin Morey MacIntosh, and staff.

Do NOT copy from our pages. Plagiarism WILL be detected by Copyscape.