Ghost Stories

Fingerprint Ghost

It was the lastplace we would have expected to have trouble with. Our firstapartment was in one of the standard large complexs that you seepopping up in suburbia. It was about 20 years old, but here werea lot of old fruit trees on the grounds, so it may have beenbuilt on the site of an old farm stead, something that is commonfor our area. Maybe our difficulties stemmed from this. On theother hand such complexs tend to have a high tenant turnover andsome residents can leave quit suddenly.

Any ways it startedout with the usual irregularities that often accompany theseincidences. Lights would be on or off when you would swear theyhadn't been that way when you left the room. The same goes fordoors opening and closing. Objects would be moved from where youhad put them, pictures would go all askance.

At about the sametime when it began to dawn on us that there might be something tothese occurrences, the finger prints started. Again, we didn'trealize at first what was happening. It just seemed like myhusband and I were getting extremely messy. I was constantlywiping dirty fingerprints and hand prints off the walls. At firstit was in places that you would expect, around light switches,for example. Then it got stranger. Fingerprints and even wholehand prints began to appear way up near the ceiling, whichcouldn't be reached unless one was on a ladder. Toward the end,some even appeared ON the ceiling. I pulled desk out to retrievea fallen piece of paper and found the wall behind it justplastered with hand prints. The prints were too small to be myhusband's or mine. we guessed they were the size of a child's, ornow, in retrospect, the size of a small woman's hands. one nightI wiped the prints off the hall light switch, and then carriedsome dirty laundry to the hamper in the bedroom. I didn't touchthe switch, yet when I came back, the prints were back. I wipedthem off, turned, walked away a couple of feet, and turned back.The prints were back. I repeated this 6 times before I gave up,and just left the prints. By this time our walls were just in aconstant state of being peppered with prints, to the point thatcompany would stare a little.

Michael and Iwatched one afternoon as the bedroom door unlatched itself (weheard the click), swung open, and then swung shut again.

One evening Iwalked into the bedroom to find a living bedspread composed ofbees crawling around on our antique redwood bed. All the windowsand doors had been shut. When I returned with the manager, Theywere all gone except for a few stragglers.

The moving objectsbecame more brazen, towards the end. We would hear a loud thumpin the other room, or right behind us, and find that somethingquite heavy had fallen, books would seem to have just flown rightoff the shelf. Things turned up in increasingly bizarre locations.One evening, I went to retrieve the broom from the hall closet.It wasn't hanging in its usual spot. Now while there is apossibility that I used it and forgot to hang it back up, I knowI didn't leave it where I eventually found it: standing in thebathroom, precariously balanced, bristles down, atop the sinkfaucet. I reached to take it down, and it fell to the floor themoment my fingers grazed it.

Here's the grandfinale: When I was quite pregnant with our first son, I got up inthe middle of the night to go to the bathroom (big surprise).When I returned, I was in the narrow space between the wall andmy side of the bed when I happened to glance down at the floor. Iwas standing in a spectral woman that was lying on the floor. Shewas very small and thin-boned, elderly, and was writhing aroundas if in great pain. The expression on her face was ghastly. Ilet out a shriek that was in itself bloodcurdling, and jumpedonto the bed, clear across my side and onto my husbands, crushinghim under me and nine months of baby. To this day, many moveslater, I can't sleep on THAT side of any bed -and I still leap inand out of bed-because even though it didn't "get" methat time, there's always next time.....