David McElroy

A few days ago, I asked friends on Facebook if they had had anything spooky or unexplained happen to them over the years. Here’s a sampling of the stories I received. Editing has been very, very light, in order to retain the original words and tone.

Let’s start with Kate Duggan, who’s a high school teacher in California. She shares a story from the house where she lives and then some strangeness from the school where she teaches:

I live in a house built in 1914. When we moved in 34 years ago, there was something…something…about the downstairs bedroom (which we made into a TV room).

No one wanted to be there after dark. Weird. Much later, when friends moved in to stay for a few months, strange things began happening. Lights going on an off (completely at random), the room being too hot at one moment, too cold at the next. My friends reported seeing stuff in the middle of the night. And these are friends who don’t believe in crazy stuff. Very, very strange. Another friend told me that it was a ghost. Yeah, right.

I got really sick of it, so I decided to do something. I went in and announced that whoever was there was dead. To go away. I burned salt and rubbing alcohol in a dutch oven and invited the “ghost” to move on.

“You are dead. Go away,” I said.

I swear that the next part actually happened: the lights went off — and it was exactly as if something lifted off the room. A presence or something. The lights went back on. I have never felt it since. My friends were completely shaken up — well, so was I. I have not felt it since.

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I didn’t really want to move to Clanton, Ala., but I didn’t have much choice at the time. After being in business for myself for five years, my company had failed and I had lost all the investment capital available to me. Then a newspaper chain offered me a job. I was recruited to be a publisher, but I would first spend three years as general manager of their newspaper in Clanton learning their operating methods.

I had no idea that it would lead to the scariest experience of my life and force me to re-examine my beliefs about things that go bump in the night. The story is one that I’ve told to very few people until now, because people think you’re either crazy or lying when you tell them something that can’t be explained.

Clanton is a small town of about 7,000 people on I-65 about halfway between Birmingham and Montgomery. I didn’t care for living in a place that small, but I was happy to have income. My then-wife, Melissa, and I started looking for a place to live.

It was difficult to find houses to rent there — and the ones that were available were expensive — so we were very happy to find a modern four-bedroom house priced at about half the monthly rent that everything else was. It was way too big for two people and one cat, but it seemed like a bargain and it was close to my office.

When we looked at the house, the basement was partially finished. It had originally just been a large open area with a concrete floor, but some rooms down there were in the process of having studs and Sheetrock put up. It looked odd because tools and construction materials — including dried trays of that mud-like substance used when hanging Sheetrock — had been left there with the work halfway done.

The woman showing us the house (the owner’s sister) told us that the last renters had been living there on a lease-purchase plan and they were planning to buy, so they were improving the basement in this way. She said that the other tenants suddenly moved out and wouldn’t say why. We thought it was odd, but we assumed it must be because of their own personal problems.

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How long has the latest financial crisis been going on? Five years or so? What are we calling it now? A recession or a depression or what? I’m not sure anymore. Some politicians and economists keep claiming things are getting better. But I’m still not seeing it.

When I took a walk Tuesday morning, I went a slightly different route that took me in front of a house that I typically only see from the side. The house has been vacant for a couple of weeks. I know why now.

I didn’t really know the people who lived there very well. I just knew them well enough to wave and speak as I walked by if they happened to be outside. They seemed like nice folks, but I never talked to either of them for more than five minutes or so.

When I walked in front of the house Tuesday morning, I noticed several pages of paper on the door and I suddenly knew why they had moved suddenly. My neighbors had been evicted for defaulting on their mortgage.

I know people have always fallen behind on house payments and lost their homes. That’s not new in the last five years. But there’s something different about what it’s felt like, at least to me.

Maybe it’s the fact that this economic downturn has affected me more than any other before. Maybe I’m simply more compassionate about the effects it’s having on others. I’m not sure what it is. I just know that I’ve seen the human effects of this crisis more than any other I’ve seen in my life.

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