Ghost Stories for Dinner Parties

In 2024, Vermont will recognize the 300th anniversary of the first continuous European settlement that was built in what would eventually become Vermont.*

During those 300 intervening years, many houses have been built with generations living and dying— sometimes dying within those actual houses. It is quite uncommon in Vermont for your home to only have two digits in its age. Saying your home is 100 years old makes your home the youngster on the block. When my wife and I bought our first home, long before deciding on a military life, we chose a two-story 125-year-old duplex. It was located in a small village, and many years previously had been a restaurant as well as an apothecary, among other things.

Oh, the history this home could tell if it could talk.

And would I want to hear all that it said?

As children, we grow up on ghost stories told to us by our parents, told around campfires, told through early cartoons like Casper, then told to us again through movies, such as Poltergeist. For some of us, we hope a ghost story stumbles upon us in our home in some personal way. Of course, we only hope for an encounter with a Casper-type ghost, not the Poltergeist type. We are looking for ghost stories to share at dinner parties, not to be frightened to death in our home and possibly bed.

As I made my way through life, there were a few incidents here and there that stand out. There was my first rental in college. I lived on the third floor of a Victorian home from the 1800s. I was friends with the girls on the second floor, and occasionally when I visited with them, the shadow produced by their chandelier would start to move wildly, when neither the light nor the chandelier itself was moving.

Then there was the house I rented upon moving from Washington, D.C. back to my hometown of Burlington, Vermont. The house was not that old; however, it had a tragic history. Due to a faulty furnace, all members of a family perished from carbon monoxide poisoning save only a baby who survived. My roommate and I would routinely flip light switches only to have them switch back as we walked away.

Both of these stories are rather minor, and though I’m not sure of a logical explanation for the chandelier story, I suppose aging electrical wiring may have been the cause of the light switches.

Getting back to that first home my wife and I purchased, this is where our first spooky experience as a married couple transpired. My wife and I purchased the home three years after we were were married. The first two of our three children were born while we were living there. It was shortly after the birth of Eva, our second child, when my wife experienced something that was slightly unsettling.

Most nights, my wife, Jules, would nurse Eva one final time before going to bed. Jules would take Eva to the living room where she would sit on the couch while Eva nursed. One night, Eva pulled away from nursing just as she would do during the day if I or her older brother Hunter would walk into the room. Her eyes followed something in the open space behind my wife. Jules thought this was strange, but Eva went back to nursing.

The following night it happened again. Again, Eva attached and began nursing. Again, she pulled away. Again, she popped off just as she only did when someone would walk in the room. On this night, her gaze remained longer, and her head turned from side to side, even going so far as to poke her head around my wife’s face as if trying to focus on a moving object that wasn’t there. It was at this point that my wife spoke out.

She said, “If that’s you Grandma, Grandpa Herb, Aunt Cathy, or Uncle Luis, you are really freaking me out, and I’m asking you to please stop checking in on me and just leave me alone here.”

Eva never popped off again while nursing.

The next story also involved our middle child, Eva. After living in our first home for several years, my wife and I decided to rent out that home and move into a rental ourselves to be closer to my aging parents and closer to our workplaces. This house wasn’t particularly old, perhaps just 100 years of age. By the time of this story, Eva was 4 years old. One night as we were tucking into her toddler bed, she tells Jules and me that she doesn’t like it when the man comes into her room at night. Thinking she is just talking about one of us going in to check on her while she is sleeping, we dismissed her concern. Soon after she repeats the concern. She asks to sleep in her brother, Hunter’s, room because she doesn’t like when the man comes into her room and stands above her while she’s in her bed. From that night until the day we left for my wife’s first assignment at Fort Bragg, Eva slept in what we termed “the nest” on Hunter’s floor.

It’s interesting that both stories at two different houses revolve around Eva. I can’t recall if it was in a movie I watched or an article I read where it was explained that human beings condition themselves as they age to stop seeing all that is right in front of our eyes. It was believed that children don’t know they shouldn’t be seeing certain things, so they are able to detect presences adults cannot, will not. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps Eva is just more attuned to something that most of us have trained ourselves not to see.

The most inexplicable story dealing with the paranormal took place at the Hotel Boulderado in Colorado. Two of our friends were getting married, and we spent the week leading up to the wedding staying at the hotel as a vacation for ourselves.

On the first night we were a little tired from the altitude and time change. We sampled a little bit of downtown Boulder and retired to our hotel room relatively early. At one point in the middle of the night, I sprang from the bed to a standing position looking at something large lying on the bed. My wife awoke to ask, “What is it?” I told her nothing and then laid back down. The next day, Jules asked what that was about, and I said it must have been a waking dream and it was nothing.

A few nights laters Jules and I retired to our room after having dinner with friends on Pearl Street. As this was before kids (and the responsibilities that go with them!), Jules and I settled in on our hotel room couch for a junior high school makeout session.

As we began to kiss, the television turned on by itself. It was tuned to the in-house hotel channel you will see sometimes. It talks about the amenities in the hotel, local weather and happenings, and in the old days, allowed you to check out. The channel happened to be at the moment when it was promoting a couple’s massage or something similar and said, “Are you in the mood for romance?”

The television then turned off.

Jules and I looked at each other. We kind of laughed and then went back to kissing. A moment later the television turned back on and said “Looking to spice up your love life?” and then turned off.

Jules and I decided to end the teenage makeout session at that point and just get into bed for the night—possibly with the sheets pulled over our eyes. The next day both Jules and I said we thought about unplugging the television; however, we both feared that after unplugging the television, it would have still turned on.

At the wedding, we spoke with the hotel staff regarding any strange happenings at the hotel. We had done no research on the hotel and had selected this hotel only because this was where the wedding would take place. The staff informed us there were numerous stories; however, they identified one particular room that had frequent unexplained occurrences. The following day on our way to the lobby to check out, we decided to walk by this particularly haunted room. Standing in front of the “most haunted room” in the hotel, my wife and I couldn’t help but notice it was the room directly below ours.

This story has stuck with me in vivid detail since it happened nearly 15 years ago. There are only two explanations: either someone had wired that television to play certain words and were peeping on the people in that room, or there is an explanation that defies the logic of the world we know. Televisions do not just turn on before the start of a televised sentence and turn off at the end of the televised sentence and broadcast a sentence that is germane to what is happening in your room at that time.

Over the years I have read several stories about the Hotel Boulderado and the hauntings there. While writing this piece, I googled “Hotel Boulderado haunted” so that I could link one of those articles here. The first article I read was from The Denver Post and starts by recounting one hotel staffer who witnessed a television turning on by itself!

Amazingly enough, we have had no strange occurrences in the 450-year-old private rental where we are stationed in Germany. I like to think it’s because I have not yet mastered learning German and just maybe the ghosts don’t want to waste their time with someone who doesn’t understand them.

 

*I recognize that the Abenaki inhabited Vermont 10,000 years ago as well as today and possibly continuously during all the time in between. For the purpose of this story, we are focusing on the possible apparitions that are found in dwellings built post-European arrival.