Betty’s Ghost

My fiancé, Lynne, and I moved into a house in Fairfax, Virginia with our 2-month-old Labrador puppy, Ben. The house was a modest 1950’s era, Cape Cod with a finished attic that we used as an office and spare bedroom. One of the things that attracted us to the house was the large, fenced in yard and the kennel out back.

We’d been in the house for about a week when, from time to time I’d feel a bit uncomfortable, as though there was a presence there. A presence that was not ‘nice’. But I’d chalk this off to my imagination.

Soon, however, there began occur things that couldn’t be attributed to imagination. The hall to the bedrooms was in the back of the living room. Lynne and I would be sitting on the couch with Ben asleep on the floor.
Suddenly he’d raise his head and stare at the arch leading into the hallway. His hackles would go up and he would growl quietly, deep in his throat. Initially we thought this was cute. Ben, our tough little watch puppy. But then we noticed that after a moment, he’d turn his head and look up as if following someone walk from the hallway to the door of the attic. When the ‘person’ got to the attic door he’d get up and scamper over to the door and sniff around the base as though wondering where the ‘person’ went.

One evening I was getting ready for bed. Lynne was already in bed, but I assumed she was reading. Ben was in the bathroom with me. He wasn’t yet house broken so we always kept him close and I needed to put him outside one last time before going to bed. As I stood there brushing my teeth, I heard a whistle. It was loud and very clear. Ben heard it too and went scampering out of the bathroom toward the kitchen. I rinsed out my mouth and called to Lynne asking her not to call the dog unless she was planning on getting out of bed to clean up the mess. Then I heard the back door slam. I walked into the bedroom to make sure Lynne was really there. She was and she was already sound asleep. I walked back to the kitchen and found Ben sitting on the back steps with the door closed and double locked. Two other times we’d look for Ben only to find him in the back yard with the door locked.
Neither Lynne nor I had put him out.

There were other subtle occurrences such as the strong pervasive feeling of a malevolent presence and some extremely vivid nightmares. But again, these could have been imagination building on itself. Still, it seemed obvious to me that the house was haunted and the ghost was not particularly friendly. The ghost obviously didn’t want the dog in the house either as most all of it’s actions seemed focused on the dog.

Then one day we got a call from our landlord. He wanted to know if he could come over and talk to us.
We had never met him, but assumed that this was just a ‘please don’t destroy my property’ discussion and set a date to meet him. When he arrived, he brought his wife, a woman who initially seemed very cool and reserved, but melted when she saw Ben. As we talked, she sat there in her mink coat with Ben happily curled up in her lap. As it turned out, our landlord was a retired veterinarian. The woman who had lived in the house had been a client of his. Her name was Betty and she had raised white German Shepherds. This explained the fence and the kennel. He went on to explain that he’d gotten the house when Betty had developed cancer.

It was terminal. The treatment was expensive. In return for his paying her mortgage, she would leave the house to him in her will. That had been a number of years ago. Recently, the doctor said, he’d gotten a phone call from a man who said that Betty had been his mother. This surprised the doctor because he’d known Betty well and she’d never mentioned a family or children. The man explained that Betty had been born and raised in Oklahoma in the 1930’s and had become pregnant. She’d given this man and his twin sister up for adoption and left town and the stigma behind. When she died, she’d left her body to the medical college at George Washington University where her ashes remained. He requested that he and his sister be allowed to see the house their mother had lived in and to bury her ashes in the yard. The doctor wanted to know if we minded. A date was set and we left one Saturday to give Betty’s children the privacy they needed.

When we returned home that evening, Ben was shut up in the kennel in the back yard. It was interesting to be reminded that behavior is genetic! And, a small tree had been planted in the yard. We let Ben out and went inside to fix dinner. The feeling in the house was incredibly different. The feeling of a presence was gone, the nightmares had ended and Ben never again followed a ghost to the attic. He did, however, chew that little tree down to a nub the very next day.

By: lrwilliams82@yahoo.com