It's been 25 years since I left my home in Gary, Indiana, but not more than a week goes by that I'm not telling someone about how great it was growing up there. Gary has always been a tough town. As a Historian and Professor of Criminology, I've spent decades looking for the causes of some of the most violent episodes in American history. But no practical explanation could have prepared me for the summer of 1974.
It was the summer of 1974 when my family and I moved from the North West side of Gary, an area known as Brunswick, to the, then, all white section of South Gary referred to as Glen Park. The move from the "inner city" to Glen Park was the best thing that ever happened to me and my family. The neighborhood was beautiful, people walked the streets at all hours of the day and night, and the old house we moved into belonged to an era when trolleys rolled down Broadway, and Mr. Wirt and his "Platoon School" system were the talk everywhere in the United States and in Europe.
Everything was wonderful, except for one small problem. The house we moved into that summer, the house that my family still calls home, was in every sense of the word, haunted.
It didn't take long before we all realized something was not right. For example, in the first month we were in the house, I was awakened by my parents and asked to join them in darkened kitchen pantry that over looked the garden. As odd as this request was at the time, odder was the fact that it was 4 am, and in the garden was what appeared to be an elderly white woman in a sheer white gown, watering the garden. Now if you're familiar with the area of town I grew up in, Brunswick, you'd know that Brunswick is adjacent to the old (no longer there) neighborhood of Cudahy. Cudahy is where the "White Lady" or "La Lorona" is said to haunt Cline and 5th Avenue. This is significant, because the lady we were looking at, matched the description of La Lorona, to include the way she just vanished before our eyes. Unlike the Lutz, of Amityville Horror fame, we didn't leave behind all of our belongings and go running into the night never to return. When you don't have much money, you learn to tolerate vanishing white old ladies who water your garden at odd hours of the morning.
The second incident occurred about a week later when both of my sisters described the same identical dream of an old white man who would open up their bedroom doors, turn on the light and look in on them. Power of suggestion? I don't think so. They each told the same story hours apart and not in each other's presence. They each had the same description of the man, down to his clothing and the cane he held in his left hand. Very soon after that, my sisters decided to share the same bedroom. And yes, the dreams continued.
The third incident occurred months later when on a beautiful snowy December night, I peered out of the front window and watched the fresh snow fall against the corner street light. A brand new blanket of snow covered the ground. The windows had frost on them, but the house was warm and safe. As I bent forward, resting my elbow on the window sill, I was careful not to press against the radiator and burn myself. And then without warning, something grabbed both of my legs and lifted me slowly sideways until I had no choice but to move my arms in an attempt to fight off my attacker. With my hands no longer supporting my body and my feet no longer on the ground, you'd think I'd land face first onto the radiator wouldn't you? But that's not what happened. What happened was that whatever it was gently put me down, and I think I went to my happy place.
I am naturally leaving out the reactions of my family at each of these incidents, and before you ask if we ever called on a priest to bless the house, let me remind you, that we are a Mexican family, and prayer, the Roman Catholic Church, and holy water were the first things we employed after the watering white lady incident. And yes, we bought a shotgun.
However, the incidents continued. My brother was awakened one morning by the old man who turned on the light above his bed (the light was a light bulb turned on and off with a string) in his basement bedroom. That incident resulted in the police being summoned and a room full of teenaged Mexican all sleeping in one bedroom of a four bedroom house because everyone was too afraid to sleep on their own.
The last incident I'll share happened in 1976, when I was talking to my Merriville High School girlfriend on the basement phone. Love can do strange things, and in my case, it made me forget that I was in the basement all by myself on the phone. The conversation was going smoothly enough, when I noticed that a small foam filled bench next to the bed I was laying on, moved. In fact, it did more than just move, it moved a lot. It moved forward and backward, and it even levitated. Once again I went to my happy place, and somehow, I was up two flights of stairs, through the kitchen, dinning room and into the living room where my father sat watching TV. Literally speechless and half out of my mind, I resembled Lassie in one of those episodes where she had to get someone to follow her because little Timmy was about to be killed by a train or something. I was finally able to get my father to follow me downstairs, where he found nothing wrong save for the hardly audible voice coming from the hanging receiver, asking, "Are you alright, are you still there?"
Many other things happened in that house and still do today. We all know who the ghost is and why he is there. It was his house long before it was ours, and we've made no attempts to make him leave.
Wed Apr 09, 2008 9:45 am
