My one and only ghost story

In 1976 I moved to Springdale Arkansas with my girlfriend Kim. Her parents had purchased some property with a small house on it. The house was a ruin and had not been lived in for several years. Before that the renters had completely trashed it.



Kim and I were in our early twenties and were restless. We thought it would be a lark to drive to Arkansas, try our hand at fixing the house up, and then continue living there if we liked it. So we took a road trip East, Arkansas or bust, and three days later rolled into Springdale.



Did I mention the house was a ruin? It wasn't even liveable. It was infested with fleas so we spent the first night sleeping in her car while we fumigated the house. We worked hard on improving our little house, and slowly it was transformed from a dump into a 'cottage'.



I liked Arkansas and as soon as we got rid of the fleas and ripped out the cat pee carpet I liked the house too. Apparently Kim did not share my sentiments ; I often heard her quietly weeping late at night. My little dog Avery also was not fond of his new surroundings and he would often burst into loud barking at nothing in particular. I would try to shush him but his barking usually turned into low, suspicious growling until he wearied of himself.



The weeks passed and still Kim's faint weeping continued. What was wrong with her?



One night her soft crying and Avery's growling made me feel particularly sad so I left my room to make a cup of tea. A few minutes later Kim joined me in the kitchen. "If you dislike it here so much why don't you just leave?" she asked.



"Me? I like Springdale. You're the one crying every night. And by the way you're driving my dog crazy."


Kim gave me an odd look and whispered, "You've been crying, not me."


It turns out that for the past several weeks she had also heard the sad weeping and assumed it was I. I swore it came from her room and she swore it came from mine. If it wasn't either of us then who, or what, was it? Our neighbor had a huge ham radio setup, maybe it was just weird noise from his radios?



The next day we mentioned the weeping sounds to our neighbor, the wife of the ham radio guy, and asked her if his electronics ever made unusual noises at night. After we explained our experience to her she admitted that people said our house was haunted by a little girl. She didn't know anything beyond that, but she did know a woman from her church who had a 'gift' and who might be willing to visit us.



A few days later the neighbor brought her friend over to meet us. The 'gifted' woman walked through the house and stopped at the hot water closet of all places, located in the hallway between my room and Kim's. She began talking to the empty space, she told the air that Kim and I were kind people who didn't wish harm to anyone. She said there was no reason to be sad and lonely anymore because Kim and I lived there now and could be 'her' friends.



That was it. No praying, no exorcism, just a short one-sided conversation by a frumpy, plain, middle-aged woman. We donated some money to her church for her time and she left.



Kim and I didn't really believe in ghosts and we weren't convinced that our house ever really had one. Maybe the crying sounds were just the creakings of an old house. Maybe Avery was just a nervous little dog that had to get used to a new place. We never heard the faint weeping again and Avery stopped his sporadic growling. In our busy-ness of home improvement, enrolling in school, boys and partying we completely forgot about the quiet, sad crying that dominated our first few weeks in Springdale.



The next summer Kim and I left Arkansas to return home for a couple of months. We grudgingly agreed to let her brother, not a very nice guy, "house-sit" for us. Basically we were letting the load live rent-free until he could get his act together. He ended up staying only a week instead of the whole two months. When we got home he told Kim that he would have stayed longer except for the creepy little neighbor girl who kept peeking in the windows at night and scowling at him. He tried to catch her a couple of times but when he went outside he could never find her.

We wondered, was Kim's brother high, drunk and imagining things? Was it really a little girl from the neighborhood or was it our alleged otherworldly roommate, unhappy with her change in living arrangements, who was creeping out Kim's brother in order to get him to leave?

Sometimes there are questions that have no satisfactory answer.



Happy Halloween Everyone!!!