Our Ford pickup was covered in dust when we finally came up the rock trail to the main farmhouse. The old, wooden house looked like it was at least a hundred years old, but it had been a painted brilliant white and was well taken care of since it's original heyday. Something about the topography of the land enabled you to see for miles in every direction--not that there was much to see besides parched yellow grass and scrubby brush with an occasional mesquite tree randomly thrown in. Even the colors around us had a washed-out appearance to them...
We got out, tired from the road, and I was a little irritated. We had driven way out of the convenient path home to come to this place. The story would be better if we were lost and tired and worried about sunset coming and not having a place to stay then randomly coming across this inn, but that's not what happened. Fran had researched Bed and Breakfasts in the famous Texas Hill Country, and had found this one and scheduled us to stop and stay there on our way back to Dallas from San Antonio.
The only saving grace to my interest was that we went through Marble Falls, Texas, which was featured as the home of Mike Teevee in that psychodelic Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory movie. Wow--3 whole stoplights and a Dairy Queen. I guess I got the joke at that point: it was an obscure place, not worth mentioning.
As we pulled up to the farmhouse, there were no signs of life at all, aside from the couple dozen head of cattle standing still like statues in the scorched, unshaded field of grass. The heat could be seen coming in waves off the melting earth below. It was July 3rd, 1996 at about 2 o'clock in the afternoon.
We weren't really sure what to do at this point. We were a little early for checking in--I think they were expecting us around 4:00 or so, and it looked like no one was home. I walked up to the front door and knocked, and waited. We've stayed in B&B's before--sometimes there is a main house and a separate guest house, and I didn't want to get off on the wrong foot by just walking into their home. Plus, I wasn't exactly sure we were at the right place--no sign. But then again, there wasn't another house for miles in each direction, so I was sure it was the right house...pretty sure, anyway.
After waiting a minute, I decided to open the door and go in. I walked a couple of steps in, with my eyes adjusting to the dark. The house was beautifully decorated but it was a little dark and stuffy inside. I had a quick flashback to what this house must have looked like a hundred years ago, with the floor creaking as I walked and the smell of old wood. Small decorations were on the several side tables scattered throughout the parlor area, and the walls had been carefully covered with beautifully framed and matted original paintings of dramatic cowboy scenes.
I looked up, and there sat two Hounds of Hell: a doberman and a German shepherd sitting quietly and alertly watching me from the middle of the stairway, their eyes unblinking and their ears pointed right in my direction. My instincts made me jump a little and they sensed that I felt out of place and calmly got up and started down the stairs. I took two steps out the door and closed it behind me quickly. Now I didn't know what to do...
"Nobody in there?" Fran asked.
"No. Just a couple of big dogs." She would know exactly what I meant. She knows I have had a thing about big dogs since I was mauled by a German shepherd at age 4 and had to have rounds of rabies shots. Ever since then, on a full moon...I would like to joke with people.
So we sat in the air-conditioned truck for a couple of minutes, talking, until the front door opened and a woman came out.
She was in her forties, and ten years earlier she had been very cute, I'm sure. She was small and wore the clothes of a twenty-something girl. After talking to her for a couple of minutes it hit me that she looked and acted a lot like my old boss who had, a couple of years ago, completely freaked out and gone on a verbal rampage through the office which ended in her dismissal. I had seen it coming (but had kept it to myself) when she had verbally assaulted me violently during a review, screaming obscenities and ripping my review document in half, then storming out of the office. I needed the job so badly that I had just sat there humbly until she came back and I had ignored the craziness and we moved on. Six months later she apologized and gave me a different, glowing review. The rampage was twelve months after my experience. I had seen that indiscriminate rage pent up inside her, and knew enough to steer clear.
So I was perhaps a little subconsciously wary of our inkeeper, who acted pretty flaky from the moment we met her. A little too scatterbrained and happy and oblivious and airheaded to not be an act. We weren't staying in the main house--our room was on the second floor of the revamped barn. She told us how her husband, who had "gone to town", had worked so hard to rehabilitate the ramshackle building--indeed it looked brand new, and the inside was furnished with rustic furniture, leather, and there was a common area outfitted with twenty worn-looking VCR tapes of western movies. I remember her saying something about an old water tank adjacent to the barn--they were going to build on to it to add more rooms in the future--it's been so long now I can't remember.
Our room was a little unusual--it was the old upstairs loft of the barn and was odd-shaped. There was a cleft over the bed that made me a little uneasy--the wall was about 10 feet high and then there was an area where the roof, which was about 18 feet from the hardwood floor, went way back about twenty feet or so behind the headboard, leaving a deep, dark cave right over our heads. It generated a little bit of an echo when we moved and talked, and felt a little creepy--like we were sleeping in the middle of a warehouse.
We took a couple of minutes to unpack and then I lay down on the bed just to rest from the road--rest my eyes and back. Fran was saying something about trying to go out and get something to eat so we could find our way back before it got too dark. The inkeeper had said something about another couple coming in later that night. My head had a dull ache that I couldn't shake.
When we came back from our long trek and from eating small-town Chinese food, in which I could taste the sizzled scorch of heat lamps, the sun was setting, silhouetting the farmhouse and barn against a blue curtain of prairie sky. When we went into the barn and through the common area, the other couple were there. We changed into comfortable clothes and came out to sit and chat with them. My head still throbbed, quite uncharacteristically for me, but I didn't want to miss the chance to meet the other guests.
They were from Houston, and they had kids our age. Nevertheless, we talkedover coffee for almost two hours about lots of things. Our travels, other Bed and Breakfasts we've stayed in (one time when we were young and newly married, we spent a week doing nothing and enjoying ourselves in the American Beauty Rose room at a B&B in Fredericksburg, Texas, where we met a doctor's family, a psychiatrist, and an author of a novel about Winston Churchill). The older man was quite large and was very proud of his role as Papageno in an annual performance of The Magic Flute. We talked momentarily about church, then discovered that they were from a church that apparently doesn't like the church we go to, and thinks we're all crazy, so we pretended that the topic didn't come up, and continued to have a nice discussion.
When it was time to go to bed, my dull headache was distracting me and I remember just seeing black and white for a while, almost like the cones in my eyes were turned off and only the rods were working (or vice versa?) At any rate, I wasn't feeling quite right. I felt dread like a lump of dough in my stomach, and I suspected that perhaps the owner had some kind of perverted camera setup in our room. I even joked with Fran about it, carefully, because once she gets a feeling she seems to go with it. It was too late this time.
"This place is definitely haunted, " she told me.
Chills went up my spine.
"You always think every place is haunted, honey."
"No, I really don't. But this place is."
Oh, no. She gets these feelings and something usually happens. She believes in that stuff, and I refuse to believe in it--I refuse to see it in any way, and luckily, I haven't ever seen direct evidence of ghosts.
But one time I had clearly seen the look of surprise and fright in her eyes when we were alone in a building working. The building was built over an old Indian trail, and many people who worked there overnight complained about weird noises and odd occurrences. Fran had looked behind me and said "Who's there?!" I had whirled around and there was no one, but she had definitely seen something. She had described a girl wearing jeans and a flannel shirt with black hair and no face...
But that night I slept fitfully, waking up, dreaming weird, vivid dreams of random, disconnected events. Waking up and noticing that the pink glow from a lamp with a wavy, glass shade that was left on all night, but not being able to move to turn it off. I tossed and turned and couldn't get comfortable. When sunlight started coming in through the partially open horizontal blinds, I got up and noticed that Fran was awake.
"I haven't slept at all"
"Really, why not?"
"Something was watching us all night. Something was up there."
"Honey, no there wasn't."
"I'm telling you, this place is very haunted."
"I didn't realize it mattered how haunted it is..."
"No, really, I'm going to ask the inkeeper about it..."
"Please don't do that? What is she going to think? Besides, we're leaving today. Just leave it alone."
"Something's going on here." She said it confidently, and the words were stuck in my head as we got ready.
We dressed and went downstairs, where the inkeeper and her husband were preparing breakfast. He was ten years older than her, with a droopy cowboy mustache, and looked like he had just walked off the set of Lonesome Dove. He was very kind and cheerful, and was cooking pancakes and eggs. The other couple came out to the breakfast table (The world of Bed and Breakfast visitors can be broken into camps of: people who shower and get dressed nicely for breakfast and then the other type, like our baritone and his wife, who just roll out of bed and look like kidnap victims. Once, while we were staying at a very fancy home in Virginia, our hostess was visibly horrified when the young couple from New York came down in their tattered nightclothes with bedhead and bare feet to eat her delicately-prepared 5-course meal on fine china in her museum-like formal dining room).
We had nearly finished eating a large breakfast and drinking cowboy camp coffee (not a compliment), when our hostess sat down at our table and stretched out her arms toward Fran.
"How did you sleep last night?"
Oh, no, now you've done it.
Fran carefully answered, "You know, I didn't sleep very well at all, even though the bed was so comfortable. Is it possible that this house is haunted?"
The couple from Houston had decided that there was a good reason that people from their church hate people from our church. But I saw a flash in the inkeeper's eyes and she shot a very subtle, quick glance at her husband. The other couple excused themselves and got up from the table.
The inkeeper looked right at Fran and said, "Dear, you must be very sensitive to that sort of thing-did you see any of them?" Oddly, she seemed very pleased. Calmly and seriously, now, now, not an airhead.
Chills again. Then, I thought to myself, This lady is whacked.
"No, I didn't see anyone, but I know someone was watching me all night."
"Those would be the children. We think there are three of them, but we usually just see the girl, if we see them at all...I call them my 'angels'."
"So other people have said this, too?"
"Every once in a while someone picks up on it...."
"We normally don't make a big deal out of it--it's harmless," the husband finished.
"Oh, no, they wouldn't do anything to you--they just watch," she added.
The lady then told us about a haunting of Shakespearean proportions. It was so shocking and horrible that it seemed unbelievable. I wasn't buying it, but Fran was focused on her and I knew she was breathing in every word, and vicariously through her the entire story became terrifying to me.
The farmhouse was originally owned by an officer in the Confederate Army. He was quite prominent in the area, and they used to entertain. During these parties there would be lots of music and dancing, and the the officer, whose name was Adam, as well as his wife, Josephine, would move all the furniture out onto the lawn.
This couple had moved in three years before, and, on random nights since they've moved in, they have awakened to find all the lights in the house on, the radio playing loudly, and a very loud, unmistakeable racket of furniture being moved across the wood floor. Even when they turn everything off, sometimes it would all come on again. Other times they would see the whole family, with Adam in the lead, followed by Josephine and children, descending the stairs in the house.
Of course, skin crawling and all, I was still having a hard time believing this. Studying their faces, I knew for a fact that they weren't trying to impress us or anything. It was almost like it was a relief to talk about it with someone that knew where they were coming from and would believe their wild stories. As flaky as the woman seemed to me to be (again, possibly prejudiced by her resemblance to my old schizo-boss), the man seemed sober and competent. But this was still unbelievable.
They were very serious.
She continued, " I even have a room in the farmhouse dedicated to my angels--I call it the 'angel room' and I have some of my paintings of angels and other angel decorations..."
"Tell her why you picked that room, babe."
She looked at her husband and smiled, then rotated that smile toward me and Fran "That's where I saw my first angel. He was so beautiful and he came to me and talked to me. He was floating above the floor."
I wanted to run. I did not want to know what he said to her, almost cringing to not hear it in case she said it, like you cringe to not hear the tales of a pathological liar--you know it isn't going to make sense, and you don't want the responsibility of having heard something and having to react to it or accept it.
Searching my feelings, I knew I felt weird while I was there, especially right when I had walked into the house. I had felt a headache the whole time, which is very unusual for me. Fran had never seemed to me to be so affected by a place, but she is prone to attributing behaviors to the supernatural, to an extent that I felt was irrational. But something was going on--either we were talking to crazy people, which was cause for fear in itself, or I was the lone, skeptical holdout in the room.
I excused myself and walked outside to get some air. Cowboy paraphenalia had been collected and was hanging from the rough wood porch. Some of it was saddle tack, some of it was relatively indecipherable. After a while, Fran joined me with a fresh cup of coffee.
The other couple packed pretty early and sped away without saying goodbye. Was it because they thought we were weird, or because they were uneasy or saw something, too?
Then the inkeeper's husband approached me. He told me very plainly, as though the other discussion hadn't taken place, "Every 4th of July we go to Luckenbach (Texas) to the Willie Nelson concert. We're taking off, now, so just lock up when you're ready to leave."
I froze. I did not want to go back into that room, especially if Fran and I were the only living souls for miles around. Fran and I looked at each other. We ran up the stairs.
When we walked in the room, Fran said out loud, "Okay ghosts, if you're here, we don't want to see you! Just leave us alone and we will pack up and get out of here!" (I wonder if that works...)
I told her "Yeah, they know we're scared to death of the ghosts in this place, so they know they can trust us to get our stuff and get the heck out of here...Maybe it was a scheme to make us check out early!" (I was saying this hopefully but it was not heartfelt).
"Pack one bag and go down to the car. I'll get the other and be down in two minutes." She knew I was severely freaked out. She was calmly but urgently packing her clothes and toiletries. She didn't have to tell me twice. I got out of there.
I went downstairs and outside and the inkeeper and her husband were gone. We were alone on the prairie at the haunted farm. I'm not sure what I was afraid of, but I was afraid.
I got the truck started and waited outside for Fran to come down. The last image I have of the place is the feel of the sudden prairie wind rushing in my face, blowing the hanging pieces on the porch as I ran to jump in the truck to make my desperate escape. I can still hear the metal pieces softly clank-clanking together as I slammed the truck door closed.
The truck kicked up dust violently as we sped down the driveway, and neither of us turned to look back.
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