Ghost Whispers Read online

The family from North Carolina moved away the following year and never returned. Ever since then, just as Mr. Klontz told, nobody has stayed long at that place on the hillside. Wight Elementary School is still there on Fourth Avenue, only it’s not a school anymore but a healthcare info systems center now. The corner mom-and-pop store across the street was taken over and torn down to the ground, the last of these time-honored relics dying slowly off here in the Forest City and, alas, the rest of Illinois as well. And the house? As of this writing it stands vacant not far from the old school, lurking beneath hundred-year-old maple trees so low you can almost touch their big spreading limbs. Neighbors complain of flickering lights at night, though no one lives there and the electricity has long ago been shut off. The concrete cistern lid remains barely visible in the overgrown, weed-choked yard. But if one dares get close enough to the somber home, the carved initials C.M. can still be seen upon the bricks nearest to the front porch where young, pretty Corine Maffioli etched them during happier times. And after dark on warm Indian summer eves, when the wind moans through reaching branches, you might just hear the strums of a harp and the sighing of lost lullabies somewhere near to you, or perhaps feel the cold touch of an anxious Italian bride upon your flesh.

  Sleep

  A fter both of his parents were killed in a boating mishap on the fickle waters of Lake Michigan, small Branduff came to live in Rockford Township from Brillion, Wisconsin, which lies up near the city of Manitowoc. He stayed for a while with his Uncle Ian and his Aunt Alvy in a house next to Cedar Bluff Cemetery—just around the time that the Sinnissippi Park lagoon was under development— back before Cedar Bluff began falling into its current, periodic states of disrepair.

  The year was 1911 and young Bran, whose name in Irish meant ‘raven’, didn’t mind at all living right by a graveyard. In fact he liked looking out his loft window each morning over the quiet mounds, even enjoyed the times his Uncle took him inside the cemetery and taught him how to do headstone rubbings with paper and bits of charcoal. What Bran didn’t enjoy doing was trying to sleep at night. Because when sleep finally came to him, there were bad dreams that came along, too. Dreams of nightmarish sea monsters which engulfed unwary people and swallowed them up whole, carrying them downwards and ever downwards into a void of black water far beyond any blackness imaginable. Uncle Ian gave him an expensive gold pocket watch, to put just beneath his pillow so that the ticking sound might assist him in drifting more smoothly, more peaceably off into slumber. Nothing seemed to help. Worse yet was after he slept and dreamt, Bran would always awaken the next day with both eyes encrusted shut, his eyelids having literally sealed themselves closed during the night so that Aunt Alvy had to cleanse them with warm water, gently wiping the sleep away while Ian hummed softly elsewhere in the room, keeping his nephew calm until he was at last able to open his eyes and see again.

  Well, one winter day Branduff wandered off into the cemetery to do some rubbings on his own. He brought along the gold watch so he’d know when to return home, attaching its chain and then placing it inside his coat pocket like Ian had shown him. With his Aunt’s pet collie Mischief in tow, he marveled at how big the snow-covered graveyard actually seemed now. Why, it was almost half the size of the entire town of Brillion! He nearly laughed aloud but caught himself, remembering his place, for though a child of only six Bran was quite mature for his age.

  Mischief and he chased each other through the white drifts, galloping between flocked cedar trees and oaks until the boy singled out a particular stone marker at which he decided to begin. It was the headstone of a family named Church, and Bran carefully held his paper up over the neat etched letters with one hand while using a piece of charcoal to trace in relief with the other. After a time he grew bored at this, however, favoring to take Auntie’s collie and go exploring. Later, when he noticed the sun dipping into the western sky, Bran checked to see what hour it was.

  His pockets were empty: the gold watch was gone! But where could it have gotten to? He swore he’d felt it there just minutes earlier. Now what was he going to do? He must have lost it while playing with Mischief, yes, when they were both romping through the trees together. Bran returned quickly to that area and began hunting high and low, dreading what might happen if he didn’t find it. His Uncle had told him the pocket watch was valuable, one-ofa-kind, how it’d been made at the Rockford Watch Company and how, by and by, this firm had run into various financial reverses, which meant that the timepiece was going to be worth a lot of money someday. Only now it had disappeared, chain and all. Vanished into thin air! One-of-a-kind, all right…

  Branduff’s stomach rolled nervously as he crawled on hands and knees, desperately searching around the snowy mounds. He looked and he looked, until he could look no more. Then he sat himself miserably down upon a cold headstone, the very stone by chance he’d been tracing earlier. He sighed darkly, and as he did Bran suddenly recalled something Ian had once said, a morsel of unwritten lore he’d passed down to his nephew right here in this same dismal boneyard. And that was this:

  “Remember, lad, if needed you can always make a special wish while sitting atop a tombstone, and your wish may even come true, but only if you have entered the cemetery and then leave the cemetery again without uttering a solitary word.”

  The boy thought a moment. He was sure he hadn’t spoken out loud, not today inside Cedar Bluff anyway. So, hoping against all hope, Bran closed his eyes and made his wish, silently imploring to find the lost pocket watch before he got into any trouble. He crossed his fingers and concentrated hard, and for an instant the boy imagined he could smell the cedar trees above him and even a nearby lilac bush in full, fragrant bloom. Crickets were chirring and the breeze felt warm and buzzing around him, and for some curious reason Bran sensed if he snuck a peek now he might see Cedar Bluff Cemetery alive with fireflies, their glimmer lighting up a summer’s night sky that stretched out forever before him like moonlit velvet across the sleeping burial mounds. Instead he squeezed his eyes shut tighter, but when he heard the distant call of a whippoorwill and became startled, he finished his wish abruptly and opened his eyes. There was only snow, of course, and Mischief there staring at him in the cold dusky still. Bran slid down from the gravestone and searched a little longer before ultimately giving up. Then he started homeward with the tired dog at his side, being extra mindful not to speak as they trudged along.

  He had a definite case of the collywobbles now, and that made him think uneasily of last Sunday’s sermon on how malaria and the cholera epidemics had once reaped their toll here in Midway.

  After a bit the house came into view, lanterns burning in the windows and smoke curling invitingly from its chimney. The boy entered and went straight up to bed, complaining of an upset stomach and passing on supper for the evening. He fell asleep and at some point he began to dream; Alvy and Ian heard him muttering out, “Silence! Silence!”, as if feverish during the night.

  When morning arrived and small Branduff finally woke he found his eyelids sealed shut so that he couldn’t open them, as was usual by now. He started to call for his Uncle or Aunt, but refrained as he felt delicate hands upon his face and brow, cleansing his eyes, gently wiping the sleep away. Bran lay quiet in his bed, listening to the familiar humming elsewhere in the warm room, the creak of an old rocking chair in the corner. He heard the rhythmic sound of Mischief’s tail against the hardwood floor—thump…thump…thump…thump— a slow, amused wag that signaled acknowledgment of some kind, mixed with wonder perhaps. The boy could smell the pleasant aroma of soda biscuits baking downstairs in the kitchen. He began to fidget, then felt the hands upon him a final time, lightly brushing at his temples. Gradually Bran opened both eyes now, sat up yawning in bed and looked around him.

  The bedroom loft was silent and empty, except for Mischief on the floor there staring oddly at him again. Climbing out of bed, the boy pulled his slippers on and went downstairs. He blinked repeatedly as his sight became adjusted to the brightness, but next he was scratching his head in puzzlement. Uncle Ian sat reading his morning newspaper at the whitewashed kitchen table, while his Aunt dawdled about the stove. When she saw Bran standing on the stairs, Alvy looked mildly surprised. She wiped off her hands and asked her nephew if he was all right, told him she didn’t realize he was awake yet, that she was just on her way up to check. He started to ask what she meant, then Ian slapped the tabletop roughly and laughed, saying how Branduff wasn’t a baby anymore but a young man now, how he knew his nephew would outgrow such nonsense sooner or later. His Uncle proudly sent him upstairs to get ready for breakfast and Bran hurried himself along, not fully understanding what had happened. He got dressed and made his bed, and that was when he noticed the pocket watch dangling by its golden chain, draped loosely over one of the bedposts! He snatched it off, cupped it unbelievingly in both hands. On the seat of the rocking chair rested his open leather-bound Bible, which ordinarily was kept in the chest of drawers. And under the rocker near where Mischief stretched, there before Bran’s wide-eyed gaze lay a clump of melting snow and with it, a tiny sprig of lilac, its sweet lavender florets already dying and turning pale upon the hardwood floor.

  As he grew older Branduff never experienced nightmares again, only dreams of lost, warm nights spent in a lush grove where crickets chirred and the starlit sky seemed to go on forever above him.

  If you go inside Cedar Bluff Cemetery today, you’ll see markers bearing names such as Asprooth and Wilmarth and Grimmitt, even the ominous Hamilton vault dug into the side of a grassy hill. And someplace beneath the cedars and oaks there, once you make your way past eroded monuments and through the occasional tangle of deadfall, you will find the headstone of a family named Church. A small tablet close by reads simply, Our Babies. But the main gravestone is inscribed with Samuel Church, who died in 1886, and also with his wife who died later in 1905. His beloved wife, whose first name is listed as Silence.

  The Drowning of Nellie Dunton

  S ome fifteen miles or so east of downtown Rockford’s historic River District lies the city of Belvidere, Illinois, where it is said that an old gentlewoman’s broken heart led her to a watery grave. Where her restless apparition is still seen today, eighty-odd years after the fact, wandering the grounds of her prized ancestral home near where the tragedy took place. And where each Halloween, when the autumn mist begins to swirl around town and the leaves turn to frosty hues of orange and scarlet and gold, local schoolchildren can be heard murmuring amongst themselves and chanting in eerie reverence as they pass by:

  “Nellie Dunton, quiet and polite, Drowned in the river late one night. Pray you may, now pray take flight, Lest Nellie claim your soul tonight.”

  The story goes as follows. Nellie Dunton lived in one house, the same house, all of her life. She was born in Belvidere before the Civil War, played there and grew up there, fell in love there and eventually grew old and alone there, losing everybody who was ever close to her over the long, isolated years. Then finally, she died there. It’s rumored that as a young woman once she discreetly took an older lover and was set to be married sometime after the war, when abruptly her intended Confederate cavalryman up and vanished into thin air, leaving a jilted Nellie behind in her gossamer veil and white silken gown on the very dawn of her wedding day no less. What became of this southern rogue no one truly knows, but the incident left Miss Dunton shaken and quite vulnerable. In a subsequent fit of anger she gathered together everything her errant soldier had given to her—the heirloom diamond ring, numerous handwritten love letters, even a tattered slouch hat he’d worn upon the battlefield—and burned these items unceremoniously, without rejoice.

  Nellie Dunton never dared to love anyone again. She instead became a spinster, an ‘old maid’ some called her, who ended up staying on at the family’s estate for the rest of her life, until at last she and her housemaid were the only ones left. How could she leave, really? Where could she go, in her humiliation and grief? No, it was safer to stay put, to keep things at a generous distance now. And yet even though quiet and retiring in her spinsterhood, Miss Dunton never became mean spirited in any way, always kept a kindly nature about herself. She remained a fixed, cultured rarity in her Belvidere community for decades to come, despite the bitterness and sorrow she inwardly endured.

  Then on a clear June evening in 1920, suffering from insomnia and failing eyesight, Nellie Dunton (who was nearly seventy years old by now) for some reason donned her faded white wedding dress and descended the terrace steps out back into the murky Kishwaukee River which flowed behind her home. There, at just around midnight, the old woman slipped beneath the water like vapor and was never observed alive again.

  The following morning when Miss Dunton didn’t come down for coffee as usual, the maid went looking but found her employer’s bedchamber vacant and the infamous wedding dress notably missing. Concerned, Nellie’s housemaid hurried to enlist help from an M.D. by the name of Belsey who lived next door. Together they frantically combed every inch of the brick Dunton estate, then began searching the outer grounds. Petite footprints were soon discovered at the rear of the home, trailing down to the muddy banks of the water. Her bridal veil lay upon terrace steps, but there was no other visible sign of Miss Dunton.

  It was here that Dr. Belsey chose to apply a discarded, although once widely used and traditional method of finding suspected drowning victims. Sprinkling some quicksilver on the gossamer veil, last touched by the lady in question, it was then placed carefully upon the surface of the river and allowed to free float until it began to move slowly, inexplicably against the currents, leading them both upstream a short distance to where an awful sight

  awaited. Nellie’s body was there clad in her silken gown from years gone by, floating facedown— because of her profound shame, according to local superstition—encircled by small slithery snakes in a mere foot and a half of writhing water. When they turned her over, the maid and Dr. Belsey found her eyes open and staring; she’d been dead for many hours, it appeared.

  Now it is told in this part of the upper Midwest that if a person dies with their eyes open, and especially if the death is one of considerable tragedy, that person’s spirit will not rest easily and will be bound thereafter in sorrow to the earth. This bit of folkloric wisdom rings particularly true in the unsettling case of Nellie Dunton.

  A young wealthy couple took charge of the Dunton home in the late 1940s. The place seemed perfect for them, so peaceful and quaint with its riverbank backdrop. Their peace turned out to be short-lived, however, interrupted by a string of chilling occurrences, which became more and more frequent in the months that followed. Suddenly things were happening which could not be explained away. On some nights, only sounds were heard. Shuffling footsteps in the hallways and on stairs, keys fumbling at locks, someone playing with the baby grand piano down in the darkened parlor, gently toying at its ivory keys in the stillness of a cold Christmas midnight. Other times the couple would find their bedding in wild disarray, sheets and pillows and blankets flung purposely about the floor in a confused tangle. Once, they discovered their closets completely ransacked, and another time they actually happened upon what looked like delicate wet footprints, which trailed up and into the guest bedchamber merely to disappear there in the center of the carpeted room. They began sensing they were under some sort of close scrutiny most of the time in the house, by something they could not see but certainly could feel.

  Then, one memorable spring day, Nellie visibly revealed herself to them in the stark form of a spectral bride, soaked to the bone and shivering, snakes caught up in her hair and moving within the folds of her ghastly white dress. This shuddersome vision of Miss Dunton was glimpsed coming through a seemingly solid interior wall on a bright June afternoon, in broad daylight yet, and was never to be seen again by them. For the young well-to-do couple abandoned their new home posthaste after that, sending for their belongings at a later date.

  Still, there was more to come. Another married couple, older this time and with two children and a family cat, bought the old house in 1951 with the high hopes of running a business from their newly acquired Belvidere residence. Being sensitive and broad-minded people, they felt Nellie’s presence almost immediately. Soon household items began to vanish and then reappear again in the strangest of places. Chairs and other small furnishings were found overturned, their legs in the air. The children reported sheepishly to their parents of hearing stairs creaking during the wee hours, of faucets being turned on and off while everyone else slept. Every so often a family member, up late and alone reading, would feel the cushions next to them deliberately sink, as if somebody had sat down and joined them upon the davenport. And on more than one occasion did their calico cat, Spangles, bound straight off that same davenport and race wildly through the house spitting and yowling as if startled to near terror by something in the room, something which in fact remained unseen to any human eyes proximate.

  Many accounts are told also of coffee found brewing in the kitchen in the dead of night, all by itself; Miss Dunton’s love of French roast was renowned, a beverage she partook of on many a sleepless evening within the safe confines of her magnificent parlor.

  Ghostly happenings still persist at the Dunton estate, though they’ve grown scarce to a degree and more unique of late. But even under new ownership, tenants do yet experience unusual stirrings there, can sometimes palpably feel the old lady wandering in and around her former riverfront home, itself once linked to the famed Underground Railroad that aided runaway fugitive slaves in escaping to the north. Candles won’t stay lit, and windows cannot be forced open in certain rooms of the house. Inside the main bedchamber a queer, cloying scent of spring flowers remains to this day, lingering within an icy pocket………described by some as a bubble of flesh-tingling air in an otherwise pleasant room, a mysterious ‘cold spot’ which one can noticeably pass through and then exit again—near where Nellie’s antique brass bed once rested, leading some to believe that Miss Dunton’s spirit still roams the night in search of her long-gone Confederate soldier.