The Mystery of the Haunted Portrait

There’s a haunted portrait hanging in the church next door.

I hope you appreciate the matter-of-fact, almost blasé manner in which I deliver the news. I’m not exactly a novice when it comes to encountering ghosts, however. In fact—and I say this with a considerable amount of modesty—I’m kind of an old hand when it comes to spirits. A spook wrangler, you might even say.

I grew up, of course, on the same ghost stories as everybody else my age. You know the ones. They end with someone shrieking “GIVE ME BACK MY GOLDEN ARM!” or “. . . and when she stepped out of her car, hanging from the door handle was a bloody hook!” These stories use to send a thrill up my spine, particularly when we’d swap them at church youth group overnighters after midnight, or in the long evenings leading up to Halloween. (This would have been in the days before the web, naturally, when we fifth graders didn’t have online gambling and internet porn to keep us occupied.)

But did I believe them? Not whole-heartedly. I believed there was something compelling about the power of a story told by whisper in the dark. I believed we all enjoy the sensation of giggling at the end of a gruesome tale and pinching ourselves to make sure all of our parts were still there. Even at a young age I believed that the world is full of scary things, and that channeling our fears into storytelling was a way to cope with the darkness. But in actual, ectoplasmic, wafting-around harbingers of another world? Listen, a golden arm would’ve had to have weighed a ton. Nah. I didn’t believe.

Not, that is, until the great misadventure of The Rapping Ghost of Williamsburg.

The College of William and Mary had ghost stories. Hoo boy, did they ever. The theater department alone had enough spirits haunting its hallways to have cast all the supernatural scenes in both the original Ghostbusters and its (less original) sequel. The specter of a lonely senior, mowed down by a car before her premiere as Emily in the college production of Our Town, was said to walk the stage of the Phi Beta Kappa Theater, searching for the spotlight she never enjoyed. Upperclassmen in the program passed down to incoming freshmen warnings not to linger alone in the scene shop after dark, where another unidentified spirit would graze the necks of the hapless with an icy-cold kiss. There were dozens more, but they all tended to blend together in a hotpot of spookiness.

I found these stories about as credible as the notion that the pretty male theater majors with perfectly-moussed hair telling them all had ‘girlfriends’ who conveniently went to ‘some other college out of state.’ Nor did I buy the story I heard from others around campus that the cemetery out by the law school had a rapping ghost.

Wait. I can see how easily this story could head down the wrong path and lead only to inevitable disappointment. You’ve now probably got an image in your mind of a hip-hop apparition wearing big ol’ earphones as he hovers over a phantom turntable, scratching rhythmically about how it’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes him wonder how he keeps it six feet under. The Rapping Ghost of Williamsburg was not that kind of rapping ghost.

I wish.

This ghost just lay there quietly in his coffin until midnight, when it would rap three times and—well, that’s all. I’m not even sure there was a story behind it—like some kind of demented Avon Lady denied her chance to make commission in life, attempting to sell that one last case of Skin-So-Soft after her untimely demise. Nope. Kind of boring, actually. And I know you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Oh, but Colonial Williamsburg! The cemetery was probably straight out of Sleepy Hollow with enormous gothic crypts and weeping angels and skulls rolling around on the ground like acorns in autumn, right?” But no. The cemetery by the law school was outside the colonial district. Its grounds were modern and dull and treeless, a grid of marble slabs rendered dull, regimented, and sterile.

One night during my junior year, though, my friends Perry and Melinda and I had been studying for finals in some of our psychology classes out at the law school. Back in the day, smart upperclassmen in the know scorned studying in the Swem Library on the main campus during finals; the law school library a quarter-mile away from the Old Campus was the place to be. The atmosphere was cosmopolitan, the seating was plentiful, and most important of all, I seem to recall they had a snack bar. We missed the bus back, or else stayed after the last return trip to campus. Either way, we decided to return to campus up South Henry Street, past the graveyard.

I don’t know whose bright idea it was to make the detour. We joked about the rapping ghost as we did it, though. Thought it would be ‘fun’ to prove the legend wasn’t real. Had we but known! The cemetery wasn’t lit at night, back then; there weren’t really any streetlights beyond its boundaries to illuminate the paths. The moon’s bright light made the asphalt driveway sparkle as we wended our way along the low, plain tombstones. I remember being in a particularly giddy mood brought on by too much sugar and the prospect of the semester’s end, combined with the silly bravado we all felt.

Then we heard it. Tap-tap-tap. Three rapid, but very distinct knocking sounds. “That was a woodpecker,” Perry said, uncertainly. None of us had really that much experience with woodpeckers, though. We heard it again. Tap-tap-tap. It sounded like someone rapping his knuckles on a wooden door. Which, to our imaginations at that late hour, was close enough to a coffin to make any differences negligible.

Now I can’t say, from a purely empirical standpoint, that it was exactly at midnight that we heard the rapping. (It probably wasn’t.) Nor can I say for certain that the noise wasn’t a woodpecker. Or a tree frog. Or some other fauna of Williamsburg. Or a distant hammer in a house on the other side of the graveyard. All I can really say is that it was late at night, it was very dark, we all heard it, and we all practically crapped our pants trying to clamber over each other and sprint the hell out of that godforsaken place. Then we made a solemn pact never to speak of it again.

Or study at the law school, for that matter.

It wasn’t until we moved to Connecticut that I had my second encounter with ghosts—this time with The Parsonage Kitchen Ghost. I might’ve mentioned that the first-floor flat in which we currently live is in an historic house that used to be the church’s old parsonage. It’s old. Very old. Not so old that staunch old New Englanders probably sat on its front porch drinking Cape Cods while watching the village burn witches on the green across the street, but just about.

Well, very early on in our stay here, I woke up at four-thirty one morning to hear noises in the kitchen. It sounded like a fan, followed by a beeping noise. Craig was snoring beside me, and the cats were both snoozing on the bed. Nobody likes to leave the bed at four-thirty in the morning, particularly to investigate a noise, but I got on my robe and padded down the hallway through the dining room and into the kitchen, where I looked around. Nothing was happening. I went back to bed.

It was maybe two days later that I heard it again. The sound of a fan from across the house. It was very early in the morning, but light enough that I could see. “That,” I said to Craig, waking him up from his sleep, “is the microwave.”

“Okay,” Craig said, then immediately conked out again.

I raced into the kitchen naked, where I saw the microwave oven’s light shining. When I walked through the door, the oven beeped at me and shut down. I opened it up. There was nothing inside. I don’t know why I thought there would be. It’s not as if ghosts need a quick baked potato or a couple of Hot Pockets.

Back in the bedroom, I announced to Craig, “A ghost turned on our microwave.”

“Okay,” Craig mumbled, drool running from the corner of his mouth into the pillow.

“FINE.” I harumphed under the sheets with a flounce. “If you don’t care that a malevolent entity is turning on the microwave and will probably burn down the house, I don’t either.”

The next time it happened, we both heard it. It was still very early in the morning, before dawn, but we were both woken up when we heard the sound of beeping, as if someone were punching a time into the microwave oven’s keypad. Then we heard the oven itself start up with a hum. Both of us ran naked into the kitchen, where the microwave was turning around and lit up. Where normally the time would’ve displayed was a digital mumbo jumbo. I’m not saying it actually read 666 4EVAH upside-down or anything, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“It’s the ghost,” I said, as we both stared at it.

“I think it’s just broken,” said Craig.

“Definitely the ghost,” I agreed.

There’s been some dispute ever since over which of us was correct, but both of us agreed it was probably better to dispose of the microwave oven in the dumpster. Sprinkled with, you know, a little holy water. I try to ignore the fact that from time to time still, water glasses in the cupboard over where the microwave used to sit have a tendency to fall out when the doors have been open for a while, even when the glasses been sitting there undisturbed, flat on their bottoms. It’s as if someone is pulling at them. My reflexes are pretty good, though, and so far the poltergeist hasn’t broken a single one.

But this business with the painting, now. That’s just creepy. At the top of the stairs right inside the church office entrance sat, for the longest time, a portrait of a former minister. I’m told it’s haunted. I don’t know why, or with what, or frankly even how a picture can be haunted. Frankly, if I were a spirit, I’d certainly find a better place to park my keister than some garage-sale quality rubbishy daub without much of a view or, for that matter, access to a room with a flat-screen and cable. All I know is that one of the associate ministers told Craig that he was walking after dark through the church auditorium where the portrait now sits and he felt something grabbing at his legs . . . even though there was nobody there with him.

We walk through the church hall after dark all the time, on the way from the parking lot to the back door of our home. At night it’s already dark, echoing, and creepy in there. Knowing there’s a bored haunted minister waiting to grab at my legs doesn’t make me relish the trip any more, let me tell you. I scurry through as quickly as possible, trying not to cast my eyes up the stairs in case I see those in the painting glowing back at me.

Post-mortem leg-pinching still seems like an unusual kind of hobby in which a minister well past his retirement could engage, but hey. Maybe my parsonage ghost could invite him over for a cup of microwaved coffee and they can compare notes sometime.