The landlady was a brassy, friendly divorcee who chatted with us about the history of the house as we inspected it. The first occupant had been a retired Navy Chief who built much of the house himself and lived his last days there. The current owner had moved to a neighborhood closer to Virginia Beach as her family grew but had never sold it. "She loved this house," said Tammy Collins. "She was happy in this house. This is where her family grew up. She couldn't sell it."
While there was never any sense that something was wrong in the house, there occured on several occasions events that I could not explain. Regularly between one and four am, single loud thumps would resound from the wall above the fireplace. We checked the outside of the house to find that the branches of the pine trees came nowhere near touching the roof. We had the chimney inspected, and while it was in need of re-pointing, there was no reason why it should make noises. I climbed into the attic and checked for animal nests: none (although I did find that the original owner had been overly sanguine about his electrical skills, having wired everything with extension cords!) We even called in the workman seal up some holes in the eaves, so no squirrels could take up residence. And the thumps were too loud and definitive to have been caused by a squirrel..
Our cat on occasion would seem to see something crossing the room, tracking with its eyes something invisible. While this was creepy, this particular cat is a strange specimen of a strange species, and had previously attacked nonexistent bugs, sunbeams, etc., so I didn't think much of it.
Neither my husband nor myself are engineers, carpenters, or experienced in construction, so we would have chalked up all the noises to the famous ghost "Subsidence" were it not for two other incidents.
My husband was home alone, as I was stationed on the aircraft carrier USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT (CVN 71) and had been out to sea for two weeks. He was in the living room watching television, during the witching hours between one and four. Not only did the usual thumps emanate from the fireplace, but footsteps --or some kind of regularly paced noise-- sounded across the ceiling of the living room, through the dining room, and into the kitchen . The unmistakable odor of stewing tomatoes wafted back across the dining room. A night breeze moving across a stack of dirty dishes left out in a glorious reversion to bachelorhood? Maybe if the smell had been pizza, but being transplants to the South, neither my husband nor myself has ever stewed tomatoes.
I can't say that I thought he was lying, or imagined it, but I didn't really believe it. I held it in suspended disbelief the same way you believe in Santa Claus or have emotional investment in imaginary characters. The binary of "True/Not True" didn't apply. I probably would still feel equivocal about this story and ask myself "waking dream? imagination? a blot of mustard?" had something not happened to me the night before we moved.
I was vacuuming the den/library behind the living room (on the back side of the fireplace) again during the witching hours (I must admit to being a procrastinator as well as a night owl). The thumps started again, the footsteps began, and suddenly I was overcome by the smell of coffee. Sights and sounds are explainable --coffee is not. It was after four by this time --around the time a career Navy man would be getting up, switching on the coffee pot, and preparing to drive in to NOB Norfolk to hold morning muster.
I think that sometimes in that house, time wore thin, and we were coexisting with the original occupant --maybe a born and bred Southerner who favored stewed tomatoes, certainly a Sailor who liked his morning coffee. That in some way we were all there together, each on the edge of each other's perception. The ancients believed that the turning points of time (midnight, the solstices and equinoces) were door through which the otherworldly could pass into the daily and prosaic world. Maybe this is true. Maybe in the 1960s Master Chief occasionally woke up and wonder why he heard a TV when his was off, a cat he didn't own scratching to come in --or why he smelled roast chicken with limes and tarragon?
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