Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf Read Free Page B

place in the room where the girls died. The newspapers had glossed over the details of their deaths, so as not to disturb readers, but unlike the quiet and painless deaths reported, the girls actually died of smoke inhalation, coughing and screaming before they passed out, according to bystander reports.
    Immediate and prolonged suffering may be enough to leave something
behind where it happened, and that seems to be the case on Allen Street.
    Before they knew what happened on that night of the fire, Chuck and Dodie turned the room into a guest room. Dodie, who was interested in paranormal activity, didn’t have a problem with the room at first.
    “When we first moved into the house, I slept up there sometimes and found it a quiet, comfortable room,” she said. Even after she found out what had happened there, she continued to use the room as storage, while still furnishing it with odds and ends.
    “It was always hard to tell [if] what was happening [was] because of what piece of furniture [was there],” she said. “We had a great collection of what we called our Dead People Furniture. Whenever someone died, we got new furniture.”
    Dodie decided to hang some old dresses in the room for character.
    “The dresses were handmade by Chuck’s aunt for Chuck’s sister,” Dodie said. “She wore them as a child. There were two or three of them. When I had my daughter in 1986, his mom passed them on to her. I thought they were beautiful and hung them on hangers on the wall in a spare bedroom when we bought the house in Salem. Although all that was in the room was an air mattress and an old bureau, they looked cute hanging there.”
    The little ghost girls found ways to interrupt the everyday flow of the house and although they never did anything to threaten or upset the family, they seemed determined to make themselves known. Maybe because of their beauty or because they reminded them of dressing up, the dresses became the focus of the girls’ activity.
    “Everyday when I got home from work, I would make all the beds and pick up. No matter how many times I fixed the airbed in that room and puffed up the dresses, I would come back to find the bed a mess and the dresses smoothed down,” Dodie said.
    This ritual continued over time. Although the other things happening in the house were scaring them, the dresses remained just a sad reminder that not all moments from the other side are spooky.
    “One day we were going out and I ran up to get a jacket. As I walked in the bedroom, I noticed the bed was a mess and the dresses smoothed down. I walked over and fluffed the dresses and turned to make the bed, muttering to myself because this crap was getting old fast,” she said. “When I turned to get the jacket, I watched as the dresses were smoothed over right in from of me.”
    As Dodie fluffed them up again, she distinctly saw an impression large enough to be a person on the bed.
    Until that moment, she had thought the activity almost funny. It always happened when she was not around and so she only saw the aftermath. But this was a bit too intense. While she wasn’t scared, it proved too emotional for her.
    Strain on the family, partly due to the hauntings, eventually made her leave the house and Chuck was forced to put it up for auction in 2009. By that time, he was no longer living in it, either.
    “It was bought and redone. It’s beautiful. From what I hear, the residents have been asking if the place was haunted,” Dodie said.
    Other family members continue to have experiences outside of the house, including ones so disturbing to Dodie that she brought in people to conduct a Native American blessing. Of all the things she experienced there, Dodie continues to return to the mystery of the dresses.
    “There was never a feeling of fear surrounding the dresses, just aggravation that I liked them one way and an invisible hand liked them a different way. Chuck’s aunt had passed by the time the dresses were handed down,