When I first moved to Galena Illinois, many years ago, I rented an enormous two-story apartment above one of her charming main street storefronts. The place was very old and dated back to Galena’s heyday in the mid 1800’s. It had probably been the residence of whatever merchant had owned the downstairs business. The place was charming in a shabby kind of way, with high ceilings and built in cupboards in the dining room and three large bedrooms on the third floor. The storefront downstairs was used by a local antique dealer for storage, and occasionally as a restoration workshop.
One evening as I was coming home from work, I noticed that the light was on in the shop and knowing the owner, I stopped in to say hello. He was busy working on a most grotesque but somehow beautiful old bed. When I commented on it he told me the story about how he came to own the unusual antique. Standing 9 feet high including the urn shaped finial at the top of the headboard; it was intricately and skillfully carved out of walnut with a shorter but matching footboard that had the same ornamentation except for the mask.
He explained that the carved face that dominated the decoration was most probably a death mask, as was sometimes used for embellishment on Victorian furniture, out of respect for a person that had died. A bed this ornate was probably made and presented to a couple as their marriage bed. If either spouse had died, a mask, carved as a likeness, would be added, least the widow or widower forget the face of their beloved. Those Victorians were a romantic if somewhat macabre lot. “ It was the funniest thing,” he added, “when I bought this, it was stored in an attic and it was in a hundred pieces. It was like a jigsaw puzzle trying to put it all back together.”
It was a hauntingly beautiful thing, but I didn’t think much more about it until later that night when I lay awake in my own little bed upstairs. Lying there I heard something like the sound of heavy furniture being dragged across the floor, and it was coming from somewhere below me. Now, I lived with two roommates and a Siberian Huskie named Tasha. Tasha had decided to grace me with her presence that night and was lying on the floor next to my bed. She seemed to hear it too and she sat, head up, ears at attention until the noise finally stopped.
The next morning as I left for work I glanced in the shop window half expecting the bed to be leaning against a different wall, or at least moved a little, but it was exactly as I remembered seeing it the night before. In a few days, it was gone and there were no more noises coming from below.
A few months later I ran into the antique dealer again and asked him what had happened to the bed. “I got rid of it,” he said. “ I was going to keep it for myself, in fact I was using it in my bedroom, but one morning there were tears coming out of the death mask!” I must have looked at him like he was crazy because he added. “Seriously I’m not making it up, it was just too creepy to sleep in so I sold it."
Later that spring, the store front was emptied out and for the week of the annual Boy Scout pilgrimage to Galena, and filled with pinball machines, a brilliant idea with 10,000 boy scouts coming to town for the weekend!
That was when we first met the spirit of our building. Chairs would rock of their own accord and there were rapping noises on the walls of our apartment even though the building next to us was a story shorter, and there was always the feeling that someone was watching us.
Then one night as I lay in bed, Tasha on the floor next to me, I heard a woman’s voice calling my name, Tasha woke up suddenly, she had obviously heard it too. I got up out of bed assuming that it was one of my roommates needing me for something, but they were both was fast asleep! As I got back into bed, I noticed it was freezing cold, so I nervously put the covers up all the way over my head and finally fell asleep. When I asked the next day neither roommate had heard anything. The noises stopped as soon as the pinball machines were carried out and things got back to normal.
We had no other signs of any ghost until we were moving out. One of my roommates and I were carrying a mattress down the stairs from the bedrooms into the kitchen, when she suddenly dropped her end and stared at the doorway. “Oh my God there he is!” she screamed, but by the time I turned to look he was gone. He was just standing in the doorway, and only visible from the waist up. She described him as a handsome young man, dressed in a white shirt with a banded collar, his arms folded across his chest. She didn’t feel any reason to be afraid of him; he just seemed to be watching us, watching us move out of “his” house.
I often wondered if he had been attached to that bed and had somehow been released when it was so painstakingly put back together. Was the fact that it harbored a spirit the reason it had been dismantled so completely and hidden away in an attic for so many years?
And what of the woman who’s voice had so clearly called out my name. Perhaps they were lovers who had shared the bed, most likely husband and wife. Was the death mask added after the handsome young gentlemen met an untimely death? I’ll never know the answer to that question, but I have no doubt that there was something supernatural going on in our home.
Copyright Kathy Gereau 2008
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