Old Widow Hanson lived and died
in this house. Only before she was Old Widow Hanson, she was Theodora
Birchington. She lived on a farm near here. She didn't play with the other
children and always kept to herself. She talked to herself a lot, too. When she
grew up, she got married to Hans Hanson who was a salesman.
Theodora and Hans fought a lot.
The neighbors could hear them screaming at each other all night long. I don't
know why she just didn't tell Hans to move out and then get a divorce, but they
didn't have any kids so I guess she wasn't in any hurry. Then one time Hans
tried to strangle her. That day she told everybody, "He's never going to do
that again."
The next day, Hans disappeared.
They found his body a few days later, only it was missing the hands. They had
been cut off just above the wrist. His body is buried in the town cemetery. You
can go see his grave, but his hands aren't there.
Anyway, people knew that Theodora
had killed murdered him, but they couldn't prove it, so she was never charged
with murder.
Widow Hanson got older. She had
wild wavy hair and a weird look in her eyes. And, like I said, she was really
ugly. She was always talking to herself and screaming, "Get away! Get
away!"
Then one day, when she was really
old and ugly and after no one had seen her for weeks, the sheriff went looking
for her. The neighbors had smelled something terrible, and I don't mean a skunk.
The sheriff knocked the door down and searched the entire house, except the
attic. Then he and his deputy opened the attic door. There was old Theodora,
lying on her back at the bottom of the stairs, with her neck broken.
The sheriff figured that
she'd slipped at the top of the stairs and fallen to her death. Then they heard
a strange sound. Drip
drip drip. Coming
from the top of the attic stairs.
Drip drip drip.
They climbed the stairs and
discovered a gruesome scene. There, lying on the floorboards, were the bloody
hands of her husband. He had been dead for years, you know. The flesh was
hanging off them and you could see the bones inside. The fingernails were all
broken off and the fingertips were oozing blood. But the weird thing was the
hands were covered with fresh blood--and it wasn't Widow Hanson's. The blood was
dripping down the stairs. Drip drip drip. They followed the bloody trail to an
old trunk where she must have kept the hands locked up. Inside it they found
deep scratching gouges where the hands had clawed their way out of the trunk.
The sheriff didn't know what to
make of it, until he and the deputy turned Widow Hanson's body on her side.
There on the back of her white nightgown were the prints of two bloody hands,
prints that matched the hands of her husband. After all these years, the ghostly
hands of Hans Hanson had come back from the dead to kill his widow.
People began to see her ghost in
the house, but the scariest thing happened when the next family moved in. The
husband was a truck driver. The first week they were there he was away, hauling
a load of tomatoes. One night near the end of the week he called his wife to say
he was coming home early and to wait up. But she fell asleep in what used to be
Widow Hanson's bedroom. In the middle of the night she heard someone come into
the room and she figured it was her husband. Then she heard someone get into bed
with her. She was so sure it was her husband she didn't even open her eyes. She
reached over and their hands met. He squeezed hers as if to say,
"Goodnight." Then the woman fell back to sleep, holding her husband's
hand.
In the morning the phone on the
nightstand rang and woke the woman up. It was still dark, and the bedroom
curtains were closed.
"Hello?" she said.
It was her husband. He was
calling to say that his truck had broken down and not to worry, he'd be home
soon. He hadn't wanted to call her in the middle of the night.
The woman's heart was pounding as
she hung up the phone. Who had crawled into bed with her? And who had held her
hand?
She jumped out of bed and turned
on the light. The room was empty--or at least it looked like it was. Then she
forced her eyes to look at the bed. It seemed empty, too. So she caught her
breath and decided that she had had the strangest dream. She climbed back into
bed and pulled the covers up to her neck. She tried to go back to sleep, but she
kept hearing a noise. A dripping noise. At first she wondered if there was a
leak in the roof--only it hadn't been raining.
Drip drip drip.
The noise was getting louder. It
seemed as if it was coming from the other side of the bed. So she reached over
and felt some liquid. Some warm liquid. She turned to look and pulled back the
covers. There on the sheets next to her were the bloody handprints of Hans
Hanson. And his blood was drip drip dripping on the floor.
Her husband found her--still
alive, but she was never the same. They sold the house as soon as they could.
That's why everybody calls it the Ghost House.
So two ghosts haunt your house
now. Widow Hanson stands at the attic window and looks out . . . and just behind
her are the creepy rotting hands of Hans Hanson waiting to push her down the
stairs.
ŠJames M. Deem. From The
Very Real Ghost Book of Christina Rose (Houghton Mifflin,
1996). All rights reserved.
