THE HAUNTED HOUSE ON YOSEMITE STREET

On July 12, 1975, Sixty-nine year-old Valerie Kitchen stabbed her beloved husband eight times in the heart, by accident. More remarkable than the mysterious execution, Mrs. Kitchen was ultimately acquitted of bumping off the kindly old watchmaker. If the saga could not bobble in more spine-chilling waters, Mrs. Kitchen eventually became our landlady.

Mrs. Kitchen was hell-bound and determined to keep the property she and her (now snuffed-out) husband shared for forty years. Not out of tender sentiment, but pure methodical greed. Behind closed doors, all the old gal really wanted, was to hit the high-seas with Todd Tea, her thirty-something surfer boy-toy. Consequently, she was renting the house out for a song. My mother, being the quick-witted and thifty woman she was, smelled the sweet stench of naiveté baked in a pan of desperation and seized it. Besides, Mom always believed Mrs. Ketchum really did execute her husband purely by mishap. Mother’s perplexing take on the matter has hung by its thumbs in the board room of parental confusion for thirty plus years.

I was not an exceptionally nervous kid, but I had a creepy feeling from the day we moved in. At the ripe old age of twelve, I had amassed countless tales to verify that the house was undoubtedly haunted. Many years before I was sitting on Santa’s lap, pleading with him to deliver my presents to my cousin's house because I was afraid a ghost would kidnap him, kill the reindeer and steal all the presents.

God bless my mother who admirably taught me, or, tried to teach me, that spirits were nothing to be afraid of. I would have slept a little easier if she had simply said there are no such things as ghosts. Instead, she attempted to instill a respect for the deceased, wandering souls and pretty much anything that goes bump in the night.

"The dead can't harm you.” She used to say, "It's the living you gotta watch out for."

As comforting as those words were intended to be, it still didn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling to know all the clocks in the house were continuously re-setting to eight thirty seven. This had been happening since the day we moved in. Then again, there was always some kind of poltergeist activity going on in Mrs. Kitchen’s house.

One quiet Saturday afternoon, my cousin Calvin and I were outside playing a pick-up game of Inner City Race Riot. We were about to lob a make-believe Molotov cocktail through the window of an imaginary funeral home when we noticed a light in the attic of my house go on and then off again. It happened several times, igniting our curiosity to explore the second floor of the house. Mrs. Kitchen was renting the entire two-story bungalow to my Mom, but we were not allowed to venture upstairs where she and her husband had bedrooms. Since racking up adulthood, I now suspect one of the rooms was a sex dungeon. At the top of the landing were two closets Calvin and I would sneak up to and play in. In the middle was a door reeking with unexplored mystery because it possessed a pad lock the size of Red Skelton’s skull. This ominous door led to Mrs. Kitchen and her dead husband’s master bedroom. Fortunately, a fifth of Wild Turkey assisted Aunt Stella’s forgetting about the second floor house rule. Whenever she babysat, Calvin and I would wait until she dozed-off, ascend the stairs and play Intergalactic Space Pimp or any other mindless game that we could conjure up at the instant. On this particular day, we heard unfamiliar noises emanating beyond the door. Of course, everyone has observed noises in our home at one time or another, but never had I heard such an unearthly and terrifying clatter like this from the rooms upstairs.

We sat spellbound in a frigid state of disbelief. After an hour-long minute, the raucous noise that sounded not unlike rusted pipes strangling a family of midgets finally stopped. Calvin and I peeked through the keyhole and clearly saw water running from the facet in the bathroom. We glanced under the door and before our nosey eyes was an embroidered bedspread freely moving as if the bed were being made. I made a rather offhand comment on how uneven the sheets were and suddenly the bed- making ceased. We instantly heard footsteps approaching the door. Calvin and I stood there for a tentative, yet unwise moment to determine if we were having a joint hallucination or loosing our marbles. When we mutually felt the thundering vibration on the floor advancing, we practically jumped out of our young skins. Completely fear-ridden, we scrambled down the stairs, bolted out the front door, and fell to the ground. We caught our breath on the porch and shared in our joint astonishment.

“Man! That was him walking.” Calvin said.

“I know, I know. That was a dead man walking.”

“Yeah, but walking towards us!”

We sat in suspended animation for a full minute, not saying a word to each other. Finally, Calvin spoke.

“Ya know what we have to do don’t you?”

“Go back up there.” I coughed up.

And we did just that. Only slowly, carefully, we crept up the corkscrew staircase. With each cautious step, a new wave of terror befell us. We then toyed with what we considered rational questions.

“What if he’s not really dead?”

“Of course he‘s dead.”

“So then he’s a ghost?”

“Yeah, I guess he’d have to be.”

“My mom always says ghosts can’t harm you.”

“Yeah, but they can still scare the hell outta ya.”

We reached the top of the stairs and stood motionless and silent outside the sealed entrance. We finally looked under the door into the side bedroom and saw the door slowly close. Though we were chill-bound in disbelief, an arrogant sense of calm and confidence began to manifest. Like a conquering of our own child-like fears.

“You know, your mom is right. He can’t harm us.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but don’t you want to know him?” I said.

“Know him? What for?”

“Calvin, according to the police his wife killed him.”

“Yeah but I heard it was an accident.” he countered.

“Okay, okay, but how do you stab a person eight times in the heart by accident?”

“So you want to talk to the dead guy and try to find out if his wife really murdered him or not?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Me too,” I shamelessly confessed.

Thus began the laborious business of ghost busting, private detective work, and murder-mystery solving, all rolled into one great childhood adventure. Since we were now old enough to take the bus downtown alone, we began our research by descending on the main branch of The Detroit Public Library.

We anxiously meandered our way to the records department. Then an unidentified fear came over Calvin.

“What’s eating you?” I asked taking note of the sweat on his brow.

“I don’t know. I mean, what if, we can find out how she accidentally kill her husband ?”

“What if we find out it wasn’t an accident?” I threw back.

We quietly moseyed into the gargantuan periodicals room. Every newspaper and magazine imaginable was at immediate hand. Best of all, they had back issues of all the Detroit newspapers. For a whopping fee of two cents, we were able to obtain a copy of the May 15, 1976 issue. That was the historic day Mrs. Kitchen was acquitted of her husband’s murder.

“Okay listen to this,” I said reading an article. “Today a jury of nine men and three women found Mrs. Valerie D. Kitchen innocent in the 1975 murder of her semi-famous watch-maker husband Harold Kitchen. The entire nation was fascinated by the trial and watched it closely from the beginning because the defense stuck so passionately to its rather bizarre alibi.”

“Which was?”

“Oh, brother, you won’t believe this! Valerie Kitchen took the stand against the advice of her attorneys and was grilled fiercely under cross-examination. The accused widow evidently made a convincing argument to the jury. Mrs. Kitchen was crying and clearly shaken as she reenacted how she kept slipping and falling at her husband’s bedside. The woman maintained she had no idea she was stabbing him in the heart because she was on the floor making repeated attempts to get up on the bed. She claims he was sleeping on her side which he never does and that’s why she wasn’t concerned about stabbing him.”

“Wait a minute Cuz, why did she have a 16 inch steak knife in her bedroom in the first place?”

“Apparently, she was cooking a pot roast, carrying a kitchen knife and a container of grease when she accidentally dropped the grease then slipped on the floor.”

“And she got off? Oh brother.” Calvin asked rhetorically.

“I know, this kind of justice makes growing up a lot less appealing doesn’t it?”

We stayed the rest of the afternoon essentially reading the same unbelievable story reported from a dozen different newspapers. On the bus ride home, our adolescent imaginations took over again.

“Look, if your mom is right,” Calvin began. “I mean, if she does know what she’s talking about, then what would be wrong with trying to contact Mr. Kitchen?”

“Nothing is wrong with it because it’s impossible.”

Leave it to Calvin to come up with an idea. He always had an idea, no matter how harebrained or impractical, he always had an idea. This time however his plan made a modest amount of sense. When we got back to my house, we quickly snuck upstairs and sat outside the door. Right when I was about to speak, Calvin began lightly tapping on the door.

“What are you doing?”

“Shhhhh.” He hissed. I repeated the question in mime.

“Morse code.”

Even at twelve years old, I knew a little about mediumship and I never heard of any body contacting the dead by using Morse code. That is, until I heard knocks coming back..

“What did you say?”

“I asked if this was Mr. Kitchen.”

“And?”

“The answer back was ‘I am he.’

“Ask him if his wife knifed him on purpose.”

“Come on man, I just met the dude. I can’t go asking him something that personal so soon. I mean how you would feel?”

“How would I feel? If I was a ghost? Whose wife got off from murder? A ghost, mind you, who wanted to be in this world and lead a long and prosperous life alive. I think I’d be dying to tell somebody I was murdered.”

Just when we were about to continue arguing or start knocking again, we heard my mom’s car pull into the driveway. We scrambled downstairs and greeted her. She asked what we had been up to, but I was distracted by the horrified look on Calvin’s face. He was as pale and stone- cold stiff as Dick Cheney’s smile.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” I asked. My terrified cousin abruptly grabbed my arm and pulled me into the dining room.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Yeah, I said. It’s six o’clock.”

“But all your clocks say its eight thirty seven.”

“Yeah, so? All the clocks re-set to that time a couple times a day. I thought you knew that.”

“Don’t you see why?”

“Duh, no.”

“Mr. Kitchen was murdered at eight thirty seven p.m. didn’t you read that in the paper?”

“Oh my supernatural god Calvin, he has been trying to tell us for a long time. Since I was five years old, that clock been resetting.

That evening I spent the night at Calvin’s house. We went to bed early, but were up all night exploring the infinite possibilities of how to contact Mr. Kitchen. We were about to give up when Suzy came home. Suzy was Calvin’s sixteen-year-old sister who was a dred-lock wearing, vegan, pagan-witch. We always considered her a new age space cadet, but now we found we needed her wisdom of the unseen world no matter how silly it might seem.

“Suzy have you ever talked to the dead?” I asked.

“Only my spirit guides. But they have been dead for thousands of years. Why?”

We laid the whole blood-curdling story on her and she ate it up without the slightest doubt in the validity of Mr. Kitchen.

“You guys really should try using a Ouiji board”. She said leaving the room. I asked Calvin what a Ouiji board was and he just assumed it was something they use in witchcraft. Suzy came back with a wooden flat panel covered by a bronze silk scarf. She sat cross-legged on the floor and motioned for us to do the same. She removed the cloth and revealed a stunning, custom-made Ouiji board. The nether-world paraphernalia was constructed of solid oak with exquisite mahogany and teak inlays.

“I had this made for me when I was in India last year,” she said gently placing her hands on the panel. Then she posed a question. “Mr. Kitchen, were you a victim of murder?” Her palms didn’t move at all, so she posed a different query. “Do you want to communicate with the boys?”

Now the disk under her fingers began moving across the board. Instead of answering the question directly, it spelled out the words: “On paper.”

“On paper?” I asked. “What on earth does that mean?”

“I don’t know for sure, but sometimes wayward spirits like to communicate through writing.” She nonchalantly explained.

“And how are we supposed write to a dead man?”

“There is automatic writing.” She said to our clueless stares. “Hmmm, how do I explain this? Okay, you channel the spirit of the deceased person and they write to you through your hands. But I doubt if you guys could ever pull that off and I’m too busy.” She said getting up to leave.

“That’s it? That’s all you’re gonna do?” Calvin said stupidly.

“Yeah” I added.

“Why you ungrateful little runts.” She said grabbing her Ouiji board. “I put my self at great psychic risk to help you guys out and that’s the thanks I get?”

With that, she stormed out of the room. As disappointed as we were, we knew she was right. If not for Suzy’s attempted wizardry, we would have never known if Mr. Kitchen was really trying to reach us, or if we were just deluded victims of our young imaginations.

Two nights later, my mom was staying out late. Aunt Stella was unable baby sit, so mother bribed Suzy into the gig. The moment she stepped threw the door I went into immediate apology mode. Suzy didn’t even notice me because the ominous vibrations of the house took her aback.

“Whoa man! There is some heavy duty activity going on here.” She stood at the entrance fairly startled.

“Good thing I brought my sage.” She said noticing two clocks with the exactly wrong time on them.

“Oh, the clocks always set to eight-thirty-seven in this house.”

“Yeah, Suzy, that’s the precise time Mrs. Kitchen stabbed her husband in the heart,” Calvin crassly tossed in.

“Eight times.” I said.

“By accident,” Calvin interjected smugly.

Suzy stood there unflinchingly, nevertheless looking bewildered. She was plainly annoyed by our childish arrogance about the whole matter.

“I’m still going to smudge the place.” she said pulling out a bundle of herbs that looked and smelled like marijuana.

Calvin and I snuck upstairs and devised a rudimentary plan to reach the poor old guy. We wrote out a set of questions on separate pieces of paper and drew huge circles on the page to answer “yes” or “no”. We then slid them under the door; greedily hoping for, yet fearing, a response. Suzy’s curiosity had cultivated just enough to ask what we were doing. When we explained, she laughed and ordered us downstairs for dinner. While we dined on her home-made and incredibly tasteless vegetarian pizza, she explained further, what in-writing means in the world of psychic stuff. We were ready to try anything, but channeling a murdered man was not even in the realm of consideration.

Suzy’s boyfriend dropped by which gave Calvin and I the perfect excuse to go back up the staircase and try to think up more probing questions to ask Mr. Kitchen. When we got to the top of the stairs, we were flabbergasted at what we saw. In the middle of the floor were five pieces of paper we had written questions on, now pushed back out from under the door. We stood there, too freaked out to shriek or scream. I finally mustered up the gall to reach over and pick up one of the sheets of paper. We were so mesmerized by the experience we didn’t notice there were answers to the questions on them.

Calvin looked down at his page and noticed in one of the circles the paper was wet. Several of my pages were the same. Placing all the sheets on the floor we began to read the answers. To the question, are you Mr. Kitchen? There was a wet spot on the yes circle. When we read the question are you dead? Both yes and no were marked. This freaked me out until I read the last question, which was, did you’re wife kill you on purpose? But when I looked at the paper, the page had already dried. Damn.

The night ended with grave disappointment as well as elation. Suzy didn’t buy our story about Mr. Kitchen answering and now we were beginning to doubt ourselves. The feat of making contact with the dead was accomplished but not our objective, and worse of all we not only had no proof, but we could not tell anybody we were up there in the first place.

That night in bed, I began thinking of poor Mr. Kitchen. I looked up at the clock, which he had made, and of course, the time was eight thirty seven. Moreover, it began to eat away at me. I had to know why he was murdered. And I felt somehow that Mr. Kitchen wanted us to know. Surely he would understand there would be nothing we could do about it. At least he could rest well in the great beyond knowing that somebody knew the real story. Still the question gnawed away at me, what would make his wife want to kill him?

I woke in the middle of the night and decided to sneak a midnight snack. But on my way to the kitchen, I heard a noised coming from upstairs. I stood still for a second, then heard it again. It was the sound of papers ruffling. The sound got louder and had an almost frantic kind of air to it. I started up the stairs but froze half way. A fear that I still cannot explain engulfed me. I broke for my bedroom and dashed under the covers.

“You ran away?” Calvin said the next day. “You chickened out?”

“I got scared.”

“Man this guy is crying out to us and we’re too chicken to even talk to the guy.” Calvin said with the selfless courtesy of adding himself to the mix.

“Yeah, I mean, how would you feel if you were dead?”

“Uh, I don’t know”. He came back with. “But I’m sure I’d wanna talk to somebody that’s living.”

We decided right there that we had to do something daring, something that would put an end to all the mystery.

“Shit man, let’s just ask him again.” I said with make-believe confidence.

We left the warm comfort of the kitchen table and made our way upstairs. The first thing we noticed was all the papers we left in two neat piles were all scattered about the floor. We immediately set out on straightening them up. Once again thinking, there really is only one question we wanted an answer to. “Did your wife kill you on purpose?”

No sooner than I pushed the sheet under the door did the piece of paper come back. It spooked the hell out of me, but not as much as what was on the paper. There right in the middle of the circle marked ‘yes’ was a huge wet spot of water. Calvin and I just stood there awestruck and staring at the sheet until it completely evaporated.

“Oh man Calvin, she really did kill him on purpose.”

“Ya know it’s darn right creepy when you think about it”

“I know, eight times. I wonder why eight?”

Before another word could be uttered, we heard a knocking sound coming from the pipes in the bathroom. It was a pattern of about seventeen beats. Calvin quickly picked up that it was Morse code again and listened with rapt attention. In his left hand, he held a pen writing down the letters being called out. I leaned over his shoulder and nearly swallowed my tongue when I saw what it spelled.

“He wants us to kill her”?

“What?”

“Look at what you’re holding” I said somewhat astonished that he could take down dictation but not comprehend what he was writing. When the words finally reach his brain, he passed out right there on the spot.

“Kill her. Please kill my wife.” These were the words Calvin gripped in his hand as he slept off his fright-food. I left him there and went down stairs for some ice cream. When I returned, there was another sheet of paper separate from the others. This one had writing on it. But it wasn’t our writing. I woke Calvin up shocked at what I held in my hand. There written in broken but still legible letters were the words, “murder my wife please kill her.”

We ran down stairs, flew out the door. We got on our bikes and peddled straight to the police station and barged our way into the main administrative center. We stood there gasping for air but still desperately trying to speak. A tall dark skinned officer came over and introduced himself.

“I’m officer Singh.” He said noticing the paper in my hand. “What do we have here?”

“Sir, we solved a murder.”

“You did?” He said almost losing his composure.

“Hey mister we’re serious. We have proof that Valerie Kitchen murdered her husband on purpose.” Calvin said loosing his cool.

Officer Singh listened politely as we told him the whole story and everything we did to get to the bottom of the case. In the end he explained that he was impressed by our efforts, but what we have didn’t amount to proof. However, he did admit that he believes in ghosts.

We walked our bikes home sulking in disappointment. Along the way, we ran into Suzy.

“Wait a minute, Mr. Kitchen wrote this?” She said utterly dumbstruck. “You guys, this is a lot more serious than you realize. This man is asking you to bump off his wife.” Suzy said as she walked us back to my house.

“We know that already.”

“But spirits don’t do that. They just don’t. Not unless they are really low beings. But even then they usually just try to possess a person and then you have to get into exorcisms and all that kind of stuff.”

If she was trying to scare us, she did a damn good job. “Listen guys, don’t ever try to contact this man again. He might try to take over your soul and make you commit a heinous crime.” There was something in the seriousness of her words that sounded like good advice.

We never played upstairs again. A year later, we moved and Mrs. Kitchen rented the house out to a retired plumber, Mr. Al Rucker. Calvin and I dropped by one day and chatted the old guy up. He admitted to hearing strange noises coming from the rooms upstairs. We told him that I used to live in the house and that it was haunted. Mr. Rucker explained that he didn’t believe in ghosts and we walked away thinking how naïve this poor man was.

Years later, while in my first year of college I was called for jury duty. I showed up at court and was immediately dismissed from the case because I knew the defendant. Apparently, Mr. Rucker was being tried for stabbing Mrs. Kitchen eight times in the heart. And the murder took place at exactly eight thirty seven.

The End

The Haunted House on Yosemite Street and all contents in the collection titled You Always Hurt the One You Love is protected by the United States Copyright office. Any publication, public performance, duplication, or recording is prohibited without the written permission of the author Gaz O’Connor. Copyright 2009

This is am uncorrected proof.