[UA] The Man in the Black Hat

[Chris Cooper]

This is the latest Weird US message.

Enjoy.

C.

The Man in the Black Hat – Onsted, Michigan     
By Linda S. Godfrey
The house no longer stands. Its destruction was both
unexpected and mysterious to many of its neighbors,
but one young couple who lived in the place for a year
think they might know why someone may have suddenly
been moved to dismantle the historic home.

The old red farmhouse on the corner of Springville and
Woerner was not without its charm. The couple loved
its rural location outside of Onsted, a small town
southeast of Jackson in southern Michigan. It stood on
ten rolling, forested acres cut through by a ribbon of
stream, with a windowed gable facing the road and a
side porch to soften the entryway. And even when the
previous owners warned Terri and Ed it was haunted,
they chose not to let it bother them. “I thought
they either had an active imagination, or if they were
ok with the haunting then we should be also, so we
bought it,” said Terri. Her optimism would prove
unfounded, to say the least.

The couple made their purchase in May, 1996, and one
of the first things Terri did was phone her local bank
to transfer her new address. The teller was pleasantly
courteous, asking Terri the required questions, but
when Terri told the woman her new address, the voice
on the other end of the line seemed to freeze.

“I wouldn't move there if I were you,” the teller
finally replied in a solemn tone. “I've been in that
place. I know it's haunted. I was there alone for a
few minutes one time while I was visiting the last
owner's daughter, a friend of mine, and she had to run
to the store for something. I'm sitting there minding
my own business, when I hear this “thump, thump,
thump” like someone's running across the floor
upstairs. I knew nobody else was home, and the hair
just stood up on my neck. I ran out the door, I didn't
even wait for my friend, and I never went back in that
place again. You're not gonna like living there.”

Again, Terri managed to laugh the warning off. She and
her husband rather liked the idea of sharing their
house with a spook. “I thought it might be neat,”
she said.

At first, Terri and Ed thought the former occupant and
the teller must have been crazy. It seemed like the
perfect country home for their young family, with
nothing out of the ordinary going on. It was, however,
around 100 years old and had become a bit rundown, so
Terri and Ed began remodeling the place before moving
in with their two–year old, Alex.

It's well known among those who study haunted houses
that remodeling can “stir up” whatever spirits
might lurk in a home. The owner of one haunted former
bed and breakfast in LaGrange, Wisconsin, claimed that
every time she hung new wallpaper or put up a new
cabinet, an old farmer dressed in overalls would
appear to inspect her handiwork. One young child
staying at the B&B with his parents asked the owner
who the “grandpa” was that visited him in his room
the night before. Other patrons saw him, too. Such
stories are typical. And very young children are often
able to see things others cannot.

Terri and Ed had no idea they were roiling a wraith's
cauldron as they hammered away, polished the hardwood
floors and painted the old plaster walls. But one
night, while Ed was working there by himself, they
began to get a glimmer of what lay in store. Ed hadn't
meant to spend the night, but he had accidentally let
his car battery drain and didn't have a ride back to
town. It wouldn't be comfortable to sleep there, since
the couple had not moved any beds in yet, but he
managed to settle down on the floor to try for a
little shuteye. Just as he was drifting off, someone
knocked on the front door. Ed's reaction was relief;
he figured someone must have realized he was there and
driven out to take him home. But when he opened the
door, he found nothing except the wind whistling over
the dark fields. Disappointed and puzzled, he snuggled
back into his makeshift bed, only to be summoned once
more by insistent pounding on the front door. Again,
only silent darkness met him.

Ed slept very little that night.

Still, he and Terri moved in on schedule, and
everything was fine for a few months when autumn began
to creep in bringing shorter days and colder nights.
The family had been sleeping with the windows open but
Terri decided it was time to shut them, and walked
around one cool evening buttoning her house up for the
night. She tucked her now two-and-a-half year old son
in bed in his little room, and then turned in herself.
Alex had been sleeping through the night for some
time, and had adjusted well to the move. But it wasn't
long before he woke Terri and Ed with terrified
screams. They found him cowering completely under his
covers, shivering with fear and yelling, “No more!
No more!” 

Terri instinctively whipped the blanket off, and Alex
jumped, looking shocked. He stared as if to make sure
it was really his parents there in the room with him.
After that, nothing would induce him to sleep in his
room again.

The seasons progressed, and Terri and Ed decided to
move their bedroom to a downstairs area to help save
on the heating bill. They transformed the dining room
into a family sleeping room, and for a while all was
calm. Ed often plowed snow for a local landscaping
firm, and would sometimes tiptoe out of the room as
early as three or four in the morning after a big
snowfall.

“One morning my son woke me up, asking, “Is that
Daddy?” said Terri. She sleepily told him his daddy
was at work. Alex was staring out the window, gazing
at something that appeared to be about the height of a
human. “I don't like that man, he scares me,” said
Alex. “Can I get in bed with you?” Terri quickly
lifted up the covers for him, feeling frightened by
then, herself. 

At breakfast, she asked Alex to tell her what the
scary man had looked like. The little boy told Terri
the man wore a black hat, something like a cowboy's,
and blue jeans. It seemed an unlikely costume for
ghost, but a few weeks after the incident, she ran
into the previous owner. When she told them what had
happened and described the ghost's attire, the house's
previous occupants were not surprised. They had seen
two different ghosts when they lived there, they said,
and the man in the black hat was one of them. Someone
who had owned the house before them had been killed
when he fell off the roof, and they believed that was
the man Alex saw. “You don't want to have him
around,” they warned Terri. “He's bad news. But
the lady ghost, she's ok. She's nicer.”

Somehow, Terri found that little comfort.

Strange little things began to happen on a regular
basis around the farmhouse. The creaky basement door
was latched with an old-fashioned hook and eye, and
Terri would find it unlocked and open when no one had
been near it. The basement appliances and utilities
started to behave erratically, suddenly failing to run
for no apparent reason. “I would never go down there
since the dirt floor Michigan basement gave me the
creeps,” said Terri. In fact, the basement scared
her so much that she would just do without water or
electricity until her husband got home, rather than
venturing down alone to attempt repairs. Alex began to
talk about seeing a lady around the house. He called
her, “the angel.”

One time, said Terri, Alex solemnly informed her that,
“Great Grandpa was touched by an angel.” Terri
didn't think too much of the nonsensical statement,
but the next day Alex repeated his assertion to
“Grandma” Ruth, his babysitter. Grandma Ruth
gasped, and told Terri that her father had died the
day before, right about the time Alex had made his
pronouncement. The angel had told him, explained Alex.

Another time, a friend who claimed to be sensitive to
spirits offered to have a walk through the house to
see if he could sense any presences there. He walked
upstairs, said Terri, and after a few minutes came
tearing back down, declaring he would never go up
there again. “He didn't see anything, but something
completely freaked him out,” said Terri. Other
friends told her they just plain didn't want to visit
her in that house.

A photo Ed and Terri took of the home's exterior
showed a mysterious face in the upstairs bedroom
window, although no one was in the house at the time.
The photo later strangely disappeared from their
picture collection.

Somehow, Terri and Ed managed to get through the long
winter, and once warm weather returned, they moved
back upstairs to the regular bedrooms. By summer, they
had another little boy, Matthew. Alex still did not
want to sleep in his former bedroom, but was finally
persuaded since his baby brother was also now in the
room with him.

One morning, Ed had left for work when a loud noise
startled Terri into wakefulness. It sounded almost
like a tornado, she thought. She glanced out the
window, and realized the sky had taken an eerie green
cast. It was a tornado! Instantly she leaped out of
bed, scooped up the baby and grabbed three-year old
Alex's hand, running with them to the basement door in
her nightclothes. Yanking open the door she usually
avoided, she held the boys tightly as she picked her
way down the worn, narrow treads. Somehow, halfway
down she stumbled and fell. The three bumped their way
to the bottom of the stairs. Terri landed on the edge
of the furnace, gashing her head. She felt a warm ooze
of blood trickle from the cut. Miraculously, the baby
and toddler somehow both emerged unscathed. Shaking,
Terri huddled in the dirt-floored cellar with her
children and tried to keep them calm until the roaring
of the storm abated. She dared not even think about
her usual fear of the cellar.

When the roaring finally ceased, she decided to run up
the stairs to see if it was safe to return. She helped
Alex to cuddle his brother and left them for just a
minute. The house was still there, so she hustled back
down and carried the little ones back up. But Terri's
head was still bleeding, so she put the boys in their
car seats and drove to her mother's house a few miles
away. Once in the safety of his grandmother's house,
Alex, who had been strangely silent since the ordeal,
finally piped up. As soon as Terri had gone upstairs
to check the house, he said, the man with the black
hat came to visit him in the basement. The man leered
a moment at the two small children, then told Alex,
“If your mama ever comes back to his place in the
basement again, I'll do more than just knock her in
the head next time.”

Terri, shocked, asked her son why he didn't call for
her.

“The angel came,” Alex said. “She told the man
to leave me alone, so he went away.”

At that point, Terri and Ed decided they had had
enough, and put the house up for sale. The place had
new owners by the end of summer. Strangely, those
owners soon tore the red house to the ground, despite
all the remodeling Terri and Ed had done. Terri never
had a chance to ask them why. In a way, she admitted,
it seemed better not to know. Once they moved, Alex
never saw another ghost. And whether the man in the
black hat still haunts the ground that once harbored
his basement “place,” no one has been able to say.




I have a damn blog. Happy now?

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