The Face On The Wall

By Jesse Glass

She walks down the cold back stairs and stands among the amateur genealogists peering back through the years at their ancestors. Intent on their own pasts, they do not see her there and she does not often notice them seated in what used to be the root cellar. She hurries right through them on her way to a more interesting part of her world of nameless tintypes and fading crinolines.

And now she is rising to the second floor to take her place among the dolls. She takes turns peering out of glass eyes in wax faces. The eyes glow dimly with her presence as she moves from one doll to the next. She peers out at the musty room full of beautiful things--things she loves to touch with moonbeam fingers. Occasionally one of Them will come and she'll watch the visitor linger before the doll cases. It is then that the secret begins to burn within her like the sparkle of a diamond, and she wishes to express it. But how does one express anything without lips teeth and tongue? And how does one make a sound if one is the shadow of a shadow?

But wait...if one is clever, very clever...there is a way. Sometimes she will rearrange the quilts in a neat stack on the gift room floor, even when the doors have been locked for the night. Then those oddly dressed people who come to share her home with her in the daylight hours will stop and frown and place their heads together, and some will know that she is there. Then, when one is very very clever and has drawn strength from a dripping tap or a cosmic ray carooming from the depths of space, one can do a trick with smells, passing the shadow of a cup of hot apple cider beneath the very noses of those who have invaded her home, bringing their chatter, their coarse appetites, their worldly cares . And see? The living ones stop and stare and back away, because they know she is a presence among them as surely as dust and creaking floorboards and fading ink in old diaries are presences at the Historical Society of Carroll County, Maryland.

But the secret...how does one tell a secret--even scream it out--when it burns like an evil star in one's breast? There is a way! But one must wait for the correct time...the proper gathering of forces. One must be a patient ghost, and she is a very patient ghost holding the most impatient of secrets within her.

For indeed something terrible happened those many years ago when the house was home and office of a doctor, and the secret thing happened and she died so quickly that even experienced hands could not bring her back. The secret that had to do with love and hate, heaven and hell, appeared to die with her laved in a shroud of carbolic fumes. As she was lowered into the earth, so the secret appeared to have been lowered into eternity with her frail and broken body. Yet somehow the secret lived, even as she appeared to live on as an alien thought between sleeping and waking, a furtive movement caught from the corner of the eye.

Then, at 4:30 on the afternoon of November 2, 1988, she managed to tell her secret in the only way a very very clever ghost could. She told it to the only person she could tell it to--Sharon Kirk--a county worker for the Tourism Department; the only person who was present at the time when the correct forces had been gathered by the patient ghost.

As Mrs. Kirk worked at her desk she noticed a "hospital smell," as she described it. The smell grew stronger, and when she looked up she saw a light shimmering on the wall next to the doorway of her office at about the height of a person's head. Inside the light she saw a woman's face with soft, indistinct features suggesting deep-set eyes and a mouth open in a scream. "It just looked like somebody who was screaming in pain," Sharon would say later.

Ms. Kirk had the instincts of a true ghost investigator. She cooly checked to see if the spectral face was a reflection by placing her hand in front of it. Her hand cast no shadow over the image. She then checked the windows and saw that all had been secured and the shutters closed.

After the ghost visited with Sharon for ten minutes, it disappeared in a truly memorable way. As Ms. Kirk would describe later, the face appeared as if it had been sucked into a hole. "First the bottom and then the top of the features merged in the center with the nose, and it just--whoosh--went into the wall." The brave Ms. Kirk closed the shop at 5 p.m., and went home.

One month later at almost the same time yet another worker alone in the office noticed the same smell, and saw what looked like heavy smoke hanging above her head. She sensed the presence of the face on the wall and ran out of the building. Later she returned with friends. The old house was the same as it had always been. They saw no ghost, though surely invisible eyes were watching them as they walked from room to room.

Did these women understand the important secret the ghost tried to tell them? Perhaps a little. Please understand that this is a very special ghost, with plenty of time. And as all clever ghosts know--persistence is the key to communicating secrets. We know that the ghost of the Historical Society of Carroll County will keep trying to tell its secret until someone finally understands.

Copyright © 2000-2005 by Jesse Glass - ahadada@gol.com.

Jesse is a Fortean researcher and the author of
Ghosts and Legends of Carroll County, Maryland

How to order his books: http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html