The Toy Phone

Living in a haunted house as a child began my love affair with the paranormal.  Living in a haunted house as a young adult with two small children almost ended it. 

    I knew a little bit about ghosts because of my experiences as a child (more about that story in a separate post), but my daughters and I lived in the second house when I was in my twenties, many years before I became a professional paranormal investigator looking for answers about who and what ghosts are. The idea of using some sort of methodology to verify events, to use equipment to gather audio and video evidence, to even try to figure out what “their” story is and what “they” are trying to voice was far into my future. As they say though, I wish I knew then what I know now.  I had my own haunted playground in that second house, an investigator’s dream, but at that time I did not have any desire to examine what was happening. I just wanted to keep us safe. 

     When I first saw the house, I fell in love with it. It was a two-story Victorian that sat close to the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. It had a big front porch and lots of windows. There was a huge dining room full of light that I filled with my many houseplants. I love plants, and I always, even to this day, have more than most people generally have in their home. The dining room, with its large bay windows, was perfect for them.

     The house had three bedrooms, a luxury for us at that time.  An old-fashioned staircase with a wooden banister wrapped around the side of the entry hall and led to the second floor where my daughters’ bedrooms were. Julie, at 3, was thrilled to have her first big-girl bedroom right next to her 5-year-old sister. Marie’s room didn’t have a closet, which I thought was odd, but we fixed up a cute area for her clothes and settled in. For the first few months, we were happy. It felt like home.

     One night, when I was downstairs studying, I heard Julie coming down the stairs.  She said that the toy phone in her toybox was ringing, and she wondered if she should answer it. The little plastic telephone had been a Christmas gift from her grandparents, and it had a tiny bell on it that would ring if you used one of your fingers to turn the old-fashioned dial when you pretended to call someone. I asked her if she had been playing with it when she was supposed to be going to sleep, but she said, “No mommy, it’s really ringing. Like a real phone.” I explained that toy phones don’t ring by themselves and that it was time to go to sleep. She argued with me for a little bit and finally, I told her to answer it and sent her back upstairs. I went up to check on her a little bit later. She was asleep, but I was mystified because her bed was moved out from the wall about six inches.  She was too little to have moved it herself, but I reasoned that somehow, she and her sister might have done it together after I tucked them in.  I moved the bed back where it belonged against the wall without waking her.  Her sister was asleep and nothing else was out of place. 

     The next morning, after breakfast, I took the girls upstairs for their baths and Julie’s bed was moved out from the wall again. I asked both of them about it and Julie said that it had moved all by itself.  “By itself?” I asked.

     “Yes, mommy,” she said. “I rode it when it moved.” I thought that was a little strange, but she was three, so I told her and her sister not to move the bed anymore and when they went to bed that night it was still in place. 

     Things were quiet for a while. I was busy with school and being a mom, and I didn’t think much about anything else. Julie came downstairs almost every night to tell me that her little toy phone was ringing, and I would give her a glass of water and send her back upstairs. Her bed stayed where it was supposed to be.

     One Saturday morning, Marie came downstairs with her sister before I was up, jumped into bed with me and excitedly told me to “get up quick” to look at the plants.  All I wanted to do was sleep in, but she was persistent, so I got up and let her drag me out into the dining room.  It took me a moment to realize that the room that had been filled with houseplants the night before was completely empty, without one plant to be seen anywhere. My sleepy mind was trying to make sense of what I was seeing, but Marie was tugging hard on my hand, and I finally turned around to see what she was pointing at. 

     Through the front windows, you could see every one of my plants, outside, on the porch. Several of them had been stacked on top of one another in odd formations that reminds me now of the chair-stacking scene in “Poltergeist.” They weren’t balanced on top of each other in defiance of physics like in the movie, but it looked creepy all the same. I was stunned and scared.  How had my plants gotten outside?  Had someone gotten into the house and moved them? Why would anyone do that?  How could anyone do that?  I didn’t know how to explain how all of my plants had moved from the dining room inside to the front porch outside through a locked door sometime during the night all by themselves. I was really frightened.

     We brought all of the plants back inside and I asked the landlord to install new locks, which he did.  He wanted to know why, and I didn’t know what to tell him, so I said that I thought someone had been in the house when I was gone, and he accepted that.  This happened before cell phones and I didn’t have a regular camera, so I didn’t have any proof that any of it had happened and to be honest, I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone, because seriously, how can you describe something like that? I was firmly convinced that one of my friends had managed to pull an elaborate prank, but even now, after so many years of paranormal investigating and having had some very strange experiences in the course of that, I have never seen anything quite like the sight of those plants on my front porch.  I still don’t know how to explain it. And it really bothered me that I had slept right through it.  For a few nights, I kept the girls in bed with me. I didn’t sleep much.  Every little sound would send me out to the dining room or to the kitchen or to the back porch to investigate, but nothing was ever out of order and the plants stayed where they were supposed to be. Finally, the girls began sleeping in their own rooms again, and I started to relax. 

     About this time, Julie’s bed started to move out from the wall again.  It was happening almost every night and it wasn’t just a few inches from the wall now, but almost to the middle of the room. Both of my girls protested that they were innocent when I told them that they needed to stop moving it. I was afraid someone was going to get hurt while they were playing their little joke on mom, but I really couldn’t figure out why they would keep doing it, or more to the point, how they were doing it. It was a full-size bed, not heavy, but still a handful for two little girls to move. I was also starting to be a little concerned because Julie was acting like she didn’t want to sleep in her room anymore. I was trying to be the firm yet understanding parent who believed that she was just trying to get out of going to bed, but her saying that her toy phone was ringing in her bedroom at night had been going on for some time now, and I was really puzzled. I didn’t hear anything when I put her in bed at night that she could be mistaking for a ringing sound. The toy phone was buried at the bottom of the toybox and when I looked at it to reassure Julie that it wasn’t ringing when I put her in bed, it was always in the same place and hadn’t moved. I asked Marie if she ever heard anything at night, but she said no, which made sense because she was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow and she was a sound sleeper.

     Looking back on it, I don’t know why I didn’t just take the phone out of Julie’s bedroom. I would do that now. But I had taken a parenting class at school and had decided that I needed to set firmer boundaries with certain behaviors like repeatedly getting out of bed.  I didn’t believe that the toy phone was ringing.  I honestly didn’t believe that anything more was going on than that my very imaginative little girl was being very creative to stretch her bedtime. What a time for me to take a stand! I was honestly trying to do the right thing, but the fact of the matter is, I just didn’t put all the pieces together like I would today. I still somehow believed that there was a logical explanation for all of it and that everything was okay.

     On the last night that Julie slept in her room, when she came downstairs and said that her toy phone was ringing, I took her back up the stairs myself.  I put her into the bed that was against the wall right where it should be, and I told her that she needed to go to sleep without coming back downstairs. I went to the toybox and looked at the phone sticking out from underneath all of the other toys.  I remember vividly that the handset was several inches away from the body where the ringer was and that it was attached to it by a coiled plastic red cord.  I pointed out that it wasn’t making any sounds. I told her that we weren’t going to do this anymore, and I asked her not to get out of bed again that evening. She cried and said that she didn’t want to stay in her room and begged me to let her go downstairs with me. I gave her a hug and kissed her good night, and I told her firmly to stay in bed. I was about halfway down the stairs when I heard the little toy phone ring.

     I actually froze in mid-step with one foot poised in the air above the step below. I heard the toy phone ring again, and somehow, I found myself turned around and going back to her room at warp speed. Julie was sitting up in her bed – a bed that was now out in the middle of the room (bear in mind that I had only been gone for about 10 seconds) and she was looking toward the toy box. The phone was sitting on top of the rest of the toys, and it was ringing at regular intervals, just like a real phone would do only with that tinny, little bell, toy phone ring. The receiver was sitting on the top of the phone, looking for all the world like a phone that was waiting to be answered.  Julie and I looked at each other for a moment, then we both looked over at the phone and then we looked back at each other again. She quietly held her hands up and out to me. I picked her up and backed to the doorway while the phone continued to ring. I had the craziest notion to go over and answer it even in the midst of my fear, but I turned around, went to Marie’s room, scooped her out of bed and carried them both downstairs. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I noticed that I couldn’t hear the little phone anymore.

     All of us slept in my bed that night. I should say that the girls slept, because I don’t think I closed my eyes. I was terrified by what had happened and horrified that I had sent Julie back up to that room night after night. The guilt that I have felt about that over the years would be enough to buy a therapist a new yacht. Marie had said nothing about anything strange going on in her room, but I knew that the plant experience had shaken her, and the thought of both of them being up there with whatever was going on in Julie’s room made me feel sick. I held on to them all night.

     The next day I called my friend, Robert, who had just gotten out of the Marines.  I felt a little sheepish being afraid to go upstairs in the daylight, but I was, and I asked him if he would come over and help me while I moved the girls’ clothes and other necessities downstairs. I told him exactly what had happened, and he was a good enough friend not to question my story. The girls stayed downstairs in the living room while we worked. I had made the decision that they wouldn’t be going upstairs again for any reason, ever, and they didn’t seem to have any desire to do so. They moved into my room with me.  We left all of the toys upstairs where they were. 

     While I was cleaning out their dressers, it was quiet in their rooms.  Nothing out of the ordinary happened, but the atmosphere felt odd. Charged. Dense. I was scared half out of my mind even with the sun shining and I was shoving things into boxes as fast I could, not caring what belonged to who. Robert had been looking around and he asked me if there had been any strange occurrences in Marie’s room. When I said no, he showed me a place in her room where he thought there might be a hidden space. He had noticed some differences in the wall texture and paint color there, and if you stuck your head out her open window, you could see what looked like a closet sized room that showed on the outside of the house, but that was apparently plastered over on the inside. You couldn’t tell from the inside that there should be a room there, but when we knocked on the wall you could hear that it was hollow. I had never noticed it in all of the months that we had lived there, but after we went back downstairs, I went outside to look and sure enough, you could clearly see it jutting out from the side of the house. I called the landlord and asked him about it, but he had only had the house for a few years and didn’t know anything about it. He didn’t ask me why I wanted to know.

     I was so unnerved by this whole experience that when Robert asked me if I would like him to sleep over on the couch for a few nights, I gratefully said yes. I was so tired from being up the night before that I fell asleep right away but woke up suddenly when I heard a loud bang somewhere in the house. I went out to the living room and Robert was awake, looking at the ceiling. “Did you hear that?” he asked.  Before I could answer we heard what sounded like something heavy being dragged across the floor upstairs followed by another loud bang. As an experienced investigator now, I have heard lots of loud sounds in haunted locations, and I recognize the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floors of empty rooms above me but that sound that night is the loudest paranormal bang that I have ever heard.  Maybe because it was the first time.  Maybe because it was my home. Maybe it was because I was so terrified.  Maybe it was because I knew no one was up there and it sounded like an M-80 had exploded on the second floor. Today, I would be the first one up the stairs, a fearless investigator looking for answers, but not then. Robert jumped off the couch and took the stairs two at a time.  I just stood there shaking.  He came back a few minutes later and said that he couldn’t see anything out of place, but even as he was telling me that we heard new banging sounds coming from the second floor.

     Robert slept on our couch every night after that until we moved out a few weeks later.  He kept trying to find out what was going on, but every time he went upstairs the noises stopped, and he finally gave up. He wanted to drill a small hole in the secret room and take a look inside, but I said no. Not just because it wasn’t my house, but because I had a feeling it was sealed for a reason.

     On moving day, Robert threw the toy phone away for me. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. The girls and I moved into a one-story house, where I could easily see into every corner, and I let them sleep with me whenever they wanted to. We got a dog, which made me feel better, but it wasn’t until they were older that I truly felt easy about them sleeping in their own beds again. The memory of what happened eventually faded away for them, but it has stayed with me. I wasn’t the experienced ghost hunter then that I am now. I was just a scared mom who made some poor decisions in the face of a paranormal event that really frightened my children. I wish that I had believed my daughter sooner. I am so grateful that, as she told me later, she never answered that phone.

     About a year after we moved out, I heard that our haunted house had burned down.  I was in that section of town shortly after that and decided to drive by. Nothing had been touched since the fire. The house was a blackened shell. The front porch, the bay windows, the first and second stories were all gone. The only part of it left standing, untouched by the fire, was the secret room that Robert had discovered and a portion of the first story below that was supporting it. There was no damage to the room that I could see. It still looked completely sealed and intact, standing tall, all by itself in the ruins.  I have often wondered what they found inside and what happened, and to whom, when they took it down. 

     There is a post-script to this story. Last year I had several sessions of physical therapy for a sports injury. One day, I don’t remember why, my therapist and I began to talk about haunted houses, and I told her some of the story of the haunted house that we had lived in. She was fascinated and asked me what neighborhood it was in, and for some reason, I told her the complete address. She looked at me with utter astonishment. “You have got to be kidding!” she said. “That is my address!” A new house had been built on the site after the old one burned down, and she and her husband were the first owners. She told me that it had taken many years for their house to be built because there were all sort of problems that had repeatedly stopped construction. She didn’t go into detail about what those were, but she did say that there had never been any odd occurrences at her house, and I said that I was very glad to hear that. She wanted to hear more of the story, but we were out of time and for the next several weeks we weren’t able to connect. Either she had to cancel, or I did, and I finally stopped going. After some time, I realized that I hadn’t wanted to share the whole story with her. I didn’t want to scare her, and it felt like it could have connected me back to that place in some way and I didn’t want that. I also had an intuitive sense that it was better not to awaken any energy there that finally seemed to have gone to sleep. Better for her not to even talk about what happened to us in her new house that was built where the old one stood.

     I did ask her if she had any children, and she said no. Her husband, though, is a collector of vintage toys. I didn’t have the chance to ask her before we parted ways, but I really hope that he doesn’t have any plastic toy phones in his collection.