I wrote this back in February when Keith Olbermann happened to mention on a broadcast that he had been reading Thurber to his father during the last weeks of Ted Olbermann’s life. Having said which, I’ve sort of got an affinity for the subject of this particular Thurber story. 😉
Nowadays the house at Number 77, Jefferson Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, where the hilariously eccentric family of the late humorist extraordinaire James Thurber (1894-1961) lived from 1913-1917, is maintained as a “literary center for readers and writers”. A number of his stories were inspired by events that happened while the family lived there, most notably “The Night the Ghost Got In” (1933). In that rollicking tale, he describes the events of November 17, 1915, when the family learned the house was haunted.
Thurber, the second of three sons, was a college junior that year, living at home with his parents, Charles and Mary Agnes (Mame), his two brothers, and—at that particular time—his grandfather, who was gradually declining into senility. His maternal grandmother refused to enter the house at all; it was wired for electricity, and the poor lady believed implicitly that electricity was dripping from all the sockets that were not in use. Charles Thurber, a fairly mild-mannered man, somewhat in the manner of his son’s famed daydreamer Walter Mitty, was a clerk for various Republican administrations who found himself unemployed quite often as the GOP went in and out of favor; Mame was a frustrated actress and born comedienne—traits Jamie, as the family called Thurber, exploited to the fullest in “The Night the Ghost Got In”.
On November 17, 1915, Charles Thurber and his eldest son, William, had gone to Indianapolis and were not expected home until late; Mame, Grandfather, and the youngest son, Robert, were already asleep. Jamie was taking a bath when he heard the sounds of a heavyset man downstairs. It sounded as if the man was walking around the dining room table. Jamie wrapped himself in a towel and woke his younger brother. The pair stood at the top of the stairs, listening as the steps became faster—and came out of the dining room and—YIKES!!–came running halfway up the stairs. They saw nothing; they only heard the steps.
The second floor hall had a door at the top of the staircase, which the brothers instinctively slammed. This served only to wake Mame. She came out of her room just in time to hear the steps as well, and concluded immediately that there was a burglar in the house. The boys didn’t bother to correct her. She decided they must call the police, then recalled that the phone was downstairs. Before the boys could stop her, she raced into her room, grabbed a shoe, raised a window, and hurled the shoe at the next-door neighbor’s bedroom window, which faced hers, shattering the glass into the proverbial million pieces. The neighbor, not unnaturally, came to the window in a state of high dudgeon; it took some minutes for Mame to explain to him that there was a burglar downstairs in the Thurber house, and that she needed him to call the police.
(According to Jamie, Mame had enjoyed tossing the shoe so much that he and his brother had the devil’s own time dissuading her from pitching its mate and shattering another window.)
Once the neighbor woke up fully and settled down enough to listen to Mame, he was cooperative enough; in very short order, Jamie recorded, no fewer than eight policemen arrived on the Thurbers’ doorstep. None of the family was willing to go downstairs to open the door, however; eventually the police smashed a beveled glass panel, reached in, and unlocked it, running into the house and up the stairs. A fired-up Mame excitedly informed them that there were two, or possibly three, burglars in the house, making the most dreadful racket. Jamie, meanwhile, belatedly remembered he was still clad only in a towel.
The police searched the first two floors, but found nobody who didn’t belong in the house; moreover, all the doors and windows were securely locked. They were about to leave when they heard sounds coming from Grandfather’s attic room. Before any of the Thurbers could tell them it was only the old man turning over in bed, the policemen thundered upstairs and threw open the door to his room.
To put it mildly, it was not one of Grandfather’s good nights; he had for some time been reliving his days as a Union soldier, and now, wakened from a sound sleep, he thought he was back at Gettysburg, and that the police were traitors—specifically, that they were deserting General Meade on the field of battle. The police realized, from Mame’s and Jamie’s expostulations, that this must be a family member; Grandfather, however, did not recognize the police. He gave them a dressing down, smacked one of them upside the head, and, as they were beating a hasty retreat, disarmed another and fired off a wild shot, winging one of the officers in the shoulder.
Fortunately, there were no other casualties, and in 1933, Jamie Thurber, by then a writer and cartoonist for the New Yorker, published the (embellished?) story in his fourth book, My Life and Hard Times.
As it happens, though, there is more to the story: i.e., the house was indeed haunted. Subsequent tenants had the same experience as the Thurbers, reporting sounds like a large man walking around the dining room table, then running up the stairs. Thurber himself did some research into the circumstances of the haunting which was reprinted in a publication called The Thurber Organ.
Thurber recorded that he paid a visit the following day to the corner drugstore; the pharmacist was local, and had been in the neighborhood for more than thirty years. Jamie had no sooner put his purposely vague question about “strange stories about the house” than the pharmacist put one of his own: “Didn’t you know about the steps that go around the dining room table and run up the stairs?”
Thurber dug deeper and learned that, some years before the Thurbers moved into Number 77 Jefferson Avenue, a man who lived in the house had committed suicide. He had, it seems, received an anonymous phone call one day while he was working; the caller told him that, if he would go home around ten in the morning, sneak into the house through the kitchen door and hide out in the dining room, he would hear his unfaithful wife on the phone, arranging her daily meeting with her lover. The husband had waited, his presence apparently unnoticed by his wife, until she left the house; then he had walked around the dining room table, sat down long enough to write a suicide note, then run headlong up the stairs to a second-floor bedroom, where he had blown his brains out. His adulterous wife apparently found him, and the suicide note detailing the phone call and his subsequent actions, when she came home.
There have been sporadic reports of paranormal activity—always those steps, and at least two unlucky residents actually reporting an apparition, once in an upstairs room, another time in a hall—right up to the present day. During the 1930s, the owner, an elderly lady, took in boarders, and insisted that at least one resident stay home with her every night; they obligingly took turns. Even now, when the Thurber House (restored in the 1980s to approximately the way it was during the Thurbers’ tenancy) hosts readings, houses a library dedicated to Thurber, and provides housing in an upstairs apartment for a Writer-in-Residence (each remains for a year), there are reports of footsteps and other sounds.
Just like the night the ghost got in.
Well, not quite. There doesn’t seem to have been a collection of characters as colorful as the Thurbers in residence since that night.
One would think they might have scared the ghost into leaving. Guess some ghosts just don’t scare easy.
Unfortunately, a complete text of “The Night the Ghost Got In” is not available online. More information about the story, and about Thurber House, can be found in Dolores Riccio and Joan Bingham’s 1989 book Haunted Houses USA; details of Thurber’s research into the haunting at Number 77 can be found in Chris Woodyard’s Haunted Ohio: Ghostly Tales from the Buckeye State (1991).
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