When our family moved into this house, it had been sitting unoccupied for several years. There were quite a few nice antiques in the house that were left by previous owners. Some of these are now at home in my house. During the summer of 1979, I was in the basement digging through some dark corners, under and old workbench that didn’t get used much, when I noticed a pretty good sized box. I pulled it out to find that it was full of old photos. Laying across the top was a large framed photograph of a little girl, maybe 4 years old, with a large bow in her hair. As I looked at the photo, a bit of a cold chill ran down my back. This girl looked somehow familiar to me, although I knew I had never met her.
I picked up the whole dirty, musty box of photos and carried them upstairs. The stairs to the basement came up into the kitchen, and my mom was working in there. I said to her, “Look what I just found in the basement!”
She looked at the photo of the little girl on top and without hesitation said, “Oh, that’s Diane, she lived in this house and she died here.”
I asked her how she knew that, and she didn’t know how, but she did. The rest of the photos in the box were of different people who I didn’t know, but I did recognize that some of them showed our house many years ago. Well, not long after this I had a dream. I don’t remember just what the dream was about, but Diane was in it. The interesting thing about the dream was that afterwards I was sure that Diane had been a character in my dreams before this.
It was just after this that my family started having little things happening around the house. We would hear footsteps where no one was, we would hear tapping on the windows, things like this. Then one evening, my older brother and I were home by ourselves. We were watching TV in the living room when we heard a loud POP! Come from the kitchen. We walked in there and found a red liquid running out from beside the refrigerator! Looking for the source of the liquid, we found that it was Big Red soda coming from an eight pack of bottles sitting there. Two of the bottles had somehow had the bottoms break completely off. This must have happened at the same time, because we only heard one POP!
I can’t say that a lot more happened concerning Diane until I started my first real job at a local restaurant. There was this elderly couple who would eat lunch there every day. The husband was a bit senile and didn’t have much to say, but the lady started talking to me one day, and before we were through, she had figured out who I was and told me that they lived in my house for many years. They were The Kaley’s, the people who my parents had bought the house from. I told her that I had a box full of old photographs that she would probably be interested in, so the following day, I took them to her.
The little girl’s photo was still on top of the box, so I asked Mrs. Kaley who it was. She told me that it was their daughter Diane, and that she had died of pneumonia not too long after that photo was taken. Then she told me that she died in her room, which was the same room as my bedroom! Mrs. Kaley didn’t seem all that interested in the photos, but she took them anyway. I told her that if there were any that she did not want to keep, could I have them back, and she said yes.
Several months went by after this, so one day I asked Mrs. Kaley about the photos. She told me that her husband had seen them sitting on the table and thought it was trash, so he took them outside and burned them. However, I was in my early years of taking photographs around this time and had set up my own darkroom in the basement (actually in the room that the photos were found in). I, for some reason, had used Diane’s photo to experiment with and had made a negative of it and was able to print a new copy of it, which I will now show you.
