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Michael stood up in his crib and stretched out his arms.
“Bird. Nice bird. Here bird.” Then he began to cry.
Karen rushed in to see if there was anything wrong with her son. Usually by now he would be fast asleep. Tonight, however, she had heard him on the baby monitor, talking and crying. She picked him up and cuddled him in her arms, rubbing his back.
“What’s wrong, Michael? Mommy’s here. Did you have a bad dream?”
“No,” Michael said through his sobs, “bird gone. Wanna play with bird.”
“There is no bird here, sweetie. You must have been dreaming.”
“NO,” Michael said emphatically, shaking his head. “Bird here. Bird gone now.”
Karen rocked her son until his sobs quit and he drifted off to sleep. She laid him gently in the crib and tiptoed out of the room.
“What’s the matter, honey?” her sleepy husband asked as Karen slid under the covers. “Did Michael have another one of his dreams?”
“Yes, he keeps insisting he sees a bird in his room. He says he wants to play with the bird, but it disappears. As nearly as I could figure, the ‘bird’ goes through the wall.”
This same scene had been repeated for nearly two weeks now, every night. The Harrison family had moved into the upper apartment of this old Victorian home just a month ago, and strange things had been happening since their first night. They weren’t big things – just lights turned on after Karen or Bill had turned them off earlier. Or a door open that had been closed. They just chalked it all up to momentary forgetfulness – until the incidents with Michael and the bird.
Before they went back to sleep, Karen decided that the next day she would call her friend Melinda, who had lived in the apartment before the Harrisons. Maybe Melinda could shed some light on the strange goings-on.
After she awoke the next morning and was frying bacon, she heard Michael stirring in his bed. “Thank God for this baby monitor,” she laughed. “I don’t have to run back and forth to his room since I can hear him plainly wherever I am.” Her senses became more alert just then, as she heard Michael talking to the bird again. Turning the fire down, she moved as silently as possible down the hall to Michael’s bedroom. There on the wall was what she could only describe as a shadow, although no light in the room could have produced such a shadow. The figure was a huge bird with what she guessed to be about an eight-foot wingspan. Its head was turned to one side, but it was not a bird head. It looked, instead, like the profile of a gargoyle.
“Bird, Mommy, bird,” Michael said, pointing to the wall. “See, Mommy, big bird.”
“Yes, honey, I see the bird,” Karen said, frozen to the spot. As she watched, the bird-shadow slowly disappeared into the wall. She walked over to the crib, took Michael in her arms, and walked out the door, shaking her head as if to eliminate the sight from her mind.
Back in the kitchen, she put Michael in his high chair, drained the bacon, and began scrambling eggs. She looked up as Bill entered the room. “I’m glad you’re up, honey. Michael and I saw his bird this morning.”
“I think you’re just overworked,” he answered. “Maybe I should start getting up with Michael in the night. Sit down and I’ll finish breakfast.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Karen said, somewhat crossly. “I know what I saw, and it’s just what Michael tried to tell us.” She explained what she had seen, ending with her shock when the bird indeed seemed to disappear into the wall. “I’m going to call Melinda this morning and see if she had similar experiences when she lived here.”
After Bill had left for work and Michael was happily playing in the playpen, Karen dialed Melinda’s number.
“Melinda, hi. This is Karen. Fine. How about you and your family?” With the pleasantries out of the way, Karen moved to the subject of the bird.
“Did you or your family ever have any strange experiences while you were living here?”
She listened intently, nodding every now and then. When Melinda had finished, Karen asked, “Did you ever see the bird yourself? I saw it this morning. Until then, I thought Michael was just having a dream or playing a pretend game.
“Thank you for the information. I was beginning to think I’d lost my mind,” Karen laughed. “Just tell your friend to call me. I’ll be very interested in what he has to say. Bye.”
Karen sat at the kitchen table, deep in thought. Melinda had definitely shed some light on the mysterious bird. Not only that, she knew a man who believed in the paranormal and had done some research on the bird. For now, she felt confident that, whatever this bird was, it was a benevolent “ghost.”
Two hours later, the phone rang. “Hello,” said a deep male voice, “this is Parker Newsom. Melinda Carter gave me your number. She said you have seen the bird in your apartment. I’d like to get together with you to share the research I have been doing on it. Would this evening be convenient?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Newsom. It’s a little unnerving to know that our home is haunted. We look forward to meeting you. Until tonight, then.”
Karen spent the rest of the day playing with Michael, running errands, and preparing snacks for the meeting with Parker Newsom. When Bill came home, she told him about the visitor.
At 7:30, the doorbell rang and Bill opened it to admit a tall, graying man with a ready smile. “Hello,” he said, “I’m Parker Newsom. Please call me Parker.”
Bill introduced himself and Karen, and the three settled into comfortable chairs in the living room. Coffee cups in hand, they began to discuss the strange events.
“Your bird has been documented several times by families who lived here as long ago as 100 years,” Parker began. “The Harrisons, who are friends of mine, gave me some papers they found in the attic from earlier families who had lived here and kept notes on their sightings. They didn’t know what to call this creature, but all of them refer to it as a bird-like shadow with a head that didn’t look like a bird.
“Using those notes with their descriptions, I began to research the ‘creature.’ Although there is not much information available, I did find one book that dealt with faeries. That is as close as I could come to a classification. Faeries represent the four major elements – earth, wind, fire and water. They are sometimes referred to as ‘elemental creatures,’ to differentiate them from ‘ghosts,’ who were at one time human."
He paused for a moment to sip his coffee, then continued.
“We can assume the reasons behind certain hauntings. Someone died in the house and cannot rest. A soldier of the past searches for his lost love. But when it comes to other supernatural creatures, we have a more difficult time.
“It is more difficult to determine much about non-human ghosts. For the most part, they are benevolent, although there have been stories – or myths – written about elemental creatures. One such birdlike creature was the Piasa. The word Piasa means ‘bird which devours men’ and, while never real, has been recorded as legend in Illinois long before the white man settled the state. It was said there was once a rock painting of a fearsome bird with a face like an animal with sharp teeth, horns atop its head, sharp talons, a long tail and two huge wings.
“Your bird, however, has few of those characteristics, so we assume it to be benevolent. It appears quite often to children and seems to have an affinity for the young, almost as if it is watching over them,” Parker concluded.
"That is about all I can tell you. You might want to start keeping notes, especially when you see the bird or notice strange happenings.
"....and please," he added, "let me know if anything changes. I am very interested in this phenomenon."
The Harrisons accompanied him to the door and thanked him for all the information. They promised to keep in touch.
Long after their visitor had left, Karen and Bill sat talking about what they had learned. They no longer feared the strange noises or the shadow-bird that visited their son. They decided to keep a diary, so that the next family to occupy this haunted home would know even more about “the bird in the bedroom.”
Well, not for real……….just a virtual tour of some of the more interesting sites on ghostchasers, haunted places in Kansas, and other things that go bump in the night.
A word of caution first. The places listed in this column and on the various websites are private property, so if you should decide to explore, please get permission and do not trespass.
Probably the best website about haunted places in Kansas is http://www.theshadowlands.net/places/kansas.htm. The author has listed the places by town in alphabetical order. Here are just a few places near Wichita:
Wilner Auditorium on the WSU campus, the “backtrail” in Park City, the Broadview Hotel, Theorosa’s bridge north of Valley Center, the cemetery in Derby and the water tower in Bel Aire.
A little farther from here you’ll find hauntings in the Beaumont Hotel, the Devil’s Washboard and Jones Cemetery in Canton, the old salt mine in Lyons, The Cedars retirement home in McPherson, the Old Mill Plaza in Newton, and the court house and public library in Hutchinson.
While not as extensive, another good website is http://www.prairieghosts.com/hauntks.html. Or try http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~gtusa/state-list/kansas.htm, which is more of a listing of ghost towns than of haunted places.
For those who are interested in a more in-depth look at ghosts and haunted places, you can join one of the ghostchasing groups, whose websites are available. Some of these websites even have photographs of “ghosts” captured on film. The main group operating in Kansas is called Kansas Ghost Works and can be found at http://psinstitute.homestead.com/ksghostworks.html. Two other organizations of ghost hunters are in the Kansas City area: http://www.kcghost.com/ and http://kcagha.tripod.com/KCAGhostHunters.html.
Other sites are out there. Just go to www.dogpile.com or www.google.com or your favorite search engine, type in “Kansas ghosthunters” or “Kansas ghost stories” or “Kansas haunted places” and see what you can find. And……..happy ghosthunting!
While we’re on the subjects of ghosts and hauntings, you might want to look at this website: http://www.holidays.net/halloween/story.htm. It contains a lot of information about the background of Hallowe’en and some of the customs observed on this holiday.
BobbyCat......Sara and Mom.Sister Sue..Sara.Graham,Cindy,Cole..Claire..Nancy
