Boo Hinkley

Recently my daughter, Joanna, shared a link on my Facebook wall, "New Ghost Tour Hits Covington Haunts." She posted,

"You might be interested in this, although you must promise not to tell me anything about it, or ever mention it in my presence. :)"

American Legacy Tours, a local company, was kicking off a new tour showcasing the haunted side of the Licking River Historic District. Which is where I live, and where Joanna grew up from age 16 until she moved out at age 21. Joanna thinks our house is haunted. Naturally, she doesn't actually want to think about it at all, especially when she comes to visit me. So while she believes this tour would interest me, she has no desire to attend it, hear anything about it, or even know that I attended it.

In 2001 I bought this turn of the century house in this beautiful neighborhood that has been described as being "reminiscent of Charleston or Savannah." I started restoring it, room by room. When we moved in, Joanna had chosen the bedroom in the very top of the house, an attic bedroom where we had decided that, back in the day, the maids had lived. There was a second staircase in the back of the house, one level leading to the attic from the second floor and another directly under it leading from the second floor down to the kitchen. The staircase the maids would have used.

It all started one day when Joanna was home from college (she was a day commuter) in between classes. It was afternoon and she was sitting in the kitchen, having just eaten a late lunch. All was quiet as she sat on a high stool studying at the island table in the middle of the room. Suddenly she heard a loud whisper, "Joanna!" coming from the direction of the back stairwell, not 10 feet away. Her immediate thought was that it was her brother Paul, but instantly remembered that he was in school (Paul is younger and was in high school at the time). The next second, she realized she was indeed very alone. This had not been the distant hiss of the furnace, the hum of the refrigerator, or a sound from the neighbors next door. She was sure it was a voice, a loud whisper, a calling of her own name in this empty house.

Her heart pounding, she stood up, grabbed her purse, her car keys, and her half-finished can of coke, and left the house. She would hang out somewhere else until it was time for her evening class. She would even go to work! (Joanna worked for her father.) Anything was better than staying in that house. Her father told her later as she was leaving work that she could come back anytime she got "scared at Mom's house!"

Joanna told me what happened later on. I surmised that perhaps one day a long time ago, a maid had tripped down the stairs while carrying a load of laundry, or an armful of cleaning supplies. I pointed out that I had almost done that myself once, and commented on the steepness and relative slipperiness of the steps. This poor maid, I ventured, had fallen to her death at the bottom of the steps, perhaps breaking her neck. Ever since, she had been a lost spirit caught in the stairwell, fated to haunt it as a ghost forever more. This would account, I continued, for how cold and drafty it is in that passage. Actually I know that it is cold and drafty in that passage because it is located on an outside wall with no heating vents nearby, and it acts as a sort of cold air return.

You might think this girl has a lively imagination, and is predisposed to jump to unlikely solutions and preternatural causes of sounds in the house. Let me just say, it could possibly be due to her own mother's vivid imagination. For I used to tease my children mercilessly with haunts, spirits, witches and ghost stories.

One day, about a month after moving in, I heard on the news that a fisherman had drown in the Licking River near the bridge to Newport. The bridge is five houses away. The story reported the facts: it was past midnight, two fishermen were fishing from a boat, they had been drinking, one decides for whatever reason to jump into the water, finds that he can't really swim, or is too drunk to swim, the other is too inebriated to save him, and he drowns.

After a respectful two minutes of feeling sorry, I immediately dismiss the tragedy and practically rub my hands together with glee. I cannot wait to tease the kids. At dinner I relate the story to them and end with my own epilogue. The fisherman's name was Boo Hinckley and having violently met his demise practically in our own backyard, he will most probably haunt our house, our yard, or at the very least the riverbank at the bottom of the yard. They look at me with big eyes, then each other, then solemnly down at their plates for a few moments, until the younger one looks up with defiance in his eyes and says, "Huh uh, Mom, you're just teasing!" He spears a piece of meat with his fork and puts it in his mouth, then adds, "You're just trying to scare us. You know there's no such thing as ghosts!" More denial than bravado, I think.

Keep in mind that my two children both skipped two years of grade school upon entering their high school where this was a normal turn of events. So they were only 14 and 16 at the time.

A few weeks later, Paul and I were home at night, and Joanna was gone for the evening. I am the piano accompanist for a church choir and had to attend a rehearsal. Before I left, I stopped in Paul's bedroom where he was doing homework to make sure he would be okay for a few hours and say goodbye. I sat on the edge of his bed and enumerated my usual instructions: Keep the doors locked, don't answer the door, don't answer the phone, don't leave the house, call the church if you need anything. His eyes didn't leave the four-inch thick American Literature book he was reading as he automatically answered, "okay" to each bidding.

I looked at him quietly for a few moments and then glanced around his room. It was then that I noticed the caked mud on the carpet, with red hair embedded in it.

"Paul, where did that come from?" I demanded, hating dirt of any kind tracked into the house.

Paul glanced at the mud, obviously noting it for the first time. "I dunno. What is it?" Back to his story. Probably Edgar Allen Poe.

Then I remembered that I had recently cut Paul's hair outside. And it had since rained. He had probably been out in the yard, stepped through the mud and his own hair trimmings and then brought it all into the house. I gasped out loud, eyes riveted on the mud. That got his attention and he finally looked up from his text book.

"Well it's mud! With red hair in it!" I point out the hair in the dried crumbles of mud and looked up at him, my eyes wide with fear. "Boo Hinckley had red hair! Hair just like yours! I think Boo Hinckley was in your room!"

I knew that at any moment Paul would put two and two together and realize that the hair in the mud was, in fact, his own hair, and that he himself had brought it into the house on his own shoes. But no. Paul just stared at it for a few seconds and then looked up, waiting for me to say, "Just kidding!" And when I didn't, he did instead. "Huh uh, Mom, you're just kidding! You're just trying to scare me!"

I shrugged and said, "I don't know! What else could it be?" I could think of many other things it could be, least of all a dead man's hair clippings in some mud from our yard. As I thought Paul would think as well. But I left it hanging and just turned and left the room saying, "Finish your homework before video games."

I returned to a quiet house. I called Paul's name and heard a muffled answer from upstairs. I went to his bedroom and looked in and saw him huddled in a fetal position on his bed under his blankets.

"Paul, what's wrong!?" I thought he was sick. I rushed in, sat on the edge of the bed, and pulled back the covers from around his face. "What's the matter, are you not feeling well?" He was practically in tears.

I waited for him to answer, all the while my own fear mounting. "What's wrong?" I felt his forehead. "Did something happen while I was gone?" He clearly looked like he'd seen a ghost.

"I kept hearing these sounds downstairs. They were like clicks. And they would come and go. And I thought someone was in the house! But I was too scared to go and look. 'Cause of Boo Hinckley!"

I thought, "Kept hearing clicks? What on earth . . . " Then I remembered. My metronome, a device that tocks like a clock and is used for keeping a strict tempo while practicing music, was downstairs on the piano. It was old, left over from my college days at the music conservatory, and was a wind-up version, like you would wind a music box. Earlier in the day I was using it and found that it had been wound too tightly. In an attempt to get it "unstuck", I had left it on, knowing that it would stop and start until it unwound itself completely. It unwound itself for awhile, but then stopped altogether through the dinner hour and until I left the house. And then, almost diabolically, it waited until Paul was alone in the silent house to continue.

I felt so bad! I told Paul that it was only the metronome and tried to explain to him what had happened. He just kept mumbling about clicks and dead fishermen and mud on his carpet. I insisted over and over that I was just kidding and pointed out that it was his own hair in the mud on the carpet. Eventually he straightened up, sat up and got ready for bed. I think I must have offered him a nighttime snack of popcorn and coke or cookies and milk to make up for it all and get him feeling back to normal again. But he wasn't interested!

"Boo Hinckley?" my sister asked a few days later, when I was sheepishly retelling the tale. "Why 'Boo Hinckley', that wasn't really the fisherman's name, was it?"

"No, of course not," I said, "I forget the fisherman's real name. 'Boo' is for Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird. And Hinckley is the name of that guy who shot Reagan, remember?

She just looked at me shaking her head. "You are such a mean mother, how could you traumatize your own children like that?" But she was laughing too.

That Christmas season I decorated the outside of the house in real Victorian style with swags of greenery and white lights from the eaves of the front porch. It looked so pretty from the street with the Christmas tree twinkling in the front window. Then I looked in dismay at the rest of the street. No one else decorated outside! Not one neighbor. Except the building across the street and down one. It was an even bigger fancier Victorian house, but attorneys had turned it into a law office. There was one solemn little string of lights way up in the window of the third-floor attic. This attic room was next to a tower room, which always had a bright light burning in it at night.

One evening my children and I were walking out to the car. I commented on how none of our neighbors hung lights outside. Joanna, who would celebrate Christmas year round if she could, said in disgust, "I know! You would think that with all of these pretty houses people would want to decorate them. And no one does, except that one with the odd straight string of lights up in that window!"

"Oh, don't you know about those lights up there?" I asked. "There's a story behind that."

"No, what?" they both asked.

"Well, you know that's a law firm, right? It seems there is this little retarded boy who accidentally shot his parents and killed them. So the attorneys thought instead of locking him up in juvenile detention, since he's mentally retarded, they would keep him there instead. See the light in the tower room? That's where his nurse stays. So I guess she thought it would be nice if he had a little Christmas decoration. Even if it is pathetic."

"Nuh uh, Mom! You're just making that up, that's not really true!" said Paul, always the more vocal.

"No, it is true! Why would I make up a story like that?"

Because you are an evil mother. Because you are always making up frightening tales to spook your children silly. Because you are so cruel that you delight in scaring them half to death. Lots of reasons. But instead Joanna, nowadays a research analyst, wanted facts and reliable sources.

"How do you know there's a little boy up there? Who told you?"

Without missing a beat, I replied, "Tom Schneider did."

This shut them up. Tom Schneider is a friend of mine who had been a Covington Criminal Detective and now was a US Marshall at the federal courthouse across town. He knew everything there was to know about the legal goings-on around Covington.

But Paul, who not so long ago had been hoodwinked by the Boo Hinckley tale, caught up to me as Joanna lingered and stared up at the dark window with its feeble little string of lights.

"Mom, you're really just spooking us again, aren't you?" he pleaded.

I smiled, "Yes, Paul. It's not really true, I just made it up."

But we left Joanna in the dark. Until a few days later when I noticed that every time we walked past the house, she would glance up at the window as if hoping to catch a glimpse of this pitiful little boy, locked in an attic room with a nurse in attendance, with who knew what kind of future in store for him. Or maybe she was making sure that she never saw him, thereby supporting her own theory that Mom was once again just trying to scare the living daylights out of her.

"Joanna, that story about the little boy, you know? It's not really true, I just made it up, " I confessed.

"Mom! Why do you do that!?" she was actually mad. "I really believed you when you mentioned that about Tom Schneider!"

"I know, I'm sorry." I really was.

Months later I was in a Bar & Grill with a bunch of friends comparing ghost stories. I told everyone that my kids were afraid of ghosts. Then I related some of the stories. They all laughed, but one man said emphatically, "Well, no wonder they're scared when they have Lizzie Borden for a mother!"

A few years later, I was reading the October issue of "Old House Journal" magazine and saw with delight that it had a section devoted to readers' accounts of their own ghost stories from their own old house experiences. It was before dinner and both Joanna and Paul were home, so I thought it would be great fun to entertain us all by reading the stories aloud. Of course I did.

I read through four or five and everyone seemed to be enjoying them so I started the next.

"Dear OHJ, we live in Youngstown, Ohio, and own a turn of the century four square design house located in town. It is red brick with a front porch and some stained glass in the front. The interior has hard wood floors, ceramic fireplaces, and has two staircases, one in the front of the house and one that goes down into the kitchen."

"STOP!" says Joanna suddenly. "Don't read anymore!"

"But why? This sounds exactly like our house! It will be fun!"

"I know it sounds like our house! That's my point! Remember the maid? And the back staircase? Don't read any more, I won't listen! Put it away!!"

Of course I was more curious then ever to find out what happened on this couple's back stairwell. But seeing the fright in Joanna's face, I quietly turned the page and asked if it was okay to go on with a different story.

"You and Paul can if you want. But I don't want to hear any more."

"Okay, here is one from Maine. Far, far away, I'll read that one."

I started in on the next story and was only mildly surprised when Joanna stood up and left the kitchen. I'm sure she didn't go to her attic bedroom. Or even Paul's room which faced the attic stairwell. I'm not sure where she went.

She probably went to work.