Night Stalks The Mansion: A True Story Of One Family's Ghostly Adventure by Constance Westbie, Harold Cameron Page A

the door open and had heard footsteps. She had
felt a person stand very near and hadn't heard that person
leave. She dropped the iron and went screeching through
the house in search of Dorothy who had been upstairs for
the last half-hour giving Michael his bath.
    "Mrs. Cameron!" Ellen gasped. "Who's downstairs in the
dining room?"
    Dorothy recognized another crisis. She put Michael down
in his crib and handed him a bottle of orange juice.
    "Come on, Ellen," she said resignedly. "I want to talk
to you."
    Downstairs Dorothy retrieved the iron and noted that the
room was empty and the library door closed. Then she took
Ellen into the kitchen and poured two cups of coffee. Feeling that she had established a good rapport, she sat down
opposite Ellen at the breakfast table and began to explain
about old houses.
    "Sometimes certain things happen in old houses that are
hard to understand, Ellen. The mansion is one of those
places. You are perfectly safe here and you must just ignore
certain things that happen-just as the rest of us do. No
one has ever been hurt. We all love you very much and want
you to be happy with us."

    Her effort failed miserably.
    "I'm sorry, Mrs. Cameron," Ellen said firmly as she pushed
her untouched coffee away. "I'm quittin' right now. I like
you and the mister fine and the work isn't that hard ... but
those certain things you talk about will just have to happen
here without me!"
    And that was that!
    We finally started in on agencies in Philadelphia and
after a while there was no one "suitable" on their lists, either.
Our reputation-or the mansion's reputation to be exactseemed to go before us but it did nothing to brighten our
path. The answers given by servants to repeated inquiries
were always the same and usually evasive. Yes, they liked
Mr. and Mrs. Cameron just fine. No, the children weren't
any trouble. But they just didn't think the house was "right."
    About this time there was to be a Fourth of July parade
in Wynne. The boys were doing dishes so Dorothy could get
Janet and Michael down at a proper hour.
    "You know," Bob observed. "We don't have to go to town
to see a parade. All we have to do is to stand here and watch
our own-the parade of servants coming and going."
    Hal agreed. "It's like an army. They march in right smart
but they sure break ranks when they leave. You'd think this
house was a bridge."
    I had come into the kitchen in time to hear this exchange.
"Maybe it is," I put in thoughtfully, "a bridge between two
worlds."
    I really meant that. I was convinced that there was another level of consciousness or activity of some kind that
occupied the same space we did and even penetrated it.
Certainly there was an interplay of some sort; an unexplained juxtaposition between entities in physical bodies
and those in astral form. Why it was particularly noticeable
in our location, I simply did not know.
    I was finally driven to try a different approach. There was a handsome, strong, young man at the warehouse who
had just left the Marines. He was newly married and I knew
the generous salary I was prepared to offer him would be
attractive and probably needed. I decided to level with him.

    "Look, Saml" I said earnestly. "You're an ex-Marine and
you aren't afraid of anything on earth. You can't be scared
by old wives' tales. We have been living in our house for
several months now and we don't pay any attention to odd
noises and creakings and things like that."
    Sam looked interested and I went on persuasively. "I've
got a four-year-old daughter. Nothing has ever frightened
her. Certainly if a child can live happily in that house, you
and Margo can. You're a grown man of proven intelligence.
You even got medals for bravery. How about you and
Margo taking on this job for me as a personal favor? I'll pay
you a lot more than you're getting here -and the work isn't
as hard."
    I was putting on the pressure and I knew it might be a
little unfair. If Sam