Springfield, Illinois, for instance. Their names are Gertrude and Russell Meyers and they were married in 1935. He worked as a stereotyper on the local newspaper, and she was a high-school teacher. Both of them were in their late twenties and couldn’t care less about such things as ghosts.
At the time of their marriage, they had rented a five-room cottage which had stood empty for some time. It had no particular distinction but a modest price, and was located in Bloomington where the Meyerses then lived.
Gertrude Meyers came from a farm background and had studied at Illinois Wesleyan as well as the University of Chicago. For a while she worked as a newspaperwoman in Detroit, later taught school, and as a sideline has written a number of children’s books. Her husband Russell, also of farm background, attended Illinois State Normal University at Normal, Illinois, and later took his apprenticeship at the Bloomington Pantograph.
The house they had rented in Bloomington was exactly like the house next to it; the current owners had converted what was formerly one large house into two separate units, laying a driveway between them.
In the summer, after they had moved into their house, they went about the business of settling down to a routine. Since her husband worked the night shift on the newspaper, Mrs. Meyers was often left alone in the house. At first, it did not bother her at all. Sounds from the street penetrated into the house and gave her a feeling of people nearby. But when the chill of autumn set in and the windows had to be closed to keep it out, she became aware, gradually, that she was not really alone.
One particular night early in their occupancy of the house, she had gone to bed leaving her bedroom door ajar. It was 10:30 and she was just about ready to go to sleep when she heard rapid, firm footsteps starting at the front door, inside the house, and coming through the living room, the dining room, and finally coming down the hall leading to her bedroom door.
She leapt out of bed and locked the door. Then she went back into bed and sat there, wondering with sheer terror what the intruder would do. But nobody came.
More to calm herself than because she really believed it, Mrs. Meyers convinced herself that she must have been mistaken about those footsteps.
It was probably someone in the street. With this reassuring thought on her mind, she managed to fall asleep.
The next morning, she did not tell her new husband about the nocturnal event. After all, she did not want him to think he had married a strange woman!
But the footsteps returned, night after night, always at the same time and always stopping abruptly at her bedroom door, which, needless to say, she kept locked.
Rather than facing her husband with the allegation that they had rented a haunted house, she bravely decided to face the intruder and find out what this was all about. One night she deliberately waited for the now familiar brisk footfalls. The clock struck 10:00, then 10:30. In the quiet of the night, she could hear her heart pounding in her chest.
Then the footsteps came, closer and closer, until they got to her bedroom door. At this moment, Mrs. Meyers jumped out of bed, snapped on the light, and tore the door wide open.
There was nobody there, and no retreating footsteps could be heard.
She tried it again and again, but the invisible intruder never showed himself once the door was opened.
The winter was bitterly cold, and Russell was in the habit of building up a fire in the furnace in the basement when he came home from work at 3:30 A.M. Mrs. Meyers always heard him come in, but did not get up. One night he left the basement, came into the bedroom and said, “Why are you walking around this freezing house in the middle of the night?”
Of course she had not been out of bed all night, and told him as much. Then they discovered that he, too, had heard footsteps, but had thought it was his wife walking restlessly about the house. Meyers had heard the steps whenever he was fixing the furnace in the basement, but by the time he got upstairs they had ceased.
When Mrs. Meyers had to get up early to go to her classes, her husband would stay in the house sleeping late. On many days he would hear someone walking about the house and