“Was it a tall man?” asked the old woman. “Pretty tall,” my mother answered. “He had a hat and a coat on, with a belt around the waist.”

“Do you know who that was? It was the man who used to live here,” the old woman said. She said it was a man who had been dead a long time. People had bought the house from him but they had not paid him all the money they owed him for it. Then they sold it to us, but they didn’t tell us about the money they still owed.

Problems

We started having problems as soon as we moved in. The first morning we woke up there, we couldn’t open the doors or windows to get out. They seemed to be locked or stuck. A girl going to school was coming for my sisters and she came right in with no trouble! That was our first morning there.

After that my father hurt himself and he couldn’t work. Not long after that my mother died in childbirth. She was only forty-one. By then I was sixteen.

Then the problems really started.

It would come at noon and then at midnight. You could hear it walk upstairs. It would come to the door at the top of the stairs and stop a while. At midnight the same thing would happen. My brothers and sisters were so scared they wouldn’t even go to get a drink in the porch where we kept our water bucket. But I wasn’t scared. I’d go in the porch, have a drink and come back saying, “Damn, that’s good water!”