The Dream Catcher

“…He heard the footsteps make their nightly path up the stairs. This time the footsteps stopped just short his door. Instead of following their usual route, he heard angry stomping and screaming as the footstep descended into the basement…”

In the late 1990s, Wilmer moved into a duplex in Eastern Washington state with his friend and her daughter. “Just around the time when the movie ‘The Blair Witch Project’ hit the theaters,” he told me.

 

The first months after moving in were peaceful. But after two, he started to hear heavy footsteps, made by boots that only a man would wear, come from the basement. They would continue up to the first level and go further up to the upper floor where the bedrooms were. The footsteps would come up to his door, when it would open, and continue to the adjacent room where his roommate’s daughter slept.

 

At first he thought that his roommate was checking up on her daughter since her schedule had her working late into the night. One night, however, Wilmer would find out that it was not his roommate. She had the night off and was fast asleep. Regardless, he heard the footsteps make their nightly trek through the house like clockwork.

I was surprised that Wilmer was not bothered by this phenomenon. He was and is a believer in the spirit world and thought whoever it was caused little to no harm.

 

For Christmas that year Wilmer received a dream catcher. Dream catchers originated with the Ojibwa nation of southern Canada and mid-western US. They are also known as the Chippewa. Later, dream catchers spread among the other Native American peoples. Dream catchers are a talismans, used to grant a good night’s rest full of wonderful dreams. It is in the shape of a hoop of willow wrapped in leather and decorated with sacred items such as feathers and beads. Inside the hoop is a web where good dreams get caught and are passed down to the person sleeping. Nightmares, on the other hand, pass through the holes. According to tradition, the owner places the dream catcher above the head of the bed.

 

Wilmer had kept his dream catcher at the head of his bed. But one day, he decided to hang it behind his bedroom door. That night, he once again heard the footsteps make their nightly path up the stairs. Yet, this time the footsteps stopped just short his door. Instead of following their usual route, he heard angry stomping and screaming as the footstep descended back into the basement whence they came.

 

The basement was finished but furnished. Since Wilmer grew up sleeping in basement that was haunted, he avoided going to that level of the house unless it was necessary. It was always eerie and the nearest light switch was in the middle of the space. He always felt uncomfortable, and the air was always “thick” as he put it. His roommate didn’t seem to have a problem with the space. She wasn’t the least bit bothered when she did laundry or needed to retrieve something to bring upstairs. Her opinion would change one night, however.

 

Wilmer came home to find her young daughter, just a toddler, crying at the top of the stairs going into the basement. The little girl, barely able to speak, kept crying “Mommy! Mommy!” Her mother had fallen down the steps. As he helped her to her feet, she told him that she had somehow became light-headed and lost her balance. But something had prevented her from going all the way to the bottom. When they turned on the lights, they were horrified to find bruises on her arm in the shape of an adult hand! Did the spirit of the footsteps drag her down? Or, did they stop her from having a bad fall?

 

Wilmer and his roommate soon began to “understand” the motives of the spirit. When it came to Wilmer’s roommate or her little girl, the spirit felt protective. On the other hand, when it came to Wilmer, it had a different disposition: the spirit was antagonistic feeling and spiteful. Yet, it never attacked him.

 

Determined to find out the identity of the spirit and its attachment to the house or the property, his roommate and a friend conducted a séance. Since the spirit disliked Wilmer, he stayed in a different part of the house playing with little girl. What they were able to learn was that it was the spirit of a man who had died in the house or on the property. He was protecting both his roommate and her child, demonstrated when Wilmer’s roommate fell. But he extremely disliked the presence of men. As soon Wilmer came into the room asking something of his roommate while they were still communicating with the spirit, they immediately lost the “connection”. From that point the spirit refused to communicate until Wilmer left the room.

 

One year later, after coming home one cold evening, Wilmer’s roommate found three of her parakeets dead in their cage. The room they were in was freezing. The fourth one was missing.

 

“How could that be?” she thought. “The heater’s been on all this time! Where’s the other one?”

 

They searched throughout the house when a loud crash brought them down to the basement. When they didn’t find the source of the noise, they returned to the room where the birds were to find that the fourth one was alive and back inside the cage.

 

Wilmer stayed in that house for another year before moving to Seattle. But he would never forget that house.