Читать книгу Arizona Ghost Stories - Antonio Boone's Garcez - Страница 8

My story about “El Coyote” took place just a couple of years ago. I have made sure not to tell many people about what happened in the house because, being a small village, the gossip gets around really quickly.

I used to rent and live in the house next to the one I now live in. I used to know the old woman who was the owner of the property. When I moved into the house next door, she and I began to talk, and we became very friendly with each other. Some mornings she and I would have coffee in my kitchen. She sure was a talker; she’d even give me a headache sometimes. She would talk to me about her son, who lived in Tucson, and I even got to meet him a few times before she died.

I recall that the first time I visited her, she showed me around the inside of her home. I noticed that one of her bedrooms had a door with nails hammered into the door’s frame. I cautiously asked her about this, because it was very strange to have a door nailed shut the way it was. Hanging on one of the nails was a small metal crucifix. Her explanation was that she had nailed the door shut because of “El Coyote.” I asked her, “Who was El Coyote?” She said he was a bad spirit that needed to be kept locked up. I thought to myself, “living by herself for so long has made this old woman go nuts.” I asked her why the spirit had the name of El Coyote. She said she had given it that name because although she had never really seen the spirit’s face, its body looked like a hairy, wild dog. By this time, I thought to myself that this poor woman needed to get out of the house more often and mingle with people—to be more social.

I didn’t think much more about the “friend” she kept locked up in the bedroom. I never heard any loud noises coming from her home, and after all, she was really sweet. One day, while she was at the post office, I walked to the rear of her house and looked inside the bedroom window where she kept El Coyote locked up. I didn’t know what I would expect to see. I peered between a narrow sliver of space between the two sheets that covered the window from the inside.

I saw a room without any furniture. It didn’t even have any rugs. “Poor old woman,” I thought, “She must have invented this ghost as her own personal friend.” I began to feel sorry for her because I myself have never married, and I know that sometimes it does get lonely. But there wasn’t anything unusual about the room, so I never mentioned it to her again.

Well, less than a year later, the woman spent Thanksgiving in Tucson with her son and his family. I know she was very happy because, after returning home, all she did was talk to me about how nice her visit had been.

Two days later, I paid her a visit to show her a large holiday greeting card that had arrived at my house. I knocked on her front door, and when she did not answer, I walked to the rear door, that was left unlocked, and walked inside. I immediately smelled gas. I took a few slow cautious steps into the house and kept calling her name. There was no answer. I got scared and quickly walked through the house. When I entered her bedroom, I found her lifeless body in bed. A flexible copper hose leading from the wall to her gas heater had developed a small hole that filled the small house with propane gas.

After her funeral, her son told me that he was going to sell his mother’s house. I asked him if he would sell it to me, and he agreed. I also asked him if he knew anything about the closed door that was nailed shut or about El Coyote. He said that his mother only mentioned El Coyote a few times but that he thought it was only a crazy idea his mother had made up.

After I bought the house, two friends who lived in the town of Nogales came to Arivaca to help me with repairs. I was overjoyed to finally own a house of my own. I began to remove old wallpaper and paint every wall. Of course, the first thing I did was to remove the nails on the bedroom door where El Coyote “lived.” During the repair work, I never noticed any strange noise or saw any ghost. Finally after a few weeks, the house was ready for me to move in.

After moving all my belongings into the house, I soon began to notice that the rear bedroom “El Coyote’s room,” was strangely very much colder than the rest of the house. At first I was not bothered by it, but soon I began to wonder. Sometimes it was so cold that I got goose bumps on my arms. Other times, it was like stepping outside into a cool night. I thought about what the old woman had told me, but then I figured that my imagination was working overtime.

As the weeks passed, things began to get worse. Day and night I began to see strange shadows all about the house. I don’t mean shadows shaped like a person—they were more like a large blanket that covered the wall! One afternoon, I was washing dishes, and I heard a strange voice. Because I was in the kitchen, I had the volume on the TV in the living room turned up high, so that I could listen to it between the rooms. I thought that perhaps the voice was coming from the television. Suddenly, I stopped washing the dishes when I felt a very strong feeling that someone was in the kitchen with me. I turned around to look behind. I spotted a huge black shadow—it covered the whole wall—move slowly, then quickly across the room and disappear into the hallway!

It couldn’t have been the shadow of a passing car because the kitchen is located in the rear of the house. A passing plane couldn’t have caused it either, because it would have to be flying level with the house. No, I immediately knew this was something that had to do with the spiritual world. Even though I was a bit shaken, I walked into the hallway and looked in the bathroom, closet, and the bedrooms. As soon as I entered the last bedroom, immediately the same cold feeling once again came over me. I knew I had to get out of there fast!

I closed the door behind me and left it closed until the following week, when I had someone pay me a visit. I had ordered a pair of new closet doors. Thee doors were delivered by a Nogales contractor who carried the new doors off his truck and into the bedroom. Everything was going fine. As the contractor was doing his job, I was in the living room watching television as the sound of his loud drilling was making noise. I remember walking to the bedroom and asking the contractor if he wanted some coffee. He said “no,” and I left him alone to finish the job of installing the doors.

Suddenly, I heard him yell, and as I began to rise off my chair, he came flying down the hallway and zoomed out the front door! I thought he had hurt himself, so I raced out the door to meet him at his truck, which was parked in the street. He was pale. He told me that “something” had taken hold of his arm. When he turned around he saw a very large man with angry eyes grabbing hold of his upper left arm. It took all the strength he had to free himself from the man’s grip!

The contractor did not know anything about the bedroom or the woman who had owned the house before I did. He was shaking. I myself was very concerned about spending any more nights or days in the house, with that “thing” walking about, but I volunteered to go back into the house and return with his tools. I softly prayed to myself as I walked into the bedroom, and I know God helped me because I did not see anything.

After the contractor had driven away, I walked back to the bedroom and placed a crucifix on the door and closed it. I decided to phone and to tell my cousin, that lives in the town just south of Arivaca, about what had happened. “If there is an angry spirit in the bedroom it must be protecting something. Why wouldn’t it want people in the bedroom?” she asked.

That weekend my cousin, her husband, Pablo, and a friend came to my house to investigate. We entered the bedroom and searched the closet and tapped on the walls. As we walked about the room, we all took turns walking over one particular spot on the floor that was colder than the rest of the room. “That’s it, it’s got to be here!” my cousin said. “What ever this ghost is attached to, it’s protecting it under this area of the floor.”

Pablo went outside and located a small door that was an entrance to a crawl space that led under the house. He told us to get flashlights. The two men opened the door and entered the crawl space as my cousin and I waited. Soon we heard Pablo yell to us. The men had found something. As we all gathered in the yard, they showed us a small Indian pottery bowl and some old stone beads. No money, no bones—just a bowl and beads. We placed them into a cardboard box with crumbled up newspaper as packing material.

I didn’t want these things in my house, so I decided to take them to the nearby San Javier Del Bac mission at the Pima reservation. After driving up the mission driveway, I waited in my car for a moment—just to think things over. I wasn’t sure if giving these Indian things to a priest would be the best thing to do. Instead I decided to take a short drive to the reservation office and talk to someone. I met an office worker and explained to her that I needed to know if there was a person who could help me. She gave me directions to the house of a woman who heals people on the reservation.

San Javier del Bac Mission

As I was parking the car on the dirt street, the woman and her son were driving up to the house. I introduced myself and quickly told her what I had in the cardboard box. She seemed uneasy, but said she would take care of it. My meeting with her only took about 15 minutes. I know that I must have appeared very nervous, because I remember speaking to her very quickly. I removed the cardboard box with the pot it from my trunk and left it on her porch. As I drove away, I began to feel very comfortable and relaxed. I somehow knew that I had done the right thing. A feeling of relief came over me.

Since that night I have not had another experience with El Coyote in my house. Today, I use the bedroom as a workshop for the ceramic figurines I paint. In addition to figurines of people, I paint animals, and flowers, but if you look closely you’ll notice I don’t have one single painted pot. I guess you can tell why I stay away from keeping pots in that bedroom!