Читать книгу American Indian Ghost Stories of the West - Antonio Sr. Garcez - Страница 25

I interviewed Francis at her home. Arivaca is a small village town tucked within a quaint desert valley. Within this quiet town lies Frances’s two-bedroom home. Viewing it from the street, the house would not give any indication as to the frightening manifestations having transpired just a few years ago within its walls.

Francis preferred that I not describe the outside of her house because she said that by doing so, some neighbors might identify her and start to gossip. Given her concern, I have chosen to also not use her real name.

This interview was conducted in Francis’ kitchen. During the interview we kept hearing a few “thuds” coming from the walls. After the third thud, Francis excused her self, rose from her chair, walked to a back room and shortly thereafter returned to the kitchen holding a picture of St. Benidict and a lit candle. Francis said, “I’m not taking any chances. Whatever is here knows we’re talking about it. This should take care of them.” Francis then placed the picture and candle on the table and the interview continued without any further interruption.

— Antonio

“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 town, the gossip gets around really quickly. I used to rent and live in the house next to the one I now live in. I also knew 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 we would have coffee in my kitchen. She sure was a talker. She told me about her son who lived in Tucson, and I 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 doorframe. Hanging on one of the nails was a small metal crucifix. I asked her about this, because it was very strange to have a door nailed shut the way it was. Her explanation was that she had nailed the door 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 immediately thought that living by herself for so long made this old woman go crazy. 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 wild dog. I thought to myself that this poor woman needed to get out of the house more often and mingle with people because she was most definitely not a rational thinking person. I didn’t think much more about the “friend” that 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. I didn’t know what I would expect to see. As I looked inside, I saw a room that was without furniture. It didn’t even have any rugs. Poor old woman, 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 it some times does get a bit lonely. There wasn’t anything unusual about the room, so I never mentioned it to her again.

Well, 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, which was left unlocked and walked inside. I immediately smelled gas. I took a few slow steps into the house and kept calling her name. There was no answer. I got concerned and quickly walked through the house. When I entered her bedroom, I found her lifeless body in bed. I called the police and they discovered the cause of her death was due to a flexible copper hose leading from the wall to her gas heater that had developed a small hole. The day before her death, she had spent the holiday in Tucson with her son and his family. I know she had died happy because, after returning home, all she did was talk to me about how nice her visit to her son’s house had been.

After the 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, and about El Coyote. He said that his mother only mentioned El Coyote a few times, but that he thought it was an imaginary friend his mother made up. After buying the house, I had two friends who lived in the town of Nogales come to Arivaca and help me with repairs. I was overjoyed to finally own a house of my own. I began to remove old wallpaper and paint from every inside wall. Of course, the first thing I did was to remove the nails on the bedroom door where “El Coyote” was kept locked away. During the repair work, I never noticed any strange noise, or saw any ghost. Except for the cold temperature that hovered in that rear bedroom, there was nothing strange at all.

Finally, after a few weeks, the house repairs were completed. After moving all my belongings into the house, I soon began to notice that the rear bedroom was strangely very much colder than the rest of the house. At first, I was not much bothered by it, but it did make me wonder. At times, when I would enter the room, it was so cold that I got goose bumps on my arms. At other times, it was like stepping outside into a cool night. I thought about what the old woman had told me, but realized that perhaps my imagination was working overtime.

As the weeks passed, things began to get much worse. Day and night I began to see strange shadows in 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 television volume in the living room turned up high, so that I could listen to the show. I thought that perhaps the voice was coming from the television. I stopped washing the dishes because I had a very strong feeling that someone was in the kitchen with me. I turned around to look behind me. I saw this huge black shadow—it covered the whole wall! It moved slowly, and then quickly darted across the room and 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. And it couldn’t have been a passing plane, because I would have heard it flying so low. No, I 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, closets, and the bedrooms. As soon as I entered the last bedroom, the familiar cold feeling came over me. My instincts told me I had to get out of there, fast! I closed the door behind me and left it closed until the following week, when a handyman paid me a visit. I had ordered a pair of new closet doors that were delivered by a Nogales contractor who carried them off his truck and into the bedroom. Everything was going fine.

I was in the living room watching television as the loud noise of his electric drill started up. 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 installation. Just a few minutes later I suddenly heard him yell, and as I began to get off my chair, he came flying down the hallway and out the front door! I thought he had hurt himself, so I raced out the door to meet him at his truck that 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 ghost’s strong grip. The contractor did not know anything about the bedroom, or about the woman who owned the house before I did. His experience left him shaken and I was very concerned about spending any more nights or days in the house with that “thing” walking around. 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 guess God helped me, because I didn’t see El Coyote.

After the contractor drove away, I walked back to the bedroom and placed a crucifix on the door and closed it shut, just as the woman before me had done. I decided to tell my cousin, whom lives in the town just south of Arivaca, about what had happened. She asked, “If there is an angry spirit in the bedroom, it must be protecting something. Why wouldn’t it want people in the bedroom?” 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 here!” my cousin said. “Whatever this ghost is protecting, it is under this area of the floor.” Pablo went outside and located a small door that led to a crawl space under the house. He returned to tell us to get flashlights. The two men opened the door and they both entered the crawl space, as my cousin and I watched. Soon we heard Pablo yell to us to come outside. 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 the bowl into a cardboard box with crumbled-up newspaper, as packing material.

I didn’t want these things in my house and I decided to take them to the nearby San Javier Del Bac mission at the Pima reservation. After driving up the mission’s driveway, I waited in my parked 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 speak with someone. I met an office worker and explained to her that I needed to know if there was a person who could help me. After telling her my story, she gave me directions to the house of a woman who heals people on the reservation.”

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 about 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 opened the car’s trunk, took out the cardboard box with the pot and left it on her porch.

As I drove away, I began to feel very comfortable and relaxed. Somehow I 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 ceramic figurines that I paint. I paint several different figurines of people, 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!