Devils Lake, North Dakota, sometime in the early 20th century
It all started with a hook.
Young John Grinstead stared at it, the cogs of his young mind turning. It was large and heavy, driven deep into the wood ceiling of the family garage. He wasn’t sure what it was used for, but he figured that it must have something to do with when the garage was still a horse stable.
Originally, the house that the Grinstead’s lived in had been a hotel. With John, his six siblings, and his parents, they needed the room that a house like that provided.
In the late 1800’s, a hotel that size needed a large stable to accommodate their guests’ horses. It was two stories, with the animals being kept in stalls on the first floor and a hayloft on the second. The hayloft was exactly what it sounds like – a loft that contained hay.
While some of the hay was used for bedding for the animals, the majority of it was used as food for them. Hay was cut down in the fields outside of Devils Lake, tied into large square bundles called bales, and then hauled up into the loft by ropes and pulleys.
That hook was no doubt used to hang the pulleys from to move the hay.
By the time the Grinstead’s moved in, they didn’t need the hayloft anymore. They only had one animal, a pet pony that they would ride around for fun. It only took up one of the stalls, with the rest of the building being used for storage and to keep the family car out of the weather.
However, the hayloft and the rest of all that mostly empty space served as a great place for the Grinstead children to play in. Sure, they had plenty of space to play in outside, but sometimes, when the weather was gloomy or they just wanted a change of pace, they came into the garage and played in there.
John, being older, often helped his mother watch the younger children. If he was being honest – and honesty was a high-valued trait amongst the Grinstead’s – John really didn’t mind watching his younger siblings. It helped keep them out of his mother’s hair while she took care of the various household chores.
For any of you who work with children or have some of your own, you know that sometimes they’re a great help, and other times it’s just easier to take care of things yourself.
It was during those times when John would step in. He enjoyed their company, and he enjoyed giving them games to play. Sometimes they just played games that kids played everywhere, like hide and seek. When those got a little boring, they came up with their own variations that kept things interesting, or they just invented new games all their own.
When John had seen the hook in the ceiling, it had given him an idea. After a few minutes, he went to see if they had what they needed to put his plan into action. After a few steps, he took one last, long look back up at it, not knowing in that moment that he was about to lead his family into one of the strangest and most frightening experiences of their lives.
—
Sweat ran down John’s face as he drove the hook into its new home in the ceiling.
He looked over at the other one, the original one that had given him his idea. This one was nearly identical, sturdy and strong, and right across from the new one he had just placed.
Satisfied, he went to find the other pieces that he needed for his project.
John hadn’t been born in Devils Lake. He had spent his early years on a farm outside of town. He had learned how to feed the animals and tend the crops, and he had also learned how to build things.
Where they had lived, there wasn’t a store within walking distance. That meant there were a lot of things that they either had to trade someone for or just build it yourself.
There weren’t many opportunities for education there, either. His father, Mr. Grinstead wanted his children to have a solid base of learning instilled in them, and the only way to do that was to go where there were better schools.
So, they packed up and moved fourteen miles into the town of Devils Lake.
The town of Devils Lake really hadn’t been there for that long. The first house had been built in 1882, maybe thirty or forty years before. It had grown quickly, though, and by the time the Grinstead’s moved there it boasted a population of around 6,000 citizens in a state that contained maybe 400,000 within its borders.
None of that mattered, though. The important thing was that there was better opportunities and education there for the children than there had been on the farm.
John was okay with all of that. He had liked the farm, but he liked Devils Lake, too. He liked his house and his friends. Life was good.
Carefully, he measured a wooden board, then sawed off a length of it and drilled two holes at either end. Knotting two lengths of strong rope through the holes, he attached the other end through the hooks in the ceiling.
He took a few steps, admiring his work. This would do, he thought. This would definitely do.
Smiling, he went to get his brothers and sisters.
They gasped and laughed excitedly when they saw it. It was a swing. John had seen the hook and thought that it would be a great place to attach one. While he may not have been a master carpenter, John was proud of what he had built.
It was an instant hit. There wasn’t a lot of public playground equipment in Devils Lake, if any. Besides, even if there was, the Grinstead children would have to share with all the other kids. This was all theirs. Better yet, because it was in the hayloft, they could use it even when it was raining outside.
Over the following days and weeks, the Grinstead children used the swing almost constantly. They smiled and squealed in delight as they swung out over the hayloft.
Even though it was their private swing, it was only a matter of time until one of the kids wanted it all to themselves. For the Grinsteads, it was John’s younger sister, Miriam.
After breakfast one morning, she ran outside to the barn before any of her siblings got there. She wanted to use the swing without having someone waiting for their turn. Miriam wasn’t selfish, but she wanted to just enjoy the swing for a while by herself for as long as she liked.
It was kind of like being able to enjoy a hot bath until your fingers got pruny and the water got cold without having someone banging at the bathroom door yelling at you to hurry up. Excitedly, she went into the garage and climbed up to the hayloft.
It was always a little dark up there, so Miriam had to take a moment to let her eyes adjust to it. A few moments later they had, and she glanced over to where the swing was.
She could see something hanging there in the dark, but it was much too big to be the swing. This was far thicker, bulkier.
That wasn’t right. Miriam squinted, trying to see what it was. Then, all at once, she saw it.
It was a man, hanging by his neck from a rope. His eyes bulged out of their sockets and his tongue hung out. His skin wasn’t the right color, so blue it was almost black. Miriam could almost hear the rope creak as it strained against the weight of its burden.
Miriam screamed. She didn’t know who it was, but they had to be dead. They had to be!
She hurried back down the ladder as fast as she could, away from the horrifying vision she had just seen.
She was still screaming when her sister Agnes burst through the wide garage door. She ran to her sister, holding her and asked what had happened.
Through near-hysterical sobs, Miriam told Agnes what she had seen in the loft.
After the younger girl had calmed down a bit, Agnes made her way toward the ladder. She was the oldest girl, and it was her responsibility to see what was in the hayloft.
One by one, she made her way slowly up the ladder. When she had gotten near the top, she cautiously poked her head up through the hole in the floor, scanning the hayloft.
She saw nothing.
Relaxing a bit, she came up a little further, taking another long, careful look.
Nothing. Not a thing. No stranger, no sibling playing a prank, and certainly not a hanging dead man. There was only John’s swing.
Agnes felt her anger begin to rise. Miriam had been screaming bloody murder at some story that she had made up. It was silly and irresponsible! She had lied! And for what? Attention? Sympathy?
Agnes wasn’t certain, but she sure was going to go down and find out.
As soon as her feet hit the garage floor, Agnes turned and laid into Miriam. As mad as she was, you can imagine what she must have said. What stood out for her younger sister, though, was “liar.”
Tears began to flow down Miriam’s face again. Agnes wasn’t Mom, and she didn’t have to take her scolding like she was a little kid. She was eight-years old! She knew that she wasn’t a liar, and she told Agnes that, cutting off her tirade.
She had seen someone in the loft! They were cold, blue and dead, and they had been hanging up by their neck where their swing was.
Agnes came right back at her, shouting that there wasn’t anything there but John’s swing. There was no reason to make up stories like that. Miriam had lied and nearly scared the life out of her!
The two girls went on like that for a while, voices raised, brows furrowed, neither one gaining the upper hand in their argument. Finally, they both realized that they couldn’t win against one another. They needed to take this to a higher court, and the highest judge in their lives was Mom.
Still shouting at each other, the two girls ran into the house to plead their case to their mother.
This wasn’t the first time that Mrs. Grinstead had settled disputes between her children. By this point in her life, she was an expert.
As always, she patiently listened to her daughters as they angrily gave their side of the story, occasionally talking over top of the other. As they finished, she knew that there was only one way to solve this. She would have to go and see for herself.
Without another word, she walked out of the house and into the garage. Agnes and Miriam followed close behind.
Carefully, Mrs. Grinstead climbed up to the hayloft. Like Agnes, she only saw the swing. She knew that her eyesight wasn’t quite as good as it had been when she was younger, but she was confident that she would be able to see a man hanging in the loft.
When their mother told them what she had seen, Agnes felt justified. Their own mother had just come down on her side! That settled the whole thing in her mind. She was right, and Miriam was obviously a liar.
Their mother, however, wasn’t entirely convinced. She didn’t think that Miriam had seen a ghost, rather, she thought maybe she had gotten sick with something. She had heard about people getting fever’s so bad that they saw things that weren’t there. What if her little girl had gotten something, and they hadn’t noticed?
Gingerly, she felt her daughter’s forehead, her eyes checking her young daughter for any sign of fever or illness.
Miriam protested. She didn’t feel sick. She felt hurt and a little confused. She knew what she had seen.
While Mrs. Grinstead was relieved that her daughter didn’t seem to have a fever, she still didn’t believe that she had seen a ghost. She thought that it must have been a trick of the light that made her think that she was seeing a man in the loft.
She wasn’t about to accuse her of lying. Miriam certainly didn’t act like it. However, this swing was starting to cause trouble between the children. Mrs. Grinstead thought it would be for the best if they left it alone for a while.
Calling the children together, she gave them the news that the swing was now off-limits. They could go up to the loft to get feed for the pony, but that was it.
A few of the children started to protest, but a look from their mother immediately silenced them. They knew that look and knew better than to argue with it. Mom’s word was law in the Grinstead household.
A short time and a lot of Agnes talking about what Miriam had said later, Miriam’s siblings were furious.
Why had she made up that stupid story about a dead guy in the loft? If she wanted attention, there were better ways to do it, ones that didn’t affect them. They had loved playing up in the hayloft! They had loved their swing! Now they couldn’t do either, and it was Miriam’s fault.
And you can bet that they let her know it.
But Miriam never relented. Every time they taunted her or gave some snide little comment; she would insist that she had seen the hanging man in the loft. Not once did she slip or waver. She knew she wasn’t lying, and no matter how much what they said hurt her feelings, she clung to that truth.
Several weeks later, Agnes was bringing the family pony back into the garage. It had been a beautiful day for a ride, and she had decided to take advantage.
Leading the animal into its stall, she noticed that the hay they fed him with was getting low. She sighed. She needed to feed him before she went back to the house. She didn’t mind that part; she just didn’t feel like climbing the ladder.
Oh, well. It wasn’t like he was going to go up to loft himself. Better to just do it and get it over with.
Agnes began to climb the ladder up to the hayloft, probably already thinking of the other things that she wanted to do that day. She would just toss some fresh hay down for the pony, check his water, and then go about her day.
As she began to step out onto the second floor, Agnes snuck a glance over at the swing. To her surprise, it wasn’t there.
Instead, there was a man. His wide eyes bulged from their sockets, dry and bloodshot. His swollen tongue hung out from a dark blue face. Agnes could hear the rope creak, straining under the weight of its burden, pulled tight against his neck.
Agnes felt light-headed. It was like the rest of the world had fallen away, and all she could see was this, this…thing.
All the while, one sentence kept repeating itself over and over in her head: Miriam was right.
Quickly she began to descend the ladder, eager to get away from the nightmare hanging in front of her.
The next thing she knew she was by the garage door and John was there, holding her by the shoulders and shouting at her. She couldn’t understand what he was saying but could see his mouth move. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, and all was silent.
Slowly, she started to hear what he was asking her: “Are you okay?” As sound returned, Agnes also realized that she had been screaming the entire time.
Agnes told the rest of the family that she had also seen the hanging man in the hayloft. It looked exactly the same as Miriam had described – same discolored skin, same look, hanging where the swing was.
Miriam looked around at the shocked and frightened faces of her brothers and sisters as they listened to Agnes. They had called her a liar, mocked her and laughed at her.
Now Agnes had seen it, too. It had been real, and now everyone, including her parents, believed her. There was a ghost in the barn.
But who was it? It certainly wasn’t anyone in the family.
After some discussion, Mr. Grinstead said that he would look into it. He knew some of the older locals who might have heard of something.
When he asked them a few days later, the old men weren’t surprised. They had heard of the ghost before.
Mr. Grinstead was almost shocked. Whatever he had expected, it hadn’t been complete acceptance of his story.
The locals explained that, several years before, when the Grinstead house was still a hotel, there had been a man who had stayed there on his way through town. They didn’t know a thing about him – where he came from, what he was doing there, how he made his living, who his family might have been. And they certainly didn’t know about the inner demons that he struggled with.
He was just a stranger, passing through. A day or two later, they found his body hanging in the hayloft of the hotel’s stables.
But that hadn’t been the end of it. For years after, people had seen a dead man hanging in that hayloft. There was no rhyme or reason to his appearances. Just every so often, he would show up and scare the hell out of some random person.
And that’s where the story ends, and it leaves us with a lot of questions.
Did they move? I sure as hell would have considered it. Or did they just get used to occasionally seeing the ghost? Once the novelty had worn off, I could see the children completely flip the script, going so far as to yell at the ghost for scaring them when it appeared, or even naming him.
I saw Bob in the garage today, Dad.
Yeah? Still hanging out? Had to throw a dad joke in there.
All joking aside, maybe, in his last, violent struggles as he died, all that emotion and energy left a kind of psychic stain on the environment. If the conditions are just right, maybe an image of those moments appear, like a photograph, but stamped into the very fabric of our reality.
Regardless of the nature of the haunting, all we can do is hope that the poor man was finally able to find the peace in the next life that eluded him in this one.
Sources
Devils Lake, North Dakota. Devilslakend.com
Norman, Michael, and Scott, Beth. Haunted Heritage. New York, Forge, 2002.