When I was a kid, my grandmother delighted in telling us about the ghost that haunted her childhood home back in Germany. Every night, she said, the family heard mysterious rattling on the staircase from dusk to dawn. I never really believed her—and, from the way she told it, she didn’t really believe in that ghost, either—but it made a great spooky story. And ever since then, in the back of my mind, I always hoped that someday I’d meet a ghost for myself. Because, well, you never know.

So it was that, on Halloween night in 2005, my girlfriend Claire and I decided to visit the Davis Baxter House. What better night to go looking for ghosts?

The Baxter House was an old dilapidated bungalow home on the far outskirts of the U.C. Davis campus; it was, like most old dilapidated houses, supposedly haunted. Exactly who haunted it, though, no one could say. Nothing in the house’s uneventful history gave any reason why it should be haunted. DavisWiki said that it had once belonged to a family called (surprise!) the Baxters, who had moved out and sold the home to U.C. Davis, which then used it as a research lab. Where they studied Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Or, actually, birds. But the university eventually moved the lab and the house slowly fell into ruin.

It was Claire’s idea; she liked photographing ruined buildings and she staunchly didn’t believe in ghosts. She made fun of me for wanting to see one.

“It obviously isn’t haunted,” she said as we drove down the winding dirt road. The Baxter House was way out in the middle of nowhere, nothing but fields and woods for miles around. “It isn’t haunted because ghosts don’t exist, and it’s silly that you’re afraid of something that doesn’t exist.”

I didn’t like having my courage maligned.

“I didn’t say that I was afraid of ghosts,” I said. “I never said that I really thought there were ghosts at all. I’m just saying that, well, you never know.”

It was pitch-black when we arrived, a perfect moonless Halloween night. The crumbling porch of the Baxter House loomed in the car’s headlights. Equipped with a pair of flashlights and Claire’s camera, we got out to investigate.

I pushed on the front door; it swung open easily, opening into a large dusty foyer. Reams of crumpled dot matrix computer paper were strewn across the floor. Someone had tacked a yellowed paper to the wall, an old “protocol for animal use and care” form left over from the house’s days as a bird research facility. It described an experiment involving the decapitation of fledgling double-crested cormorants. To our left, we saw a kitchen full of empty cabinets. To the right, a narrow doorway led to a cramped bathroom.

It was when Claire aimed her flashlight into the bathroom that it started. Outside, the underbrush rustled, and then came the sound of loud, heavy footsteps. Tromp, tromp, tromp. Left, right, left, right—slow and deliberate, like someone feeling their way through the unfamiliar dark.

Claire froze. “Did you hear that?” she hissed.

“Someone’s out there,” I said.

“Is that an animal?” said Claire. I suppose it could have been the world’s most heavy-footed raccoon. Or maybe . . . the ghosts of those baby cormorants back for revenge?

I just jerked my thumb toward the door and we both bolted back the way we had come, scrambling out the door and leaping into our car parked down the driveway.

As we sat in the dark, I turned to Claire, feeling rather vindicated that she had run from the house just as quickly as I had. “I thought you were too logical to believe in ghosts. What were you scared of?”

“It wasn’t a ghost. I just thought it might be the campus police.”

“Yeah, wandering around in the dark without a flashlight, miles from anywhere.”

We sat in the car, watching the house. A minute passed, then two.

“This is silly,” said Claire. “Seriously, it was just our imaginations playing tricks on us.” She pulled out her camera again. “Let’s go back in!”

The house was empty and undisturbed; whatever had been trudging around had apparently not decided to go inside. We poked around in the living room and the kitchen, finding nothing but cobwebs and more crumpled papers. And then, once again, Claire held her camera into the bathroom, trying to get a good shot of the cracked tub and moldering wallpaper. As she aimed her camera, we heard the same heavy footsteps outside. Tromp, tromp, tromp.

This time we didn’t pause to debate. We ran out and drove away.

There weren’t any ghosts in the photos—although, when we showed them to a friend, he insisted that the smeary reflections of the flashbulb in the house’s broken windows were spirits trying to communicate. We were both skeptical. A week later, we returned for a second look, but too many people had come up with the same idea in the interim. Campus police had boarded the house up tight and scrawled a warning to future trespassers across the door. Last June, Davis firefighters burned the house to the ground as part of a training exercise.

Claire still insists that she only ran from the house because it might have been the police and that she was never worried about ghosts. Of course, it was probably just our imagination. But it forever sated my curiosity. Because, well, you never know.

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Mike Rosen-Molina is an East Bay writer and frequent contributor to The Monthly, who learned everything he needs to know about ghosts from Beetlejuice. He blogs at mikerosenmolina.com.

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