Damper Of Damnation
Jan 03 '05
The Bottom Line What was there about a small, inanimate object that seemed so spooky--make that downright TERRIFYING!!!--to me?
INTRODUCTION: Below, find a story I've posted in at least two other places.
I've made a minimal amount of revisions in it to correct a typo, cut out some parts that didn't apply, and revise other parts to bring them up-to-date.
What I'm hoping for is feedback along the lines of whether or not you--or anyone you know--has ever had anything similar happen.
In short, do you know of cases other than this when an inanimate object takes on an eeriness without any rational sort of explanation?
Any details you can give would be appreciated.
Also, if you've written (or will be writing) anything on this subject either here or at another place, please provide the URL.
Again, thanks, in advance, for reading and commenting...
DAMPER OF DAMNATION
When I wasn't quite 1 1/2 years old, we moved into this wonderful, four-story (counting the attic and basement) home out in the country just south of the friendly, little city of Anderson, Indiana.
This was a farmhouse--but much more elegant than your average farmhouse.
The carpeting was classy, the hardwood floors were classy, the bathroom tiles were classy--as for the kitchen linoleum, I don't know if you would call it classy, but it was certainly attractive.
I loved this house almost 100%.
If there could have been two things I would have changed about it, this is what they would be:
THE STAIRWAY TO THE BASEMENT
The steps were solid, but they seemed somewhat slick to me--and the scariest part about them was that they didn't have handrailings.
There wasn't even a wall to hang onto--just an open space that would be easy to fall from onto the hard cement floor below.
Anytime I had to go down to the basement, I generally preferred to sit on the steps and bump down them rather than walk down.
If I walked down it in the normal, upright way, you'd better believe that I would take my sweet time in navigating those treacherous steps!!!
When my grandparents, uncle, and cousins came up from Kentucky to stay with us--before eventually moving into the bank barn house where I now live--they would sleep upstairs and had run of the entire house. However, they had their own private day-room set up in the basement.
My ornery cousin, David (whose presence can be found lurking menacingly in other stories I've posted here and there, such as HEY JIMMY!!!, RED ROVER! GLAD IT'S OVER!, and THE BENEDICTION), put my four year old cousin, Cathy, up to threatening to run down the stairs and knock me off of them while I was snailing my way along. They were both a lot more surefooted and athletically-daring than I was--or will ever be--so this was fun for them!
Anyway, if I were to, at sometime in the future, decide to repurchase the house I grew up in, getting good, solid handrailings on those awful basement stairs would be the first thing I would take care of.
I would also put handrailings on the three sets of porch steps (front, side, and back). As I was growing up, I had no problem with those steps. In fact--if memory serves me right--we DID have a back-porch railing. But, now that I'm older and my trick-knee not quite so steady--not to mention also wiser to the fact that two or three steps need a railing just as much as a flight of steps--I would have railings installed on all three sets of porch steps.
Possibly, the current owners have taken care of the basement steps. I haven't been in the house in many years, and they might have done something like this--especially, considering how many small grandchildren--and, now, greats--they have visiting them on a regular basis.
I would hope so, anyway!!!
No doubt, the only other thing I simply detested about the place is probably right where it was from the time we bought the place--likely, from the time it had been built (circa 1930)--and is at least as ugly as it ever was:
THE FIREPLACE DAMPER
I hope to receive lots of feedback on this article in the form of discussion about how an inanimate object that isn't associated with an animate fear (e.g. I've known people who have been so terrified of cats and bats that they can't even lay eyes upon pictures of the same) could inspire feelings of sheer terror. Read what I've written and let me know if anything like this has ever happened to you or anyone you know.
Where should I begin?
I'll begin by saying that I spent the time from when I was 1 1/2 years old until I was somewhere over 4 seeing that damper on a daily basis and thinking little about it.
How did it look?
How can I best describe its appearance?
I believe it was between two and three inches in length and brassy in color.
Its widest part was mostly round, but it went into a teardrop shape to lead into the handle, a fairly straight stick that had depth to it with a sunken area where your finger and thumb could go in order to adjust it.
In the wide part, there was an arrow etched into it showing which way to turn it to open it and the name of the company that made it etched in the center of the same part.
Actually, what I'm describing--if you want to be technical--isn't actually the entire damper. It's only the part that controls the damper (a door in the flue that is opened when you're using the fireplace and closed when you aren't). I believe that the accurate name for the control is the damper handle, but most people just call it the damper. And that is what I'll be referring to it as.
There are innie dampers and outie dampers.
The innie ones look pretty much alike--dark, wrought-iron levers that are pushed backwards and forwards (or else from side to side) to open or close the passageway.
The outie ones can look a variety of ways. Some are very plain while others can be like works of art: sculptured to look like flowers, children's hands, etc.
Some are placed to one side of the fireplace.
The horrid-looking one we had was right in the center of the brick, archway-shaped opening to the fireplace.
As an adult, I've tried to figure out just what there was about the damper that really made my skin crawl, starting shortly before I turned five.
My folks always thought that I had blamed it for a fall I took where I hit my head on the hearth while trying to get to a curio on the mantle to show it to my cousins who were visiting from Kentucky--that I believed that it had reached out and knocked over the loveseat on which I was standing in order to reach the mantle. But I'd never had any thoughts like that--though I'd had some thoughts along those lines re: a pink thermometer (but that's another story altogether).
A theory I had for when this all started was that I was feeling like any great artist would feel when his/her work was destroyed.
My theory was based on how a series of decorations came to cover up the damper from the day I put my first decoration on it until the last one was removed when we sold the house, the summer after I'd graduated from eighth grade.
Let's start with how the first decoration came to be--starting with a few days before then when my mother's first cousin's daughter, Anne, dropped by for a visit with her mother (Juanita), nephew (Danny's late dad--Danny being the one who ended up being a hero while up to mischief in DUBIOUS DONATION AND OTHER TALES OF THE CHAMBERS CURSE, something I once wrote and posted elsewhere, only to have it disappear when the writing site did), and daughter, Georgia Anne, who was one lively toddler with a mind of her own.
I thought Georgia Anne was the stuff--and found it especially cute when she went over to our upright piano and started banging on it until her mother pulled her away and said something about that it was probably time to leave.
She was definitely a natural--and, years later, ended up getting the chance for several scholarships in various university music departments!
But, for now, let's go back to the time when I was almost five and she had just turned two.
After a few days had passed, I was playing with a small piece of paper and pretending that it was some sort of magic paper that could turn into anything I wanted it to be. I was singing a little song that I was making up as I went along about what all the paper could do.
I finally went dancing with the paper from the dining room to the living room, spun around a few times, and found myself headed in the direction of the fireplace.
The damper was handy to play a role in the fantasy I was having, so I shoved the paper onto it and then stood back and looked at what it looked like covered with paper.
The bottom of the paper was skirted out to where it looked like a dress, so I decided that I had turned the damper into a little girl. I was so proud of myself and declared that her name was Georgia Anne.
At some point, I decided that I would name "her" Susie instead--after three other people who meant a lot to me: one of my first cousins from Kentucky; a little girl who hosted her own kiddie show that I loved to watch on Saturday morning (Does anyone else remember a girl named Susie who liked to travel in her magic chair?); and after the Susie in the Everly Brothers' hit WAKE UP, LITTLE SUSIE.
The damper remained a little girl until the next morning. Then, like the coach in the story of CINDERELLA that turned back into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight, the little girl became a damper again.
For some reason, going into the living room and seeing only the damper made me cover my eyes with my hands and hurry back upstairs to bed, telling my folks that I believed I woke up too early.
So, what was I planning on doing? Spending the rest of my life in bed?
I don't think that I had any definite plan. I just knew that I didn't want to look at the damper, but I had no idea why I was feeling this way. It was just a feeling.
Had I ever felt that way before?
In a sense, yes--but not all that strongly and only for fleeting moments.
There had been times over the years when I happened to be looking in the direction of the damper that something about its appearance was unsettling to me.
Sometimes, when it caught the reflection of the lighting in the room in a particular way, it gave me a spooky feeling.
Another thing: For some reason, it looked far less sinister when the handle part was pointing downward instead of pointing upward.
Pointing sideways?
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr! That was the most chilling of all!
Of course, it was seldom in that position for long. In fact, the only time that I remember seeing it that way was when my cousins and I were playing with it on their last visit up from Kentucky.
I know that seeing it sideways wasn't enough to make me scream, cover my eyes, or run into the other room. It was just a fleeting gut-feeling that it didn't look right that way.
Frankly, I don't even know why this damper was even fascinating enough for us to play with in the first place. In fact, it didn't hold our attention for long, and we were off to play elsewhere in a short time.
One evening after all of our company had left, it was just my dad and me in the living room sharing a typical evening.
Daddy was watching TOMBSTONE TERRITORY (a Western series) on TV, and I was looking at the TV from time to time but was mostly concentrating on sitting on the sofa and drawing, using the piano bench for my table.
During a commercial break, he got up to adjust the damper, which my cousins and I had left with the handle pointing downwards. I assume now that, in that position, the flue was open, so Daddy felt a draft and realized that it needed to be closed. He got up, went to the fireplace, and put it in the handle-up position.
As it turned, it made a hissing noise (probably the sound of the door part of the damper scraping against the inside of the flue).
Daddy returned to watching TV.
TOMBSTONE TERRITORY was signing off with its haunting theme song. While listening to the theme song, I happened to look at the damper just right to catch an eerie reflection of light. It made my skin crawl for a split second or two--but I then went back to my drawing and thought little more of it that night.
From the point that I first decorated the damper on, it had to be covered--generally, by some sort of paper that I had drawn on and stuck over it.
Susie was my daughter, and she always had to be clothed because it wasn't polite for her to be naked.
Although Susie in the form of the covered damper stayed in one place, I had her going on imaginary trips/adventures and even drew pictures of her--pictures that looked like a little girl and not like a covered-up damper.
So the Susie concept served two purposes: the normal desire of a child to have an imaginary playmate (or, in my case, imaginary daughter) and the covering-up of what I saw as a BEYONDugly object.
Each of the many decorations came off when we would have a cleaning lady in to help with spring housecleaning, and she would clean in the area of the fireplace.
Each time, my folks could tell by the expression on my face and my body-language that I hadn't grown comfortable with having the damper exposed, so they would allow me to put up a new decoration.
The only decoration where the damper (in the handle-down position) was exposed was one where a kindergarten art project was used. This was one of those projects where you color on a piece of paper, fold it several times accordian-style, and then tape it close together in the middle while letting each side of it fan out. This was placed on top of the damper so that it looked like a butterfly (the art project being the wings and the damper being the body).
This stayed in place until removed by a cleaning lady during late-summer housecleaning a couple of years later.
By then, I was about to begin fourth grade in just a few short weeks.
My folks, realizing that I still wasn't comfortable with having nothing but an unadorned damper, asked me if I would like to decorate it again.
This time, I took a sheet of paper and drew a lot of pictures and designs on it. I cut a hole in the top of it and hung it on the damper. Then, I took some aluminum foil from the kitchen and used it to cover the damper, itself.
We were leaving for Kentucky to visit our relatives, and I remember taking some paper with me and drawing Susie in her new outfit as we drove along. I illustrated and told about another chapter of Susie's life.
After doing this for about fifteen minutes, I laid it aside and enjoyed the scenery.
Somewhere in that time period, I outgrew Susie and simply considered myself to be decorating an ugly damper.
When I was in fifth grade, my folks brought up the subject of the damper to me. I was terrified that they were going to tell me that I was too old to be keeping a decoration on the damper and that it was time to face whatever it was about the damper that was terrifying me.
None of us had any idea what it was--even though my folks still stuck to their theory that I had been traumatized by the fall onto the hearth.
But that wouldn't explain the occasional bad vibes I was picking up from the damper even before then.
It turned out what they wanted to discuss with me was that the current decoration looked rather juvenile and, since I was older, it would be nice to have a more attractive and mature decoration.
Therefore, the final decoration for the damper consisted of aluminum foil covering it with artificial pink roses and greenery "growing" from it.
The summer after I graduated from eighth grade, we sold the house.
We had wanted to design our own house and didn't want to be hurried out of where we were living, so we fixed the contract to where we could continue to live in the house for several months rent-free, even after being paid for it, and would begin to pay the new owners a steep rent for an indefinite period of time, should we decide to live there longer.
This was done in case there would be some sort of slip-up that would postpone our housebuilding, moving out, etc.
But we had every plan of being out in time for the boys to begin school at the first of the year instead of having to change schools in the middle of the school year.
Our new home was in the early stages of completion at that time, and we had bought a mobile home to live in and had planned to move into it a couple of weeks before the beginning of school.
In the meantime, we were gradually packing things to store in the three barn basements until we were ready to decide which ones to incorporate into our new homes, which things to sell/discard/give away, etc.
Since nobody was living in the mobile home at that time, Susie (my cousin--NOT the damper) and I loved to use it for our own private getaway to talk girl-talk and have overnights in.
One night in late July, my folks and I were in the living room watching TV when there was a knock at the door.
Surprise--SURPRISE!!! It was the new owners--who had brought what seemed to be their entire family with them.
"We've come to help you move!" they announced.
At the time, I thought that was nice of them--what I didn't know was that my folks weren't really ready to be helped to move, so this gesture seemed rather pushy to them.
After they had managed to carry several pieces of furniture down to store in the basement of the barn, we managed to have them to hold off doing any more until the next day when we would be at least a LITTLE more prepared.
That night, we quickly did some packing.
The next evening, Uncle Don, Pawsie (my grandpa), and Uncle Jim had joined us to help with some of the moving.
My bedroom suite was going to be one of the things that would be stored after that evening--even though my folks would still be staying in the house that night--so Susie and I had planned to have a two-person slumber party in the mobile home. I would be moving in there a day before my folks would, and having my very own place for even that short period of time made me feel really grown-up.
I was the first person having both a key to the house and the mobile home, and that was very exciting!!! Since my folks were both working the day-shift by then, I would be the one waiting for the telephone man to come and install a new phone in the mobile home and remove the old one from the house.
That evening, a lot was removed from the place where we had lived for over 13 years--including the decoration from the damper.
I was on the phone with someone (can't remember with whom) at the time, and Uncle Don was collecting nik-naks from the living room in a packing box. He removed the decoration and brought the flowers over for me to smell, and I played along with him and pretended that they had a fragrance. He then sniffed them and uttered, "Pee-yew!" causing me to giggle.
At that point, I hadn't seen the damper in several years except in some still pictures and a home movie, but it was now exposed--and I wondered what I'd once found so scary about it. Granted, it wasn't any great thing of beauty, but it didn't turn me to stone, either.
We continued on with the rush-job of moving. I finally took a break and settled back in the reclining chair--one of the few pieces of furniture now left in the living room.
Daddy came into the room and joined me and asked if I noticed anything missing--an amusing question at the time to go with how empty our once-generously-furnished living room now looked.
"Just about everything!" I replied in awe. Moving was a new experience for me. In another day, a new family would be living where we had lived and we would be moving on into the next phase of our lives!
Daddy mentioned that he was talking about the fact that the damper was no longer covered--which was now old news to me, as I'd been there when it happened. I told him about how silly Uncle Don had been acting with the flowers.
He asked me if I'd remembered anything about how scary the damper had been to me just a few years before, and I told him that I certainly did and still didn't think it was very pretty, but I now wondered why I'd ever found it to have been so frightening to look at.
In awhile, Daddy left to tend to other parts of the moving, and I relaxed in the recliner a few minutes more before joining him.
I looked at the damper once more, trying to figure out why I had insisted on keeping it covered (or, in the case of the butterfly, semi-covered) for the past decade.
All at once, the light reflected on it just right, and I felt a chill going up and down my spine and goosebumps raising on my arms. But just for a brief moment.
In the years to come, I didn't give much thought to the damper on a regular basis. Most times, it wasn't even on my mind.
Even when I shared the same house with it, it hadn't been one of those things that I'd obsessed about. Other than the Susie game of my earlier years, it wasn't even a part of my daily life unless there seemed to be a reason to worry that the cover might be removed--possibly, for good.
There were times when something inspired me to give it some thought.
One time was when I was sixteen and about to walk down into the Grand Canyon with my folks. Part of a presentation at the visitor center told how people had been known to throw things they didn't want (e.g. used razor blades) down into the canyon and that the area was so large that it would be highly unlikely that they'd ever see them again.
The damper came to mind at that point where I had this brief fantasy of how it would be one of the first things to go should I decide to repurchase the house and live across from my folks when I grew up. I would replace it either with an innie damper or else a more attractive outie damper. And I would make a special trip to Arizona to hurl it into the Grand Canyon--but, with my luck, somebody might find it, wonder what it was, and it would be shown and broadcast on all of the TV stations and be pictured in magazines like TIME, NEWSWEEK, and NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC!!!
In all seriousness, I've wondered why the sight of this tiny, inanimate object seemed so sinister to me at times.
One of my friends is interested in paranormal psychology, and I told her about the damper, wondering if she had any explanation as to why something so small could be so scary.
I asked if she'd ever heard of anything like this before--and she told me that she'd had similar feelings about something inanimate in her own life. Since this is her personal story, I don't feel free to disclose either her name or the object that freaks her out to this day.
She gave me the explanation that there was probably some sort of phenomenon associated with the damper.
I told her that the woman who had built the house was using it, in part, to operate a house of prostitution.
Could something have happened such as a married man coming there to cheat on his wife who suddenly had a religious conversion and spirits of evil intent had, at that point, fled from his body and into the damper (like the evil spirits Jesus cast out of this possessed man fleeing into a herd of pigs)?
My friend told me that she'd meant something different than that when she used the term "phenomenon."
It was just like something in the air that had little, if anything, to do with anyone actually associated with the property. Just like some kind of vibes coming in from somewhere that had somehow settled in the damper, and I had been sensitive enough to pick up on them.
Don't forget to leave a comment, if you're so led to...
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AinsleyJo
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Member: Ainsley Jo Phillips
Location: Anderson, Indiana
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