Last night I was reading a book that described an old French cultural custom, and I recognized the connection to something that happened to me early in my marriage. The memory got stuck in my head, ruining my sleep, so I got up and started writing it. Here is the story that just cost me a full night of sleep:

The house sat at the end of a long, country driveway, three-quarters of a mile long. All around was rich, fertile farmland, set in the middle of a Mennonite rural community.

There was a ghost in the house - the trapped spirit of a man who had hung himself there, many years ago. Many people had lived there in the intervening years, but the spirit had not manifested itself for a long time, until recently. There were a few older farmers in the area who had heard rumours of the ghost, but nobody still living remembered many details.

Three bachelor brothers had built the house and lived there together, working the land, raising livestock and generally keeping to themselves. The story goes that they were huge men - practically giants - all of them at least seven feet tall in their bare feet. There was evidence of this in some of the original wood trim details, such as a coat rail set so high along the corridor that normal people had to jump up, or climb on stools, to use them.

According to local lore, one of the brothers became depressed and hung himself somewhere in the house. Nobody remembers how or where he did that. The basement ceiling was too low and the living and sleeping rooms were also low-ceilinged. The only possible place this deed could have been accomplished was somewhere in the two-story, central hallway.

The hallway floor and the staircase were built of thick wood planks, alternating between soft pine and a harder, deep-red coloured wood. Over the years, the pine had worn down with foot traffic, while the red wood had not. On the staircase, this uneven wear had created a veritable symphony of sounds as one ascended the staircase. Each of the stair treads had a unique, identifiable creak as human feet trod them. The slower a person climbed, the louder the creaks were.

The young couple now living there had heard someone climbing the staircase slowly, over and over again. Once the "something" reached the top of the stairs, however, the footsteps stopped. If "it" had continued walking anywhere on the upper floor, they would have heard the floor creaking. But, the footsteps always stopped after reaching the top of the staircase.

After hearing this for months on end, they started making inquiries in the local community and that is when they learned the story of the ghost in the house. Learning the story gave them an explanation, but they were not sure if they could accept it. Nevertheless, it took away the worst of their discomfort and they were even starting to joke about it. Although they felt a malevolent spirit emanating from the manifestations, they decided that since it never went further than the head of the stairs, it must be a spirit that was not able to touch them.

The couple soon married. On a cold January weekend, the girl moved her things into the farmhouse. She filled the stove with wood, lit a hot fire, cleaned the house from top to bottom, and claimed it as her new home.

The ghost stayed quiet for a while.

One night, soon afterwards ....

It was a Friday night in the middle of winter. Snowdrifts had blocked the driveway after the first quarter mile. There was no heat in the second floor of the farmhouse. The woodstove fire in the kitchen below had burned out. A chill settled over the old house and everything in it.

The high canyon of the clear, open Canadian sky shone cobalt blue as stars crackled in the bright light of the winter moon. The thick frost on the windowpanes of the ancient house cracked as the wooden frames expanded in the intense cold.

The newlyweds were together in their tiny bed in the freezing, upstairs bedroom at the head of the staircase. Frost crystals on the windowpanes caught the dancing starlight and shot sparkling streaks of white light over the couple. The cold, crisp, clear silence of deep winter cast its spell and choked everything below.

The man slept like one dead, his back turned to his wife, snoring softly. His teenage bride was still awake, lying naked so she could plaster her flesh against his back and hopefully absorb enough body heat from him to save herself from freezing stiff.

She felt like she was sealed off in a frozen dungeon. The two of them were covered with a huge pile of blankets, but they were no help to her. He was sleeping soundly beside her, his back turned to her as usual. Each breath she drew brought icy air into her nostrils, burning the inside of her nose. She held the air in her lungs until it felt warmer, then exhaled, only to start the painful breathing process all over again. Her skin was covered with gooseflesh as she shivered convulsively.

The sky was cloudless, giving the moon and stars leave to shine their blue light through the uncurtained bedroom window. She tilted her face up, exhaled, and examined the cloud of steam from her breath, lit up by the bright moonlight.

One moment passed into the next moment, then the next and the next. Seconds were like minutes, minutes like days. An eternity of moments passed as she lay there, miserable from the cold. She wondered how time could pass so slowly when she was in misery. She wondered how her new husband, the one she thought of as her new protector, could sleep like that, oblivious to her suffering.

She felt a prickling sensation up and down her spine. She had the feeling of a cat with its fur standing straight up on its back, but there was no sound - nothing to give me reason for fright. It was the same feeling she got when the ghost trod the staircase, but the house was silent. She shuddered, and tried to glue herself tighter to her husband's body.

A couple minutes passed, and the feeling subsided. She sighed, trying once again to block out the bitter cold and fall asleep. A few twists of her wrists and ankles brought the blankets closer around her body. She forced her hands and fingers under her husband's side. He grunted when she shoved under him, but didn't wake up. Then, she wiggled her toes under his legs. It was an awkward position, but at least her extremities were warmer. Soon, that position made her back ache and she had to draw her toes out again, but they stayed warm after that. She left her hands underneath him and started to drift off to sleep.

It was the dead of night now, close to midnight. She finally fell asleep.

All of a sudden, a cacaphony of noise blasted through the silence, shocking her into full consciousness. She woke to howling and screaming, the shreiking of wildcats all around the desolate house. The howls ranged around the house, now underneath their window, then circling the house. She thought of the ghost, but "he" lived inside the house, not outside, and "he" never vocalized. Besides, there was only one of "him" and there were a number of screamers running around outside in the snow.

Terrified, she burrowed deeper into the blankets and shook her husband. The horrific noise continued, but he kept sleeping like a dead man. She stuck her head back out into the air and started screaming at him, poking him. When he didn't respond, she clawed him in terror. He didn't wake up.

She gasped, hearing a loud hammering noise at the front and back doors. She had never experienced such terror in her short life. She was hollering at her husband, but he kept sleeping. How could he sleep with all that horrible noise? Then, she heard a smashing noise at the front screen door, and right after that, she heard the heavy wooden door crash open. The howling entered their home and she was overcome with terror. Still, her husband slept on.

Heavy, thumping feet rushed up the staircase and she bolted upright in bed, convinced in her soul that she was about to be killed by a werewolf, or some other demonic creature. The bedroom door burst open and she saw that the light in the hallway had been turned on. The girl sat naked, with her breasts exposed to the freezing air, staring in horror at the man in the doorway.

Framed in the sickly yellow light was one of her husband's friends, Ralph. He stared at her breasts for a few seconds, then grinned and hollered "shivaree!!"

Voices downstairs stopped howling and started hollering "shivaree!"

Her humiliation was only matched by the fear she had been feeling a few seconds earlier. She pulled the icy blankets up around her nakedness and blushed shamefully. She started kicking her husband under the blankets, trying to wake him up.

The man woke up, sat up, rubbed his eyes, and started to guffaw. Ralph closed the door and she rounded on her young husband. "How can you laugh at a time like this? Make them go away, right now!!"

They began to argue, the girl weeping in shame and fear. Her husband got mad at her. He didn't believe that Ralph had "seen her." He accused her of making up a story. He pulled on jeans and a shirt and stormed out of their bedroom. She stayed under the blankets, shivering uncontrollably as she listened to the raucous noises in the kitchen underneath the bedroom.

There were about a half dozen "young bucks" downstairs, his friends from the local Mennonite church. The husband built a fire in the old woodstove and helped them find glasses for the whisky they had brought. They had also brought lots of beer and an assortment of teenage junk food - chips, pretzels and the like. Her husband stomped up the stairs, stuck his head into the bedroom and angrily told her to either hide in the room like a fool, or come down and be hospitable.

She dressed herself, went downstairs, grabbed a bottle of rye whisky - Seagram's VO - and sat in a corner for the next couple hours, drinking the stuff quickly with just a splash of coke, getting as drunk as she possibly could. She couldn't look at any of them. They paid no attention to her, quietly drinking in the corner as they partied around the kitchen table.

One of the men brought out a deck of cards and a lively game of euchre began. They laughed loudly, bragging about what a good job they had done of startling the couple. The husband laughed with them, then made popcorn on the stove and passed the bowl around the table, ignoring the girl. When everyone was totally smashed, the young men left to make their separate ways home as best they could.

The next day, the girl had a dreadful hangover. Her father-in-law came over that morning to tend the animals in the barn. When he saw the girl, he snickered and said "heard you got shivareed last night." Then he turned on his heel and walked away from her.

The ghost started mounting the stairs again, late at night. It never walked further than the top of the stairs, and it never left the house.


"Shivaree:" a Canadian English modification of the French word "charivari."

Charivari: a noisy mock serenade to a newly married couple; a clamorous salutation made to a newlywed couple by an assembled crowd of neighbours and friends.

Origins of this French tradition date back to the year AD 1681. It was habitually done to shame newly married couples whose marriage violated community standards - when someone married shortly after the death of their last spouse, for instance, or when the bride was much younger than the groom.

Stories of this tradition in French history talk about some newlywed couples being so traumatized by this experience that they lost their sanity. The point of the ritual is to humiliate and terrify the newlyweds. Some of the youthful husbands fled, terrified, leaving their young brides to the mercy of the revellers. Some bridegrooms, overcome with adrenaline, attacked the revellers, maiming or killing one or more of them. Other young couples fled together in fear, in their nightclothes, on horseback, never to return to their home.

The North American tradition dates back to AD 1843. By the mid-1900's it had become an excuse for a wild party, rather than a means of administering social reproof.