'Haunting' a house

"How to 'Haunt' a House" (January/February 2008) was a wonderful bit of detective work, reasoning, and writing. Surely Mr. Radford is correct that Tom's bed was being kicked by Tom, not by an unseen being. Tom may well suffer from "restless legs syndrome" (RLS), but the sensation of the bed being kicked suggests strongly that he also suffers from the less common condition called "periodic limb movement disorder" (PLMD). These two are distinct movement disorders; both may occur simultaneously in the same person.

RLS was described in the sixteenth century but not truly recognized and studied until the 1940s. People with RLS have an irresistible urge to move their legs while at rest. These feelings may be present all day long, making it impossible for an individual to sit still; however, they are most common in bed at night. PLMD, also known as "nocturnal myoclonus," occurs only during sleep. It is marked by involuntary muscle contraction ranging from slight, continuous movement of the feet to the more common sudden and vigorous kicking of both legs. Sometimes the arms jerk as well. It was recognized as a separate disorder from RLS in the 1970s.

In addition, given the medical problems described in the article, Tom, especially if he is actually Hispanic, is at extremely high-risk of developing diabetes, which would make it possible that the "tapping" sensation that Tom feels in his feet results from developing peripheral neuropathy.

Michael Verber, MD

University of Texas Health

Science Center

San Antonio, Texas

While reading Benjamin Radford's article on a haunted house, I was reminded of my own "haunting" almost thirty years ago.

In the early 1980s, newly married, I moved with my wife into an older house on Ridge Avenue in Evanston, Illinois. The house was turn-of-the-century, two stories, squat, and solid. There was a wide front porch enclosed with windows, which had the unfortunate effect of placing the living room always in darkness. On the back of the house, off the dining room, was a wide, deep "alcove," really a room itself save that it lacked one wall. Two of the other walls were windowed, and I chose this bright and sunny area as my studio. (I am a comic book writer and illustrator, so already no stranger to ghosts and other odd things!)

The upstairs consisted of three bedrooms and a bathroom, grouped around a short, narrow hall. My wife, then a working actor in the Chicago area, took the smallest of the bedrooms as her home office. This was immediately above my studio.

One day about a week after we moved in, with my wife out on a round of auditions and my stepdaughter in school, I sat working on the latest issue of Fantastic Four, then my assignment as writer and artist. I heard the distinct sound of footsteps in the room above me proceeding across the room, down the short hall, down the stairs that led to the front door of the house, and then, disturbingly, doubling back and crossing the living room, the dining room, and finally ending right beside me as I sat at my drawing board. There was nothing there.

The next day, my wife and daughter once again out of the house, these footsteps were repeated, and repeated again on roughly alternate days for several months. I began to refer to it as the house "walking." "The house was walking again," I would say when my wife came home in the evening. I started keeping a log, jotting on the cover of my drawing board the times and days when the walking occurred. There seemed to be no pattern.

Finally, one day in early summer a contractor we had hired to look at the crumbling bricks of one front corner of the porch arrived. He determined that the bricks were crumbling because the house was subsiding, and the weight was settling into that corner. He asked to see the basement. I have no great fondness of basements, and this one was particularly unpleasant to me; it was low-ceilinged and poorly finished with odd-shaped rooms and old furniture that could set off my allergies. The contractor noted that the ancient tree trunks which were pushed up under some of the beams to support the house were in bad shape and much in need of replacement. So out they came, replaced by new, expanding metal supports.

After those went in, the house no longer "walked." It was the subsidence that had been the cause, with the "path" of the "footsteps" more or less transecting the house corner to corner, along the same line on which the subsidence was occurring.

I'll confess--I'd gotten used to the "mysterious stranger" (even though I don't believe in the supernatural in any way) and kind of missed his/her occasional walks through the house.

John Byrne

Comic book writer/illustrator

Benjamin Radford's client Tom--"How to Haunt a House"--experienced a phenomenon remarkably similar to something that happened to me. Fortunately, I eventually discovered the cause of mine and exorcized my "ghost."