It was one in the afternoon. Nick Simon was alone in the house waiting for his parents to pick him up for Christmas when he heard it.
“I heard like a 300 pound person running as fast as they could up the stairs to the basement,” Simon told iHorror. “And then stopping at the top of the stairs.”
He went over and looked. Nobody was there.
Simon was at Fantastic Fest with Heather Graham and Mimi Rogers to talk about What Happened to Doris?, his film about Doris Bither, the woman whose case inspired The Entity. The table had drifted into whether belief changes how you tell a ghost story. That was when one of his cast offered up the director. Nick, she said, had a ghost.
So I asked to hear one.
“We’d hear things all the time”
Simon did not present the basement stairs as a one time glitch. He presented it as the worst entry on a long list.
“Many things happened,” he said. “We’d hear things all the time. We’d see things like in the corner of our eyes.”
Corner of the eye stuff is the easiest haunting to talk yourself out of. Most of us have watched a coat on a chair turn into a person for half a second. The stairs were a different category because Simon did the thing people in horror movies never do fast enough. He got up and checked. Nobody there. He went back and sat down on the couch.
“It was such a specific,” he started, and then the sentence gave way to the fact that it still gives him chills.
The bed did not make the cut
Someone at the table clearly knew the catalog and asked about the bed shaking. Simon did not need a reminder.
“Oh, the bed shaking, dude,” he said. “That was weird.”
Then he demoted it. “I wasn’t as scared as that because you were probably asleep, you know.”
The ranking is the interesting part. Simon had already run the skeptic’s checklist on his own house. A shaking bed happens when you are half asleep and your brain is unreliable. He also had roommates and figured the bed might have been them. The stairs had no such exit. He knew he was by himself. It was daytime.
There was also the front door. According to Simon it would slam.
He is not describing a house that frightened him in a general way. He is ranking incidents by how easy they are to explain away, and the one at the top is the one he could not.
Not a press anecdote
Simon never says the house shaped What Happened to Doris? and I am not going to say it for him. He does not say how old he was or what he believed before he lived there. What the conversation does establish is that this is not a story he dusted off for festival interviews.
“You told me that story when we first met,” one of his cast told him.
So the director of a film about a woman who said something was in her house has a house story of his own. He tells it with the boring details left in. The time of day. The couch. The parents who were on their way.
Ghost stories are supposed to happen at 3 a.m. with the power out. Simon’s happened at one in the afternoon while he waited for his parents to pick him up for Christmas. Nobody told whatever was on those stairs it was supposed to wait until dark.
