The Dead Part of the House

Episode 9, originally airing on March 3, 1959

This one takes place in California. The woman has a Chinese servant.

A little girl is coming to live there along with her father. Apparently her mother has recently died.

The young girl tells the servant that the rooms upstairs are not empty despite what he told her about them being just empty rooms.

The girl has an accident while pouring some lemonade and her father gets mad and shakes her around quite a bit. What happened was that a picture of his wife/her mother also fell and he says that the girl hates her.

The girl is later on the supposedly abandoned second floor and claims she heard someone call her name. She's drawn for a former nursery and says she wants that for her room.

She tells the servant that three girls, Jennifer, Rose and Mary, said she could have their music box. The servant searches for it and finds it just where the girl told her it would be even though he was positive there was nothing there but empty boxes. Later her father and the woman (Aunt Mina) do try to fix up the room for her but for some reason the gas (for the heating pipes) will not work in that room but it will work in every other room, and that's even with putting in a brand new pipe to avoid any clogs.

The voices the girl has been hearing have been trying to help her win the love of her father and even taught her how to do the charleston, a popular dance of the 20's, I think. Later he tells her he plans to move back home to Denver and she refuses to go.

The servant explains to the father that the room is haunted and that is why the previous tenants in the house moved out. He explains that during the 20's there were three little girls who lived there and the father was "shamefully neglectful" of them.

The Aunt freaks out when she's in the room and one of the spirits tries to hug her. The father finds out that three children died from escaping gas in the room thirties years previously.

The girl tells her father that the three spirits told her she should willingly go with her father and move back to Denver. In the end, though, the father seems to believe in the spirits as, alone in the room, he says thank you to them.

It's well known in paranormal research that children seem to have an easier time making contact with various spirits/ghosts/ etc. then adults which is probably due to the fact that belief in the paranormal is sort of washed out of people as they get older by the skeptical adult society. Many a case of a young boy or girl having an "imaginary playmate" could actually be the child seeing the spirit/ghost of another child.

This is even reflected in the Christian literature by C.S.Lewis and his Narnia chronicles where, as the children get older, it gets harder and harder for them to visit Narnia.

Paranormal activity often involve the mind of the participant, and if that mind has been taught by others that certain things are impossible, then it will tend to shut out any occurrence of those things, no matter how real they might be.

A really good episode.

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