Dear Lee,

Are antiques haunted? Do you have a clock that strikes at odd times or a light that keeps flickering no matter how often you try to fix it? Is it caused by long-gone relatives trying to communicate? We often hear about so-called ghosts that inhabit a place or a thing. A friend “knows” minor accidents are caused by spirits and so lights a purple candle in the house to send them away.

We have our own weird ghost stories. Ralph’s favorite chair, an Egyptian Revival armchair with ormolu trim of sphinx heads and lions, had to be repaired; a spring was poking through the seat. So we sent it to a well-known department store that knew how to treat antique furniture. They sent it to a small upholstery shop that burned to the ground, destroying their work and our chair. Like all serious collectors, we knew who made the chair, knew its previous owners and had seen similar chairs sold at auction.

After much searching, we found an identical chair, had it re-covered in the same kind of black velvet used on the old chair, and arranged to have it delivered the day before Thanksgiving. It was like the old chair reborn. The end of an arm of the old one had a wiggly ormolu sphinx head we kept screwing back in place. The first time Ralph sat in his new chair he was amazed to find the new chair’s head could be wiggled—just like the old one, we joked. We went to bed and at 4:30 a.m. our security system started ringing. It was the fire alarm, and we soon had a house filled with firefighters. They searched the house, but there were no signs of smoke, heat or fire. Was it an oddly timed malfunction of the alarm? Or did the old, burned chair send a welcoming message to our new chair?

This month Kim encouraged me to start thinking about “downsizing” and, for the first time, I have been selling and giving away signs and boxes in the Kovel advertising collection. Is that why a poster for a 1940s airshow slid down the hall wall last week, and carried a Centlivre beer sign and a “Rough on Rats” sign with it? Even though they were in antique frames with glass, nothing broke. My purple-candle friend says it is a message from Ralph approving of the sales. Or was it just a very old picture wire that finally broke?

Do you have a haunted antique? Let us know and we will report on the most interesting ones for Halloween. Write to editor@kovels.com.