MAURICE THE FRIENDLY GHOST

Everyone likes a good ghost story, which is probably why our interview with neighbors Mark and Priscilla Rieves for the April magazine eventually turned into swapping spooky stories.

The Rieveses claim a mischievous ghost, whom they affectionately call Maurice, haunts their bungalow in Vickery Place, where strange things began to happen.

It was just little things here and there, like one of them would put something down, but then when they’d look for it a later — sometimes only minutes later — it would be gone. They’d search high and low for it, and then go back to the place where they left it, and it’d be sitting there in plain sight.

“You’d be like, ‘I know I put this knife in this drawer,’ and you’d turn that drawer upside down and it’s not there,” Mark explains, “and then you’d come back to that drawer two or three times looking for it, and suddenly you’d find it right on top of everything and it’s like, ‘There’s no way.’ ”

At first Priscilla thought Mark was messing with her, but he insists he wasn’t — someone or something else was.

They decided it was a ghost, and after doing a little research on the house, they named it Maurice for a man who lived in the house as a child before going on to fight and die in Iwo Jima in 1945. They like to believe it’s a childhood Maurice playing tricks on them.

“He’s a friendly ghost,” Mark says. “He just hides things.”