electric mist

a ghost story

Not long after we were first married, we bought a house from the elderly daughter of the woman who died there. The old (now dead) woman had been a friend of my husband's grandmother. The house was across the street from Granny and run-down and in desperate need of everything, but it was cheap and we could (sort of) afford it.

The previous owner had died in the master bedroom (and if you had seen the really large, really ugly, and I mean horribly ugly flowered wallpaper in that room, and learned she'd been bedridden there... well, I'm sure staring at those flowers would kill anyone.) When the daughter sold it to us, she was delighted that we were going to be having a baby soon because her mother had wanted to have many children and had not been able to and her one daughter hadn't been able to have any, either. It tickled the daughter that there would be children laughing there -- she thought her mother would have loved knowing that.

Immediately, odd things happened in the house, but I chalked it up to it being an old house. Things fell in the other room, things moved from room to room when I had been the only one home during the day, etc., but to tell you the truth, I didn't pay any attention to it. I assumed I'd forgotten where I put things or the things that had fallen had been set precariously and, you know, gravity works. There was no such thing as "ghosts" and I never even contemplated the concept.

After Luke was born, the frequency of odd things happening in the house increased, though I still didn't think too much of it. I did notice that when I'd walk into the living room, the rocking chair the owner had left for me... was rocking on its own. It did that fairly often. I moved it from spot to spot to spot, convinced there was something about the uneven old floors which was causing it to rock as I walked across the room. Nothing helped. It kept rocking.

Several times when Luke would wake up crying in the middle of the night (which he did often -- he suffered badly from colic) and I would stumble from exhaustion towards his room, he would stop crying suddenly and sort of sound happy. Every one of those times when I got to his door, I could have sworn Carl's grandmother was leaning over his crib, soothing him. Only Granny wasn't at our house, since it was usually two a.m. or somesuch, and I would blink and step toward the bed and no one was there and Luke would start crying again, and I was certain I was in an exhaustion-stupor and hallucinating or dreaming. And I probably was. That child didn't sleep for nine months, and I was completely worn out.

One day Luke was more fussy than usual and the only thing that hushed him was me holding him and walking with him, and I was so tired and he was so cranky, I was in tears. The rocking chair just kept rocking faster and faster and finally I turned to it and said, "Would you PLEASE STOP? You're making me a nervous wreck."

And the damned thing stopped. No kidding, just stopped rocking.

I felt my scalp go all tingly and my heart raced and I sort of froze there a moment. Luke hushed and looked toward the rocker and we stood a long time. Finally, he started fussing again and I went back to pacing in the same spot, keeping an eye on the rocker, sure that since I was pacing the rhythm of my movement would make the rocker start back up again, but it didn't.

I thought about all the times I'd seen the old woman and knew without being able to explain it that if there was someone there, she was trying to help but just didn't really know how. Without making a bit of rational sense, I turned back toward the rocker and apologized for shouting at her. I said, "You can rock now. I'm okay."

It started rocking. Slowly, easily, not abrupt and rough, but it rocked.

I saw her on several more occasions and things kept moving and more than one person thought they'd seen Granny in the other room when they visited even though she wasn't there at that specific time, but I never tried to explain. I was pretty certain if I said anything, people would assume I was not fit to take care of Luke, so I kept it to myself all those years. Carl occasionally saw something, too, but he never really thought about it, I think. Like me in the beginning, he assumed he was tired or that his walking across the floor had caused that thing to fall two rooms over or the chair to rock or whatever.

Years later, when Luke was six, we moved and I took the rocker with me. I have to admit, I really sort of hoped she would come with the rocker to our new house because I had gotten used to her silent presence, and honestly, I always felt like she was looking after the kids. Several times when Luke had been sick in the middle of the night with a fever and not making any noise, something fell in my room waking me up. (We didn't have pets inside at that time.) On more than one occasion, Luke was certain Granny had gone to see him in the middle of the night and of course when I asked her, she hadn't done that. (Granny could barely walk across the street and she was blind in one eye -- she wouldn't have tried to negotiate it in the middle of the night.)

I have to say I was kinda bummed when the rocker no longer rocked by itself at the next house (built very much like the first and from the same era, same kind of floors). But time moved on and I forgot all about it. Granny died and my sister-in-law moved into her old house and one day she commented about the family that had bought our old house.

They were abruptly moving out. The woman was convinced the house was haunted and not in a pleasant way. She was hysterical and upset and would not set foot back in that house. The next door neighbor said that she had heard the mother and father arguing visciously on more than one occasion and screaming at the kids, and apparently that's when the freakish ghost-type of things would happen. Things fell, something went flying at the dad one time with no one there to throw it when he was yelling at the kids and the mom just wanted out. They sold the house at a great loss just to get the hell out of there.

I laughed. My sister-in-law wondered out loud if I had ever had experience with a ghost there and I told her yeah, but she'd liked us.

When the next family moved in, (and I was told the family leaving said nothing about the ghost to them), they commented to my sister-in-law that the house was haunted, but they liked her. They had deduced it was an old woman (apparently several people have seen her like we had.) They had small children and seemed to be generally happy, and I felt relieved that our ghost had some new children to love. I hope that trend continues.

Posted by toni at October 31, 2004 12:17 PM