I Want Proof

One of my non-writing projects of late is the maintenance and rental management of my Grandma's house. I've been lamenting why it has kept me from writing. But I figure you deserve to read a ghost story about the place.

That's right, my Grandma's House was haunted.
And I have proof.

Let's backtrack. My uncle Herb was the oldest and he had several sons that were near my age. If you talk to them to this day they'll swear the place is haunted and that they experienced strange goings-on when they would have a sleep-over there.

I stayed overnight at Grandma's house once or twice and I slept on the living room couch, but I must have been a sound sleeper because I never noticed anything.

However, my cousins said that they would be there and would hear pictures rattling on the walls. And one said that one night a picture came flying right off the wall!

I would normally dismiss their stories, except for the fact that I found proof.

Grandma's house is laid out with a core of central rooms and a large, L-shaped, three-season, enclosed front porch that was added on in the '50s. This results in redundant windows in the front bedroom--Grandma's room, and in the living room that all open onto the front porch.

You can see it in the first picture, but the second picture was taken before it was built. The Living Room window can be seen on the left.

Grandma kept two old davenports on the porch and they were the ideal place for a bored kid to hide from adults and read Science Fiction on a Sunday afternoon.

I know, because I was that bored kid. I still associate H. P. Lovecraft with the field near the swamp where the fog rolls in.

I never made too much of it at the time, but years later I remembered and put two and two together.

Back then I never quite understood why Grandma ran monofilament fishing string out her bedroom window, along the porch near the ceiling, and then into the living room window.

Now I wish I had some of that fishing line as proof the house really was haunted.

Not by ghosts, mind you, but by a trickster Grandma who loved to stir people up just to see what would happen.

I can imagine her crouched by her bedroom window tugging on that fishing line, and listening to hear the picture attached to the other end rattle and waiting for one of us kids to react.