Another Ghost Story

You may recall my tale of Grandma's haunted house from a while ago.

I have an update.

I was walking into the grocery store near my house and at that moment walking out was my cousin Jerry. This was surprising since I never see him anywhere except at family get-togethers, much less at the grocery. I had written the earlier blog post mere hours before and I told him what I'd written. (He was one of the cousins telling me the house was haunted.)

He smiled and said, "It wasn't just Grandma."

"Oh?"

Turns out that he and his twin brother, Larry, were sleeping over at Grandma's house and they were in the back bedroom. After they went to bed, Larry saw something out the window. He got scared. And then both of them saw something spooky. After a few minutes their terror got the better of them and they went running and crying out to get help from Grandma.

They told their tale of spectral visitation and after a few minutes, Grandma asked casually...

"Where's Mary?"

Though the boys had made a huge racket and gotten Grandma out of bed, Aunt Mary had not come out to see what was up. And when they went to search for her, she wasn't in her bedroom, either.

A bit more looking and she came in from the outside, holding a flashlight and a stick on which was affixed a doll's head. That was what she had been waving outside the window for my cousins' benefit.

I guess between Grandma and Aunt Mary they must have had quite a cousin-scaring operation gong on.

Pity I wasn't a lighter sleeper and didn't have more sleepovers there.

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.