Boo!
Are you horrified? Do I do that every year? I think I do. The point is, it's St. Patrick's Day and we're all getting ready to cut turkey with our families and spin a dreidel. Speaking of which...
I guess Jewish kids were sick of getting the shaft, AGAIN, when it comes to their holidays, so they get Mensch on a Bench, now, to ensure they're good for Hanukkah or something. Poor Jewish kids. Seriously, I'd tell Marvin about my Christmases and Easters and he'd be all, we look for a cracker. That'd be it. Their whole holiday. Oooo, we found a cracker! Cellllllebrate good times, come on!
Anyway, today is Arbor Day and because it is, I'm giving you a good Freaky Friday, sent by Faithful Reader Jennifer. Ready?
OOOOOOOOOooooWEEEEEoooooooo.....
Dear June,
I thought you might be interested in the following benevolent ghost story for your Freaky Friday series.
My husband and I recently purchased an old home in Thomasville, Georgia. It's more than 100 years old and, of course, people have asked if it was haunted. When we were moving in, my sister-in-law got the willies when heading up our stairs. My mother grew up in a haunted house (with a true dirty-old-man sort of ghost), so she cackled (yes, really) over the thought ours might now be.
We spent a few weekends camping out between closing on the property and moving in and didn't really notice anything other than the usual old house noises echoing around empty rooms. After we moved in, though, and spent that first night in our new master bedroom, things were different.
While my husband slept on, blissfully unaware, I was awakened multiple times in the night by a series of four knocks coming from who knows where--I certainly wasn't about to go investigate! There were also sounds of boxes being slid around the wood floors downstairs--that creeped me out the most, even if nothing was out of place the next morning. I was not amused; mostly I was just tired!
Now, I'm fairly comfortable with the concepts of the astral realm, etc. I read Tarot cards and have done some scrying and Ouija board work. I consider myself fairly intuitive, but I've never had any one-on-one experiences with spirits outside of the scrying and spirit board stuff. But I did know that I wasn't going through another night like that one, so--through meditation/visualization--I put up a security blanket around the house to ward against any metaphysical mischief (I also may have told the house, aloud, "Not tonight, Momma needs some sleep!"). It seemed to work, no more strange noises in the night.
We hosted a Halloween party last weekend and, knowing that a couple of my guests are sensitive to ghosts/spirits, I took down the security blanket (but left up a net--I'm semi-brave, not fully stupid) and told anyone/thing listening that as long as they could play nice, they could come play tonight.
Having just finished up one of the house tours to a group of guests, the Friend M told me, "You're not alone." Okay then! Apparently she encountered two spirits in the house, but they just seemed curious about what was going on. Fair enough. She wasn't able to get much more from them as she wasn't feeling well that evening.
Friend S, though, really clicked with one of the spirits: a woman, appearing to be in her mid-30s, who was decidedly happy that there was laughter in the house again after so very long of being tired and down. S did not yet know that the house had been rented out as a personal care home for the last 10+ years and was vacant for a time before that. I don't doubt for a minute that the state of the house when we purchased it reflected the state of the care the patients received during their time here.
But that wasn't all she shared! There is a section of the staircase that she is uneasy on; that she clutches the railing for dear life as she goes down. It was either that she'd fallen down them or that she'd witnessed a fall. Also, in what is now my office, there was an argument of life-altering sort/things-that-cannot-be-unsaid vein that took place between a man and a woman.
In my research into the house's history, I'd learned that the original owner did take a tumble down the stairs and was hospitalized. And I believe it was shortly before his passing or the cause of it. So, if it was his fall that the woman witnessed, that could make her his daughter. And I also know that the daughter was a schoolteacher and never married, living out her days in this house at least through her retirement, so I got the impression it was an argument over a suitable suitor. She didn't seem to indicate (via S) that this was wrong.
I'm looking forward to finding out what more this spirit (that I keep calling Eleanor in my head for whatever reason) has to show me about the house. Though, right now, I'd happily settle for the whereabouts of the leak that started last night from the upstairs pipes!
