by Jenni Beard

Created on: October 31, 2009

I visited my childhood home just a few weeks ago. I vaguely felt her presence, but it was dim, like a light bulb nearly burnt out. I smiled inside, knowing that the house's current owner was unaware of his invisible guest. I silently said my final goodbye.

The home I grew up in was originally a tiny two or three room bungalow, built c. 1890. Various owners built additions over the years, so by the time my parents bought it in 1972, it was much larger-though still a small home.

From the time that I was a little girl, I often felt that someone was watching me-especially at night. When I expressed my fear to my parents, I'm sure that they were certain that these were the typical fears of a young child, and paid little attention to it except to tell me that there were no such things as ghosts.

When I was almost seven years old, my younger sister was born. In order to have a bedroom on the first floor for the new baby, my father refinished a part of the attic into a new bedroom for me. I was pleased with my new room, and felt much more safe and comfortable in it. The one thing I disliked about it was that if I needed to get up during the night and go downstairs to use our only bathroom, I was terrified of doing so. I would wait for as long as I could, then rush downstairs and back up again as quickly as possible. I distinctly recall feeling safe again as soon as I reached the landing at the top of the stairs. I discovered, many years later as an adult, that the attic rooms were added onto the house sometime around the 1940s.

In 1981, things became very exciting! My elderly grandmother was visiting, and seated in a rocking chair beside an old television set. My younger sister sat in a chair towards the rear of the room, and I was in another chair. My father had been lying on the sofa as we watched TV and chatted, and when a commercial break came on he decided to get up to do something. He stopped before leaving the room and turned to finish a conversation with us, placing his nearly empty beer can on top of the television. Within a minute, the can levitated about 18 inches into the air, hesitated for a moment, and then proceeded to fly towards the rear of the room before landing on the floor. My poor grandmother nearly had a heart attack; my father was completely speechless. My sister did not seem fazed, and I just thought that it was great. My father's hollering brought my mother running into the room, and she decided that we were all crazy when we tried to explain.

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