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.
Some months later, my mother was convinced that there was a disturbance. She was in the kitchen, frying eggplant to make eggplant parmesan, my father's favorite dish. No one else was home. She was frustrated, since she did not like to cook and abhorred frying foods. Suddenly, she distinctly heard a voice as though there was another woman in the kitchen with her! The voice said sharply, "Put the catfish in the skillet!"
My mother was startled, to say the least. She stopped what she was doing, trying to decide if she was crazy or just tired and aggravated. Then she heard the same woman again, "You know, you don't have to be EYE-talian to cook!"
Needless to say, this incident really shook up my mother. She was beginning to believe.
One night soon afterwards, my father awoke during the night. He saw a woman standing in front of my mother's triple dresser and large mirror, brushing her hair. He sleepily mumbled, "Come back to bed, Bethany!"
My mother just rolled over and mumbled, "What's wrong?"
My father bolted upright and realized that my mother had been in bed the entire time! This was the first time that any of us actually saw the ghost. It certainly made an impression. I think that she planned it that way!
After that first "sighting," my father began to see the ghost fairly regularly-sometimes as often as 2-3 times in a week. It was rather common for the family to be sitting in the living room watching television, and for my father to suddenly gasp, "Hey! There! Didn't you all see that?"
He was referring to seeing the wispy phantom walk right down the middle of the room, between the seating-and us. None of the rest of us ever saw her, though. It was quite funny to me, because things were in complete reversal. My mother was still a bit skeptical, despite her auditory experience. And I had felt unheard for years, sensing the ghost watching me at night in my childhood bedroom, yet unable to convince the adults that anything out of the ordinary was there.
At varying times we would individually or collectively see items move and experience other unexplained phenomenon. Once, my father was just walking in the front door to an empty house to hear my sister's voice coming through the answering machine. "Hello? Hello? What happened?"
Apparently, my sister had called, and the phone was picked up after just a couple of rings. She thought she heard breathing at the other end of the line, but no one would reply to her. After nearly a full minute, my father grabbed the phone after walking in, and alleviated her fears that something had happened to whoever was answering the phone. He joked that it was only the ghost answering, not to be concerned-she was already dead.
So, who was the ghost? We never received a concrete answer to that question, though we did have a clue. My father held a garage sale in the early 1980s, and a very elderly man was looking through the sale items. My father asked if he could help him find anything, and the man explained that he was mainly there because he had lived in the house when he was a very little boy. His grandmother had also lived with the family, and she had died in the house. They moved out shortly afterward, around 1920. I think we could have learned so very much more, except that my father was never known for his tact. As soon as this poor gentleman reached that point in his story, my father blurted out, "Oh! That must be the ghost I've been seeing!" Needless to say, the man left and never returned.
I never felt as though the ghost was actually evil-just angry and confused. I think that perhaps she did not understand that her time was passed, or that she just could not accept death. I hope that eventually she will find the peace that she craves.