It’s that time of year again! Halloween! The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting darker earlier, and the ghost stories come out. I will admit. I’m a HUGE ghost hunting fan. I watch the shows (Ghost Hunters on the SciFi Channel and Most Haunted on the Travel Channel). And, this is the time of the year, I can’t get enough of them.
A local radio show helps with the obsession as they take calls from people with real-life ghost stories. I have never called, but do have one of my own. The Hubby can verify he gets the same story from my parents, so it wasn’t just a kid’s perspective on a different issue.
When I was 9, we lived in a rental house where there was a ghost. We noticed it soon after we moved into the house. We would be sitting in the living room watching TV and hear someone walking up the stairs. The upstairs was sort of a master bedroom suite where my parents slept, so no one really went up there except for them. The stairs were very creaky, so there was no sneaking upstairs quietly. The sounds were heard were identical to what it sounded like if a person walked up the stairs. Heck, we counted them one night, and it was the exact number of steps. Periodically, we would hear the ghost walk through the bedroom. In general, however, the ghost always walked a loop: up the stairs, through the bedroom, and back down the stairs.
We didn’t think much of the ghost until we had a much bigger incident. My parents were unpacking in the basement and asked me to go upstairs to the storage space off of their bedroom to get something out of it. I was about halfway up the stairs to their bedroom when we heard a huge crash. It was the sound of glass breaking – a lot of it. I ran downstairs to see what happened and met my parents on their way to the stairs. We looked through the entire house, outside of the house – and found nothing. We even asked our neighbors thinking maybe it had occurred closer to them. Nothing. For the entire house to hear it and find nothing was a bit unnerving. My parents finally chalked it up to the ghost. We never had it happen again – just continued to have the walking around.
Years later after we moved out of the house (for other reasons), we were talking to someone who knew owners of that house – the owners prior to the person who owned it when we lived there. She told us it was a tragic story. Of course, given our experience there, our ears perked up. She said the family who lived there were supposed to go on vacation to visit family. At the last minute, the dad had to stay behind due to work or something. After work one night, he and a friend went fishing at a nearby lake where he drowned. His wife and kids were so upset; they sent their family up to pack the house and sell it as they could not bear to go back. After the woman who was telling us the story left, we all looked at each other. It made sense. We had always wondered if the ghost was looking for something or someone. I guess it was the dad. Over the years, others who lived there or visited there confirmed the story. It was odd, but at the time we were living there, it was no big deal. It’s funny how that happens.
