haunted houses

Monika expressed some interest in the two haunted houses I've lived in, so here's the stories.

One was when I was living in my favorite house ever--just a tiny old farmhouse in the country with a great big patriarchal oak tree protecting it. My landlady, who must have been in her 70s, had been born and grew up in it. Friends had been renting it, and the first time I set foot in it, I fell in love with it--it was such a friendly, sweet-tempered, protective house--so as soon as they moved out, I grabbed it. The ghost was a mischievous poltergeist with a penchant for paper. I was doing a lot of writing at the time, and my poltergeist liked to hide manuscripts, magazines, newspaper clippings, things like that. Back then I had a lot less stuff and was slightly more organized, so I usually knew exactly where everything was, except when the poltergeist decided to hide something. It was a little house, and I would KNOW that whatever I was looking for had to be there. Sometimes I would look and look and look, and it would eventually show up in plain sight, like right on top of a stack of papers. I mean, some place where I couldn't *possibly* have missed seeing it while I was searching. You could practically hear him snickering. But he wasn't scary (as poltergeists can sometimes be) and he always brought the stuff back. That house could never have held a violent or frightening spirit.

The other one was scarier. When I was 15 my family moved into an old farmhouse on top of a hill overlooking a small river. My mother did some research on it and said that a long time ago it had been an Indian camping spot--maybe true, maybe not, but there was a good view, in the summer there was always a breeze (very important in these miserable Midwest summers), and the river probably provided both water and game. At any rate, by the time we moved in it was maybe 100 years old, and had belonged to 2 or 3 different families. When we moved in, we added a bathroom on the north side of the 2nd floor, where the hall turned (from east/west to north/south). The window overlooked the back, where the barn, storage shed, and horse stalls were. My bedroom was at the south end of the hall, so I had to pass by there coming and going, and esp. at night I used to go pretty fast, because I always had the impression something was going to grab my ankles--but you know, I had a pretty vivid imagination. I often had the impression when I was out back with my horse that someone was watching me from the bathrom window, which was an uncomfortable feeling, but my sibs and my grandfather all used that bathroom, so I didn't think much about it. Some days my mom would say that she had heard footsteps and voices upstairs while she was home alone, which my scientist father would pooh-pooh.

Fast forward about 15 years. After my parents died, I moved into the house. Since it was just me, I didn't use the upstairs, but I rented pasture to a couple of people who had horses. One day I came home from work and one of the renters said, puzzled, "Did you just get home?"

"Yes."

"Did you maybe forget something and come home earlier?"

"No."

"Well somebody's been watching me out of that window all afternoon." (indicating the bathroom window) She was fairly well freaked.

I mentioned this to my sibs when we got together for the holidays. We'd never talked about it before, but it turned out that all of us had had that spooky feeling that something was going to grab us in that one particular spot, and we'd all had the sensation of being watched from that specific window. (cue Twilight Zone theme) I've often wondered whether the people who bought the house from me ever have the sensation of being watched...

A final story--I never got to say goodbye to my mother. I was in Dallas when she had her stroke, and although she lingered several days she never regained consciousness. Maybe a week after she died, I had gone to buy groceries or something, and when I came home, the windows I had closed in the family room were open, and the rocking chair my mother used to sit in was moving gently back and forth. There are probably logical reasons, but I like to think it was my mother making one last visit.