Ghost Stories

Every house my grandmother lived in was haunted, or so I was told growing up. The family concluded that it was her. We did this not in the, you are crazy kind of way, but with the pure belief in her ability to summon the spirits to her. This same mantle was given to her brother Haven and in the next generation, my Aunt Cy.

The family would gather in that dinning room where the yellowed bulbs could never quite knock the shadows out of the room. Where the paint was a little dingy and the nick knacks didn't make a lot of sense. The adults would be up at the table taking about old times, West Virginia and why we don't put baby shoes on the table. They would laugh and cry, saturating themselves in the walk down memory lane.

This was just a little dry for my liking back then, but it was the perfect intro I needed to shift the topic to my favorite. "Was that place haunted? Tell us about the ghost light, the stove that moved or the vanishing wolf.". This was just a smattering if the supernatural stories they loved to tell, but I was just priming the pump.

When we lived in Milford, my Mom or my Aunt would start, we hated going into the basement. I could see everything the described, the dingy white stairs lead down under a naked bulb to the packed dirt floor of basement. The canter of the floor had a bump, a hardened mound really. It was five feet long, maybe a little shorter and roughly two feet across. It made you think of a casket for a child, drove in the idea that something was down there.

My Mom walked the stairs to get some canned vegetables from the side wall. The large furnace snorted at her as she, full of fear, entered its lair. The branches of the dark metal beast grew up into the house, like an angry tree. The shadows played across the floor, little imps in her vision. The mound, where she had decided a little girl was buried, stayed dark.

Movement came from near the furnace, drawing her eyes away from the rest of the shadowy chaos. It was a hand. Solid, tapping its fingers, angled in a way that implied an arm and a body just out of sight. Everything else she could sort out, but the hand didn't belong. Somewhere in her subconscious a war raged between running back upstairs or deciding it must be Cy. Settling for Cy, she picked up her pace, trying to scare her and chase her.

The hand slid down then out of sight. My mom rounded the bend, hands out stretched into nothing. In an instant she thought, I'm alone and then, worse, no I'm not. She couldn't see it, but she knew it was there, the hand which would later grab invisibly at her legs as she raced up and down those stairs.

As I listened I was fascinated trying to figure it out, what really happened. Was it real! Could it happen to me? It was trilling and frightening? Then who was this little girl in the dark? Everything they talked about was so close to things I knew, but all out of focus. If I could hear them today, I wonder, again, how different they would look.