My ghost story…rewritten (& now w/photos!)

This is the story that was ‘lost’. I didn’t like it when I read it over so I deleted it. Sorry for the confusion. 🙂

The house that five generations of my family occupied for 80 years was built in 1859. I know this for sure because when we were ripping down rotting siding to replace it, we found a note written in pencil in great big letters stating "DORINDA   JULY 2(?) 1859!"  I can only imagine that a carpenter was celebrating the birth of his daughter and exuberantly wrote down her name and birth date on the paper underneath our siding, where it stayed perfectly preserved for 140 years until we uncovered it in the late 1990’s. Wow, huh?

The house as it was when the family bought it in 1921.

The house as it was in the 40’s

In a house that old, there are sure to be any number of ghosts and we did have our share. The most predominant one was the young woman who lost her engagement ring in the kitchen which was in the cellar at the time. The story goes that the entire cellar was searched and dug through to no avail. All we knew in the family was you had to keep your eye on your rings or keep them on if you didn’t want them to go missing! There have just been too many rings lost in that house to be coincidences, and our theory is that this woman is still looking for her ring! There is also a shadow that keeps going into the bathroom, which used to be the dumbwaiter room that brought the food up from the kitchen in the cellar. My theory is split on this one. Is it our enormously ‘house-proud’ great grandmother still working and keeping an eye on her beloved house, or is it the same young woman heading down into the cellar for one more look around for her ring?

Other than that, there have been smaller things that happened, like the time I was sitting in the living room watching TV late at night when I heard someone walking by me, creaking all the boards and even rocking my chair a bit because the floorboards were soft near my chair. Being ever so brave, I went right to bed and hid under the covers after that! LOL! And when my daughter was very young, I would hear her laughing and having conversations in her room and when I asked who she was talking to, she would describe ladies in ‘pretty dresses". I was sure glad when that stopped!

So all of that was pretty run of the mill in our house, but nothing prepared me for one day in August of 1995 when I was outside watering my flowers. Our much loved grandfather who helped raise us and was our father figure had been in the hospital for 3 weeks and at 89, we were just waiting for him to leave us. But he was always stubborn and a fighter and he just kept hanging onto life and he was in such misery. It was a difficult time for all of us to see him suffer like that after all the good he had done for so many people in his lifetime. I remember thinking that we wouldn’t let our pets suffer like this when there was no hope of recovery, but people we just let linger on and on hooked up to medicine and machines that just keep them alive to suffer more. It was really weighing on me when I finally took a deep breath and tried to shake off the depression and just took a quick look around me and then went back to watering my flowers. And then I froze.

I could not have possibly seen what I just had, so I slowly looked back to my left and sure enough, the fence that had been torn down when I was a kid was there, and the swing that was big enough for 2 or 3 people that had also been thrown out when I was a kid, was back instead of the picnic table that had been there for years and years by that time. And on this swing was a gentleman dressed in a suit from maybe the 20’s or 30’s. The suit was brown, and he had a hat on and had one arm extended along the back of the swing with one foot resting leisurely on his knee and in his other hand he had a pipe. He looked for all the world to be relaxing patiently and he had a soft smile and twinkling eyes as though he were enjoying the reaction he was getting from me.

I knew this man. He appeared to be in his 40’s and I had only seen pictures of him at 20 or elderly, but I knew who he was from his pictures. He was my great grandfather Pat. The father of my grandfather in the hospital and the one who had bought this house way back in 1921. And if I had any doubts that I really saw him, I didn’t after I found out that he smoked a pipe, something I saw when he was sitting there. All the men in my family smoked cigars. There were no pipes or mention of pipes in my family, and certainly no photos of him smoking one, so there was no way I could have known that fact.

So why did I see him? I knew just by looking at this man that he was letting me know that everything would be all right. That he was waiting right there for my grandfather, and it wouldn’t be much longer. And it wasn’t. But when my grandfather did pass away, I knew he was met by my great grandfather, and I knew that we all have guardian angels in the people we have loved that have passed on before us, even if we didn’t get to meet them in life. Otherwise, why would this man care about making me feel better, which I was very grateful for. He did it because I was his great granddaughter and he knew I was hurting because his son was suffering.

The house is no longer in the family, and I don’t believe the people in it now know or care about it’s history. But none of us will forget any of it and the house and all the family before us will always be a part of our hearts and memories.

So that’s my favorite ghost story! Happy Halloween everyone!

This is Pat, my great grandfather driving.  This photo is circa 1914. That’s my grandfather in the front seat who looks about 7 and my his brother in the back seat. I don’t believe Pat is even 30 years old here.

 
My grandfather in his college years a couple of years after the family bought the house. That’s him in the middlewith his favorite dog Gyp. And on the right is Grandpa holding Alysia, his first great grandchild born on his 79th birthday in 1985. I told him that was the last birthday present he was ever going to get from me since I worked so hard on it! LOL! Right about the time this photo was taken I asked him how it felt to be a great grandfather. He looked at me in surprise and said "I’ve ALWAYS been a great grandfather!"  His answer was true to form and it made me laugh. I have to agree, he was always a great grandfather!!

And here are the Halloween photos I’ve been promising.

This was last year as Gomez and Morticia Addams. I felt like Cher all night though because I had to keep swishing the hair out of my face! lol.

Not a great picture (I think we were kinda in the bag here. lol) but you get the idea. We were trying to be The Fonz and one of the Pulanski twins but because of the vest instead of the leather jacket, we were dubbed Chachi and Joannie! Next year we go as Hawkeye Pierce and Hot Lips Houlihan! (I get to be Hot Lips! LOL!)