Wednesday, June 15, 2011

BOO!

My mother was lucky. In the 1960's, after she had her first child, she, my father and my brother moved to Millville, Massacusetts, into a house that was over a hundred years old. Long ago, the people who built the house used to let out their extra rooms and spaces to travelers passing along the highway (picture a cowpath.) The title "highway house" came after the fact as that house just happened to be in a good middle of nowhere stopping point-as most good highway houses were. People traveling on foot or long distances would walk up to any house and offer coins or something in trade in order to rest for the night and maybe have shelter for their animals. Sometimes a number of travelers happened to be resting in the same highway house for the night. Of course, that's when things got interesting. Groups of humans-tsk, tsk. Some of the travelers saw opportunity when their roomates bunked down for the night. Murder was very common in highway houses because it was easy to do: wait till the house was quiet, strangle someone or slit his throat, take his money, sneak out and run away. By morning, no one knew which way the murderer had gone, often no one knew the murderer's name and often no one knew the name of the deceased. (I love the phrase "people these days" because it's silly-people don't change. Show me some horrible crimes that people are committing today, and I'll show you something worse from hundreds of years ago. Hola, Vlad the impaler and friends.) So, as the bodies piled up, so did the negative energy in the house fed by lingering emotions of grief, rage, sadness, confusion = ghosts. A good many decades later, here comes my mother and her little family renting the downstairs of the grand home now seperated into apartments. And there are cold spots. And there's a chair that rocks on its own. And the covers get pulled off the bed.
I have never seen a ghost and I've never felt a ghostly touch or blast of cold air. Nothing. I loved this story that my mother told, because she wouldn't lie about such a thing-she was a hard, straight-forward woman and didn't tell this story lightly. I could tell, she was years out of that house and still looked spooked when she spoke of it.
She had had enough when one night the covers were pulled off again. She opened her eyes to pull the blankets back up and saw a woman standing at the end of the bed... I used to aske her, "What did she look like?" "What did you do then?" But my mother couldn't remember. She didn't know if she ignored the woman and rolled over to go back to sleep. She didn't remember if she jumped up to turn on the lights or wake my father. She only remembered that the room was cold and that the woman was standing at the foot of the bed. Brrrr. Now I scared myself again. You got ghosts?

2 comments:

  1. We actually built our house next to a graveyard... WTF WERE WE THINKING??? I've had a couple of strange experiences, which scared the bejesus out of me at the time; however now, on recollection, were probably due to my overactive imagination and one too many beers... DOH!

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  2. This is a comment from Laura Letourneau Dube............I tried to comment on your blog but it keeps having me sign again... I even went as far as to create a blog but still won't let me post a comment anyway this is what I tried to write... I swear I see things in the corner of my eye sometimes or even smell a scent that reminds me of a person that has passed. I think Hayden did see a ghost when he was 2. He was sleeping in my bed one night, and woke up and kept asking me who the lady with the baby was. He ws pointing towards my burea, but I saw nothing. The only thing on was a night light. He wasn't scared or anything. I told him it was Meme and Emily. But have no idea who it was. Wish I could of seen what he saw.

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