Tuesday, October 6, 2009

A Ghostly Tale


A new and cherished friend, Paige Ryter, has submitted a true accounting from her childhood. She'll be submitting more throughout the month, so stay tuned. She's also going to ask her sister, who just happens to work with the "dead", to supply us with one or two from her experiences. I'm excited:

Check out Paige's web site, but first...enjoy:

When I was a young child, from the age of about two to five, my father was a college professor in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. It snowed year round, it seemed, with flurries on the fourth of July from lake effect snows. Thus, the place was dark and cloudy most of the time, letting a young child’s imagination and fear run wild every time the sun went down.

The house was older, with one bathroom on the first floor. So if you needed to use the bathroom, you’d better do it before you trudged upstairs to bed. There are four girls and one boy in my family, and my youngest sister was a newborn at this time, sleeping in a crib in the hallway. I’m next-to-youngest, and my older two sisters and I shared a very long room with three beds. The only way out was a door through the closet, with clothes hanging on both sides. It was terrifying at night if you had to use the restroom. Many nights, we’d hear voices in the basement of the old house, as if the ghosts were having a party. I’d have thoughts of monsters in our room, coming through that closet door, which was right at the foot of my bed.

My mother was the most affected by the eeriness of the house. She had five children, and many nights, she’d hear a baby crying. She’d get out of bed and check on all of us, but we’d all be asleep—even my youngest sister. But that baby crying would keep her awake, sounding like it was coming from the attic. My brother had a bedroom that contained the same attic door, but he was never bothered by it. But Mom would hear it, and being the tough woman she is, she’d just ignore it and go back to sleep.

My parents decided when I was five that it was time to move from the darkness of Erie county and go south, to Lancaster county. Dad got a job at the university in Lancaster, and two weeks before we were to move, he went into town and told some guys at some store that we were moving and where we were going.

One of the guys turned to him and said, “Oh, the haunted house.”

“Haunted?” Dad’s ears perked up.

“Yes. That’s the place where a baby died in the attic. No one goes near that house, because it’s haunted.”

Dad and Mom had us packed up fast, and within a week, my uncle came to the house to help us move in a U-Haul. My uncle slept in my brother’s room—the room attached to the attic, and stayed up all night reading comic books, he was that scared of that house. We moved out, and since then, have found out that the house was sitting on a gold mine of natural gas, which may have been the sound of voices talking coming from the basement. We’ll never know. The house was demolished, from what I’m told, and the story of the baby that died in the attic died with it. But I know I’ll never forget it. Ghosts are around us…

No comments:

Post a Comment

Romance Reviews

The Romance Reviews