Haunted Too. Dorah L. Williams

know if the mailroom employees are still seeing him to this day. I hope not. I hope he is finally at peace by now.

      My Grandmother’s Spirit

      This isn’t really about a place being haunted so much as an experience I had with a ghost. And since it was my grandmother, I prefer to call her a spirit.

      When I was nine, my parents signed me up for a week away at a summer camp with our church. I didn’t want to go. I had never been away from home before even for one night, never mind a whole week. I begged my parents not to make me go, but they kept telling me it was for the best.

      I knew something was going on because my mother was so sad and there were a lot of long-distance phone calls from far-away relatives, which usually only happened on birthdays or Christmas. My parents seemed to want to get me out of the house, and that made me feel even worse and want to leave even less.

      When I asked to see my grandmother before I left, and was told I couldn’t, I really broke down. My grandmother and I were very close. I thought she would talk my mother into letting me stay home if I could just explain to her how scared I was to go. But no one would let me visit her, or even talk to her on the phone. So I felt completely miserable by the time I was put on the bus for camp at our church the next week.

      I refused to admit it in the letter I wrote home, but I did enjoy myself there after the first few hours of feeling sorry for myself. The last night that I was at camp I was lying in my bottom bunk with my eyes closed, but I wasn’t sleeping or dreaming. I felt the bunk sink down as someone sat beside me. And when I looked up, there was my grandmother, smiling down at me. She gently brushed the hair back from my eyes and cupped my cheeks in her hand, as she always did.

      Looking back now it is surprising to me that I only felt comforted and excited to see her. I never wondered how she got there or why she had come alone, so late at night, to see me. I was just glad she was there. She sat there on my bunk holding my hand until I fell asleep.

      My parents arrived to take me home the next morning, and I was eager to see them, but my mother looked even sadder than before I left. When we got to the car my father told me that my grandmother had died the night before. She had been very sick and dying in the hospital when I left for camp; that is why I couldn’t see or phone her. My parents thought it would be best for me not to be there during that time, and that is why I was sent to camp that week.

      I thought they were obviously mistaken and excitedly told them that my grandmother had come to see me the night before. I could see the glances they gave each other, and no one spoke for a while.

      Finally my mother asked me how her mother had looked when I saw her. I told her she looked really happy. My mother cried a lot when I told her that, but said it made her feel so much better.

      Bad Vibrations

      We like to take Sunday drives in the country and would often pass a quaint turn-of-the-century farmhouse that sits on top of a hill along a rural road just outside of town. I always thought it was abandoned. It wasn’t boarded up, but there was never a vehicle or person anywhere around.

      And I could never understand why it was not being lived in; I always enjoyed looking at it whenever our drives took us in that direction. So one day when we noticed a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn and another sign at the base of the long driveway indicating there was an open house that afternoon, I was curious to have a better look at it.

      My husband wanted to see it too, so we pulled over to the side of the road and parked the car. As we walked toward the house, I realized for the first time what a fair distance the house was from the road, and as we got closer I started to get the weirdest feeling. I almost felt sick, I was feeling so anxious. I felt so stressed I just wanted to leave before we even entered the house, but had no idea why. I had felt fine in the car. That feeling just came out of nowhere and hit me so hard.

      There were a few other couples wandering around the house and grounds. Every room had been freshly painted, and the floors had all been redone. But I couldn’t shake that awful feeling, no matter how nice it looked. My husband was more interested in the plumbing and electrical service, though, and said he didn’t have that same creepy feeling that I did.