Ghost Meme

Inspired by a request from tiellan and in the spirit of the Halloween season, I decided to tell a few ghosts stories.


The Haunted Picture

This happened to a close friend of mine who's identity I will cleverly disguise by calling her Robin.  It all started when Robin's grandmother, Helen, died.  Robin's parents, Jeanne and Van, went back to Ohio in order to settle Helen's estate.  They spent a couple of weeks clearing out the house and the night before they were set to leave, they were asleep in Helen's bed when Jeanne heard the closet door—which she'd firmly closed—squeak open.  She said she'd never heard that door squeak before and it scared the hot holy hell out of her.  She didn't get out of bed to investigate because Van was sound asleep and she didn't want to disturb him, but she didn't get much sleep after that, either. 

As soon as it was daylight, she got out of bed and went to the closet.  Looking inside, she noticed that part of the closet wall had detached a few inches from the rest of the wall.  When she peeked inside the crack, she realized it was a secret compartment and there was something inside.  She pulled the compartment the rest of the way open and found some old letters and, more importantly, the picture of a little girl about ten or eleven.  On the back of the picture was written "Alice" with birth and death dates.  This girl turned out to be Van's little sister who died at about the age shown in the picture and before Van was even born.  Helen was so distraught by her daughter's death she wouldn't let anyone talk about her and for years Van hadn't even known she'd existed.  Jeanne and Van were glad to find this picture.  She said, "I guess Alice just didn't want to get left behind or Helen didn't want us to forget her."

So they took the picture back to California with them, framed it, and put it on a shelf in one of the bookcases they had in a small library alcove in their home.  One day as Jeanne came into the house and walked in front of the alcove, a bird was suddenly there, fluttering frantically about, trying to find a way out of the house.  With great difficulty, Jeanne directed it across the room and out the sliding glass door.  There were windows in this alcove that the bird could have gotten in, but they were never opened, so it was a great mystery how the bird got there and in that out of the way alcove, of all places.  Then one night they were sitting in the living room, about ten feet from the alcove, and Jeanne was talking about the bird incident.  They heard an enormous thump on the floor in there.  They hurried in.  Somehow a big, heavy book which had been shelved above the picture had worked it's way out of the shelf and landed five or six feet away.  The title of that book:  "The Myths and Superstitions of Great Britain."

There were several other incidents regarding books, but the coup de grace for my friend, Robin, was one day when she came over to her parents house to feed the cat.  He was mostly an outside cat, so he wasn't freaking out or anything.  But when Robin started thinking about Helen, all of a sudden the room filled with the scent of Helen's perfume.  She fed the cat and got out of there real fast.

Eventually, Jeanne—who was Helen's daughter-in-law but had really been closer to Helen than her own mother—got to be concerned that Helen (or maybe Alice) was earthbound.  She hadn't ever felt afraid of the presence in the house, but she didn't want anyone to get stuck here.  She said to the general cosmos inside her house, "I want you to know, Helen, that we'll never forget you and we'll never forget Alice.  And it's okay if you want to move on to wherever you need to go."  There weren't really any more incidents after that.


Ghost Cat

I had a cat named Mocha, a brown tortoise shell.  She walked into the open door of my old apartment one day and basically said, "I belong to you now.  What's for lunch?"  So I fed her.  What else could I do?  I've loved all my cats, but I had an amazing closeness with Mocha.  She taught me many lessons about living.  Then one day when I was living for a time back at my parents' house she got hit by a car.  I was devastated.  Our cats became indoor only cats after that.

The first weird thing happened that same day when one of the other cats got out the door.  He headed straight for the street and stomped on the brakes right at the edge of the sidewalk.  He looked out at the spot where Mocha had been hit and the hackles went up and he started hissing and hissing until my dad picked him up and carried him back to the house—but he was really freaked.  My dad had hosed down the street and Mocha had been consigned to her coffin by then, but we still figured there could have been a blood smell.

Mocha had also been good friends with our dog, Tippy.  They used to play a game around one of the swivel chairs in the living room—round and round, dog chasing cat, then cat chasing dog, all very friendly and fun.  The evening that Mocha was killed, Tippy started playing that game all by herself, her eyes fixed on the height Mocha usually occupied, chasing something invisible, then being chased by something invisible.  Round and round and round, all very friendly and fun.  Tippy also sat in front of the window sill where Mocha liked to sit and look out at the world.  Tippy looked up into the spot that Mocha habitually occupied and whined and whined and whined.  I went over to the window, which was in full afternoon sun at the time, and ran my hand over that spot.  It was much colder than the surrounding air.  Mocha also liked to sit on top of the cable box on top of the TV.  Tippy sat in front of that looking up at Mocha's spot and whined and whined.  Again, when I ran my hand over the spot, it was cold.  I also thought I felt her climb onto the bed with me and settle in her favorite spot on the pillow beside my head.  I woke up to her purrs.

It was comforting, not scary, but I started to worry (like Jeanne in the other story) that my cat friend was earthbound.  One night I said to her, "I'm okay now, Mocha.  If you need to move on, you can."  And neither the dog nor I had any weird experiences after that.