Ghosts

Yes, it is true. We have a ghost in our house. He's a friendly ghost. The kids named him Fred. There are rumors that someone died in the house long before we moved in (it's an older house), and it is his ghost. No reports of the place being haunted before we moved in.

Ghosts don't spook me. I've been attracting them since I was a little girl and saw the ghost of my great-grandmother, a woman who died when my father was a young teen and whose name I didn't learn until I was in my 20s and pregnant with my son. (Turns out, had he been a girl, I would have given him my great-grandmother's name, which is kind of spooky in itself.) Seeing a ghost then probably should have scared the living daylights out of me, but I was a stupid kid. I thought Pop's wife, as we all called her, was locked up in the spare bedroom that we weren't allowed in and she somehow snuck out that day.

How did I know it was her? Besides the fact she told me? Well, in a very Victorian way, my great-grandfather essentially banished her from the house after her death. No one spoke of her in any depth (hence, her being known as Pop's wife). Her pictures were packed away. No one ever talked about the type of person she was or what she looked like, nothing. So after my grandmother died, my grandfather was looking at pictures. I picked up a stack, all photos of people I didn't know, and said, "Oh, there's Pop's wife!" My grandfather looked at the picture and got a sad look in his eyes. "Yes, it is my mother. How did you know?" Um, well, I saw her as a ghost. No really, I said that. And he nodded and said, "I wondered. She's come to me many times, always telling me she was watching over you especially."

She's never come back to see me. Fred though. Fred's always around. Everybody in the house has seen him. He's okay. Mostly he walks around the outside of the house. I see him go past the front window all the time. He used to sit on the edge of my bed while I slept, but he doesn't do that anymore. He's been known to open the bathroom door when we're gone so the dog can go in there and eat up toilet paper.

I've got tons of ghost stories, really. No hobo stories like Patti, though.