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My Family’s Ghost Story
What follows is not fiction. This is both an accounting of recent sad events and our family lore. You may chalk it up to superstition, imagination, or the random firings of neurons as the brain flickers out, but I am conveying it to you as it was told to me, and you can make of it what you will.
My brothers and I, and our sister, grew up in a farmhouse that was built over the foundation of the house that had stood previously, which in the 1800s had served as the county poor farm. You could still find chips of pottery and bits of old furniture by digging a few inches into our yard. Our mother kept several old glass bottles she had found intact while digging her garden.
It was a place with considerable tragedy in its history. Our house was built c. 1940 after the previous house was destroyed in a fire, with some loss of life. At the back of the adjacent hayfield was a copse of trees, about half an acre, where the paupers unmarked graves lay. In the 1990s, the county put a little monument there, with the names of those who had died.
Some of our family believe the house is haunted. They claim to have seen a figure standing in the upstairs window gazing toward the cemetery grove. Others claim to have seen a shadow pass them in the upstairs hallway when they were alone. There was a door to an attic that refused to stay closed. You would latch it before going to bed and in the morning it would hang open again. Others claim to have merely felt a “presence” of something.
But that’s not the story … this is the story.
Last weekend, I traveled back home and met up with my brother and sister. We met in a local sports pub, over craft beer and cheeseburgers, with Michigan trouncing Northwestern in the background as we caught up on our kids, our careers, local gossip, Covid, of course. And that brought us ’round to talking about mortality.
Our mother passed away in 2013, after a long, gradual series of strokes debilitated her one blow at a time. At the end, she was left with partial vision in one eye, no speech, and the use of none of her limbs except her left leg before she finally succumbed. Uncle S—- passed away a few years later, probably of a stroke, but as he had multiple health issues and because his daughter (who’s a bit nuts) isolated him from the family in his final weeks, not even letting anyone know where he was hospitalized, I’m not certain what finally took him. Uncle J— passed away this past January after a much shorter and harsher series of strokes.
My brother’s wife recounted that after Uncle J– suffered his second stroke and the prognosis was grim, he was placed in hospice. He lay in his deathbed for several days, neither speaking nor able to get up, his life maintained by plastic tubes and wires. Just before the stroke that finished him, though, he said to his caregiver, “I have to go home and get my shoes. S—- and (mother) want me to go and live with them.” He died shortly after.
And that’s not quite the end of it. Another member of the family, call him Cousin T—, was stricken with Covid earlier this year. He ignored the initial symptoms and did not get treated until he passed out in his home and had to be rushed to the hospital. The oxygenation in his blood was in the low 70s when he was admitted. He was not expected to survive and was given the Last Rites. But after several days in a near-comatose state, he woke up. He made it through, but just barely.
He claims to have had had a near-death experience. He says that when he was unconscious in the hospital, on the verge of death, “I talked with Uncle S—- and Uncle J–. They want us to keep talking to them. They can hear us.”
“I never believed in ghosts until I met your family,” my brother’s wife concluded.
All of this is what I have been told. I am a skeptic of the supernatural. While I believe in the Afterlife, I also tend to believe there’s a solid wall between the living and the spirits of the dead. My family, likewise, tends to be a pragmatic lot; observantly religious but not given to spiritualism. They say these things happened, though. So, they are now part of the family lore.
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Thank you for sharing
Great story!
On the day my mother-in-law died, she told the attendants in the nursing home that Elvis was there to pick her up and take her home. She was a big fan of his, so I thought it was nice of him to help her in her last hours.
Me? I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.
I wouldn’t care to go on a steady diet of ghost stories, but every once in a while, a single such story pleases me. Thank you for yours.
I was moved to look up one of the few I could remember – in Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express. It is indeed there, and it is still soulful. But I’d forgotten its title: “Another Texas Ghost Story”. I don’t think Brautigan had written a prequel to it. Perhaps circa 1978, Texas ghost stories were enjoying a vogue.
I drove from Minnesota to Illinois to see my dad in the ICU before he died. I was only going to stay overnight, then leave the next day. While at the hospital in the morning, I told him I needed to leave at 2:00 so I could drive in daylight (it was summer, and I would be able to get home by 10, so mostly daylight). He had had a stroke and cerebral hemmorhage, and was unable to speak. I wasn’t sure what he could hear or understand. At 2:00 precisely, he passed away.
I believe there are some spirits who are not yet able to rest, and others who are able to communicate, especially with family, near or after death. When my mother in law died, my husband called her sister to let her know. She said she already knew. During the night she had felt someone pull on her toes and she knew it was her sister because that was the way their mother had always awakened them in the morning.
There are a lot of things that we can’t or don’t want to explain as supernatural because it is outside our rational thought process. But that is not evidence that they do not exist.
Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
My kids were small … 4 & 2 … somewhere in there. It was just before Christmas and I thought they were both old enough to enjoy my Dad’s train set. My Dad died before either was born. They’d seen his picture but he never got to meet them. Anyway … for the first time in many years I got out his trains and the kids and I started setting them up around the tree. At some point I noticed the kids got really quiet and were looking over my shoulder. I asked “What?” My daughter said “Grandpa is watching. He’s happy we are setting up his trains.” I couldn’t bring myself to turn around. And I didn’t want to freak out the kids… so I said with as much calm as I could muster …“Of course he is.” And continued connecting track. After a long few seconds so did they.
Neither one of them now remembers this happening. But it did.
I have recently been on a NDE kick there are dozens of videos on YouTube and it’s a fascinating look into – something anyway.
I am beginning to believe that local consciousness is an illusion. By local I mean consciousness that belongs to a person rather than that person in effect “renting” generic consciousness, that transcends his/her temporal life.
Of course you could call this a “soul” and it would be essentially the same.
Life and death are both complete mysteries.
There are many many similar reports.
I love that you have had these experiences with beloved departed family members. My understanding is that we are eternal souls, and that this earthly/human life is just one part of our existence. Me and all of my sisters have had moments we shared with our dad following his death from leukemia when he was only 63. All of these shared moments were positive and uplifting. When our mother was dying (15 years after our dad’s death) she was heard by one of our sisters talking to someone (in her bedroom, alone) and mother’s reply was, “Oh, next Saturday? That will be fine.” And, that is exactly the day she died. Whoever was coming to get her spirit had been “visiting” and reassured her that the ordeal was nearly finished.
The creepy movies and horror books that tell of the unsettled dead are entertaining to some–not me! But I have never had to simply “believe” in the Christian concept of Life After Death. I have had several experiences with family members who have died that I KNOW that our souls live on.
Maybe little children are still so fresh from the pre-existence that they still haven’t had enough of the rudeness of earth life to blot out their perception of “heaven” and the people they knew there.
What an interesting revelation, Vic. I am a believer.
I know things I shouldn’t know.
One time when I still lived on the outskirts of Chicago, I was invited to dinner by close friends who lived on the near North side.
The dinner was to be at 6:30Pm on a Friday.
By Thursday I knew it would not be safe to drive into Chi town. I called and asked if my friends could come and see me, same day same time, but my place not theirs.
On Friday, while starting to prep for the dinner, a neighbor knocked on my apartment door. It was Jenny, a real prankster, and before I could say “Hi! How are you?” she said “Carol, the police are over at my place and they want you to come and talk to them”
She refused to admit she was kidding, so reluctantly I followed her over to her home. I expected to be invited inside and encouraged to sit on a chair with a whoopie cushion.
But as I rounded the curve of buildings separating her building from mine, I looked down the lot to the far end. There I saw two cops standing by my Dodge station wagon. It was a big bomb of a car, built in 1968. There was a crimp in the bumper that had not been there before.
The police officer began: “Your friend says this is your vehicle. That you park here by her apartment as it is safer than in your parking lot. Well, it was not a safe place today.” He turned to take in the location. This parking lot was more remote than the other two. My station wagon was parked at the furthest end of the lot. The fact the car had been in an accident was really remarkable.
“Anyway, how your bumper got this nick is a drunk pizza delivery driver drove down this lot. He then pulled a U turn & managed to total his truck while hitting your car.”
I was stunned. If I had decided to drive to Chicago, I might have been driving out of our driveway while he was driving in. I got the chills.
The police gave me the insurance info of the pizza company that had employed the drunk driver. I felt compelled to make a statement. “I was home all day today because I had a bad feeling about driving anywhere. I don’t know how or why, but I knew I’d be involved in an auto accident today.”
The police man who had been doing the talking looked at me funny. Then he shook his head. “You would be amazed how many times I have heard similar stories.”
I later came to find out that when people researching psychic phenomenon go and chart out psychic abilities being admitted by people, according to occupations and interests, police and hunters are among two groups that will, if backed into a corner, admit to having psychic intuition.