Llewellyn Journal - Two More Ghost Stories

Ghost stories are as old as the hills! We’ve been telling them and listening to them, generation after generation and across all cultures.

My father was a great story teller, and was likewise fascinated with the paranormal. While many of the stories he told over the years were fictional, a few were based on personal experience.

One of the favorites was that of a real life experience in my parents’ first home after they married. It was an older house on Lincoln Avenue, purchased from a widow, Mrs. Green.

Mrs. Green told my mother that she had been unable to locate her late husband’s fishing tackle. He had been an avid fisherman, and always kept it in the basement, and she really wanted to give to their son for the memories. Mother promised that should it turn up she would call Mrs. Green.

Mother said she would often be awakened at night by sounds of someone walking down the basement stairs and rummaging around. The noises would always stop as soon as she opened the basement door, only to start up on another night. She was convinced that it was the spirit of Mr. Green looking for the misplaced fishing tackle.

But, that wasn’t the scary part of their experiences in that old house.

One night they slept apart because my mother was ill and preferred it that way. Dad was awakened with the sensation of someone grasping his foot, and then sliding a hand upward. He said he could see the outline of a hand under the blanket as it moved upward. He pulled his leg away, but it was grasped more firmly. He then tried to grab the hand at which time all the bed clothes were suddenly tossed into the air.

Of course, nothing was there to see – but the experience was real.

What to make of it? He had no explanation, but he never doubted that some kind of entity was actually involved.

* * *

And that reminds me of my own experiences, many years later when I moved into the old mansion on Summit Avenue. There were many encounters, and there was a long history of haunting in the old house. The first story was a sad one involving an immigrant maid servant who had an affair with a chauffeur. When he wouldn’t marry her, she feared she would be let go as soon as her pregnancy showed.

She hanged herself in the stairwell leading to the servants’ quarter on the third floor.

After that many people claimed to experience cold and unease on that stairwell, and I myself fell down those stairs one night having “stepped off into nothing!” It was a sudden sensation of having nothing beneath my feet that made me mis-step out instead of down and find myself out in space. It was like waking up in a strange room, forgetting that it was not your own familiar place and stumbling about in the dark. Mis-direction because of a wrong memory.

I have no doubt that I picked up her own memories of emotion and sensation as she died.

How many cases of ghosts and paranormal phenomena are “recordings” of extreme emotion-energy releases that stimulate a response in sensitive people, or people at sensitive moments?