Honorable Mention - Pam Skochinski
Honorable Mention - Ellen Peters
I received some great ghost stories this year, and it was so hard to choose a winner that I enlisted an impartial jury (my husband and teenage son), and let them choose for me.! :)
I decided to post not only the winning story, but a few others, as well. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
Special thanks to everyone who shared their true-life ghost stories!
When I was a child, my parents moved me and my four brothers to Ireland where we moved into a lovely turn of the century house. It wasn't long until I was awakened one night by heavy breathing that I swear was right up against my face. At first I thought it was one of my brothers, playing a trick on me. I called out their names and the breathing drifted up into the corner of the room. Scared the heck out of me. I felt I couldn't tell anyone about the creepy breathing because my brothers teased me relentlessly and this would only give them more fuel. The creepy breathing continued on and off and I just sucked it up until my Irish grandmother got me to talk. I unloaded the whole story and she shook her head, saying, "The poor unfortunate is trapped in your room. Next time she comes, you say to her 'In the name of Jesus, what do you want?' and the poor creature will disappear." I used that bit of wisdom and it worked like a charm. Soon after, I heard my mom talking to our housekeeper, a local woman. She explained how she knew the old lady that lived in our house. It seems the old lady died of lung cancer in my room! When we finally left Ireland a year later, I wasn't sad to leave that haunted house.
There's nothing so innocuous than the ABC song, right?
Well, on Friday the 13th, I took my 3-year-old son to a speech class at the local elementary school. My 2-year-old, Scotty, and I entertained ourselves on school grounds for half an hour. That Friday, entertainment consisted of playing in the sink in one of the girl's bathrooms.
Scotty is wet to the elbows and having a ball when I hear a little girl singing the ABC song in the bathroom. It echoes eerily around us and I'm grinning because the little girl has jumbled the order of the letters Q,R,S,T. She starts singing it again and that's when I look in the mirror. The doors to the three stalls behind me are wide open and there is no little girl in the bathroom with us.
Odd, I think. May she's right outside the door? by this time she's started the third rendition of the song. So I poke my head out the door. There's no one in sight. I poke my head into the boy's bathroom next door (just in case), but it's empty as well. Then, I walk all the way around the little building with the bathrooms and ther is no one around but Scotty and me!
She only sang the song three times, but I still get goosebumps when I think about it!
When I was about ten years old, my dad had torn up the upstairs of our house to turn an attic space into a bedroom. The construction butted up next to my bedroom, so the wall to my room was partly gone and equipment and tools were everywhere, including a stool that my dad used.
One night, I woke up 'sensing' something. Still lying in bed, I looked around the dark space, and I saw my Grandpa, who had passed away three years before, sitting on the stool. he wore his hunting clothes, rather than his usual farmer's garb. A shotgun rested crossways on his bent legs, as if he'd sat down to rest after a long day in the woods. I didn't move all night, nor did he. He watched me, as if studying who I had become. Or maybe he watched over me in a protective way. one thing I knew - he was there.
When the dawn filled the room with light, Grandpa melted away into the darkness. About that time, my dad opened the door to the upstairs and called his daily, "Time to get up!" I cried for him to "Come upstairs quick!" I told him the story, and of course he thought I'd imagined the whole thing. But, the image is as vivid for me today as it was all those years ago.