THE LEGEND OF THE FRIENDLY GHOST
It was the family’s first night in their newly purchased,
100 year old house. The young boy couldn’t sleep, so he sat up in bed to gaze
out the window of his new room. To his
amazement, he saw a shadowy figure holding on to the gutter and peaking up over
the porch roof.
This happened some fifty years ago in the house my husband
and I now live in. We purchased our home
from my husband’s father. They moved here
with their four young boys in 1967. That young boy, the oldest of the four and first
to see the ghost, was my husband.
Shortly after my father-in-law bought the place the former
owner asked if anything strange ever happened the house but would not say what
was meant by that. The word haunted was
never used to describe the house, the word implies fear, and no one was ever
afraid when the strange happenings were noticed.
After the first night in the house, my mother-in-law had to
get up very early for work. While she was getting ready to leave, she heard
sounds coming from the boys’ room. She
was puzzled, this was out of character for them. She peeked into their room and saw that they
were all still sleeping. The noise was coming from the closet. Since it was
time to leave anyway, she just grabbed her sweater and left, trying to convince
herself that it was just her imagination.
When she got home later that day she told her husband about
it. He listened and admitted that he had
often heard sounds coming from upstairs while he worked in the basement before
the family moved in. He said that
several times he went upstairs to see who was there. No one was.
The family got so used to hearing unexplained sounds that
they didn’t even bother wondering about them. If no one was supposed to be home
at that time, the probably weren’t.
After they lived here for a while she had the opportunity to
visit a women from out of town who claimed to be a seer. The woman said a little boy had died in the
house years before, and it was that child’s spirit that still inhabited the
house.
Once, my mother-in-law said, that she and her husband came
back from visiting next door and found all the boys huddled in the oldest boy’s
room with the door locked. The boys said that soon after their parents left,
they had heard what sounded like someone walking up the stairs. They said that they could hear each step
creak on, one at a time.
At other times, they would hear drawers being opened or
closed or a stool being scooted across the room. Once a snare drum belonging to
one of the boys was knocked over. It was sitting in an empty room with no one
around.
My favorite story is one my husband still tells. When he was about thirteen. He was in the basement, working on an art
project, listening to the radio. All of
a sudden the radio started blasting nothing but static, he turned around just
in time to see a red figure disappearing from the floor up. He said it looked
like it was a four year old boy. He says
he grabbed his coat and got out of there fast.
When we married in the late 1980’s, my husband’s family
moved to the country and I thought that the little ghost tried to follow his
friends and got lost in the wind.
My family moved in
this house in 1990 when our daughter was 3 years old. It had been a good 10 years since anyone had
heard a peep that couldn’t explain away
by sounds made by one of our four cats. But when our girl was about 12, she
complained often that while she was sitting at her desk doing homework she
would get the feeling that someone would come up from behind her and just touch
her shoulder, of course no one was there.
I believe that an individual can allow themselves to be
afraid of ghosts or not. Spirits don’t intend to scare anyone and are just
doing things they would normally do in life and therefore are not always noticed. One of my husband’s brothers and his 3 boys
lived here for a few years and I have heard no ghost stories from any of them.
I pretty much dismissed these stories.
But the stories continued.
Recently, I met a
woman at a club meeting I attend. When I
found out her maiden name it rang a bell. Her family rented this house from my
husband’s father right before we moved in here.
Before she even heard my stories, my friend asked me if a
child once died in this house. She was married and not living here with her
family of origin, but she did spend some time here. Her family often told of
feeling the presents of a ghost in the house, but were not fearful of it.
In one story her family said a distinct the sound of something
falling down the stairs, when someone got up to look they saw that a small shoe
had come tumbling down the stairs. The
shoe was of an old-fashioned style, and did not belong to any of them. My new friend’s mother still has that shoe.
Her little brother played and laughed with an invisible
friend, that to this day he swears was real. The little brother says he and his
“friend” were going out in the field to play.
His mother called her son back because he was going too far out. The brother motioned back to someone and
called out. “Come back, it’s too far”
I think now that since that family rented the house right
before we moved in the ghost got lost when they moved out, or maybe, the
ghostie didn’t like it here anymore because there were no little boys to play
with.
By Charla Dugle Schleter
