It was a new house, you should know that. Only a few years old, and we were only the second family to move into it (more on that later). It was on the edge of a lovely, well-established development with inlets and ponds and mature trees. A two-story colonial brick, still smelling of fresh paint and new carpets. Not the kind of house I'd expect to be haunted. But I was wrong.
All the bedrooms were upstairs, and mine was just down the hall from my parent's room. The first night we slept there, I was awakened by a strange sound in the wee hours of the morning. It was like something hard scratching along the baseboards, moving down the hall, on the other side of the wall. My door was closed, so I couldn't see if anything was out there, but I convinced myself it might be one of our cats and went back to sleep. In the morning, I didn't say anything to anyone.
The next night, I was awakened again by the same noise, only now it seemed as if more than one creature/person was making it. It rasped along the wall, moving down the hall. There was also a king of snuffling, like a dog searching out a scent in the ground. Shivers went up my spine. What was that sound? Who could be making it? It was very low down for a person. Cats couldn't drag their claws across a wall the way people did along a chalkboard! Anyway, it sounded bigger than a cat. Had a raccoon gotten in somehow?
Maybe I should have gotten up and had a look. But you have to remember that I'd been in a house where the doors sounded as if they were being shut (when they weren't), spirits walked down the hallway, and people went into trance. Although this was a new home for us, that didn't mean spooky stuff couldn't happen! Maybe it had followed us up from Florida!
The next morning, I told Mother about the noises—and she said she'd heard them, too!
"Why didn't you get up and see what it was?" she asked me.
"Why didn't you?" I said. "You're the psychic, you're not afraid of spirits! I'm just a chicken shit."
"Well, let's see what happens tonight."
"Do we have a choice?" But I believed we did. It was part of the paranormal lore that, if you had an unhappy soul drifting around, you could help it "cross over" by praying. So that night, when the scratching and snuffling started again, Mother and I both said a prayer. We told the maker of the noise that it was free to go; we sent love and forgiveness and help its way and hoped it would find peace.
I swear to you, the noise stopped that night and never came back. For true. But that's not the end of the story.
One day, my mom was sunning herself out in the back yard when she saw a man walking her way. Immediately, she knew he was a spirit, not a living person. He didn't look at her but kept walking across our land until he disappeared.
"He was dressed like a fisherman, in a Sou'wester," she told me. (See image for outfit.)
"But," she continued, "I also felt like he was a farmer. Maybe he lived near here."
Not near, as it turned out. Here. Soon after, a woman came to see Mom for a reading, and she was local enough to know the story of our property. The man my mother saw walking by had owned a farm on our land. He was also an oysterman. And, according to the woman, he was a mean old bugger who used to chain his dogs and verbally abuse anyone who came near him. But—and this is the kicker—he also kept pigs. Pigs for which he, for some reason, felt his only real fondness.
Our house had been built right on top of his pig pen! And that's when my mom knew: the sound we'd heard each night was the sound of pigs scratching and rooting in their sty.
It's always a relief to solve a mystery, even a greater one to have it stop waking you up at night.
There is another postscript, though, unrelated to the farmer and his pigs. We discovered that the family who had occupied our home was known to us from a former military posting. We'd lived around the corner from them on the Naval base, and I'd gone to school with the kids. The parents had not been happy even when we knew them; things must have gotten worse, because, while living in our house, the dad hung himself. I am not kidding. The family moved out afterwards, which is why the house was only a few years old when we bought it.
We didn't learn this until later, after we'd made our own memories and become embedded in the home. It was horrific and sad to contemplate but, surprisingly, it didn't freak me out. The ghost of the dead man never walked or made noise or appeared in our house, so I was good. Mother would claim that the echoes of that troubled relationship are the reason why she and my stepfather fought so much, that she was "picking up" that discord and playing it out in her own life. But that's crap. The two of them had been hammering on each other's feelings for years at this point, and they didn't need any help from the spirit world to keep it going.
I said a prayer for the guy, just in case. But the people who really needed prayer—and a counselor—were my mom and stepdad.
No comments:
Post a Comment