A Witch's Blessing

When I was a young girl we rented a little two story house in the country for a year and a half. I never saw the "ghosts", but the rest of my family did. This is a story that my mom told me a few years ago about one of her experiences with the ghost that was a little malicious.

My mother, at this time, was a nurse and worked the night shift. My father would usually be away on business, so she left myself and my sister at my grandmother's house quite often. This left her alone at least five days a week in the house. A couple of weeks after we first moved in the "malicious" ghost started to play pranks on her. "It" would move objects around, but she would only see it out of the corner of her eye. Sometimes she would hear her name called, but when she turned around nothing was there. When she went to bed she would hear footsteps out in the hall, and thinking it was my dad she would get up to greet him, but of course no one would be there. Then she started to get a "feeling" of panic every time she would hear the footsteps. My mother stopped sleeping at night because she was afraid one day she would see what was making those footsteps. After two weeks of not being able to sleep, my mother's friend at the hospital took notice. This is where the witch comes in, because my mother's friend claimed she was a witch.

Her name was Helen, and I only remember meeting her once. However, that was enough to burn the image of her smokey gray eyes into my head. I have never seen anyone with eyes like that. Every picture my mother has of this woman has some sort of white light that hovers just above her head. Getting back to the story, Helen asked my mother what was wrong. My mom didn't want to burden anyone with her woes, besides she thought people would think she was crazy, so she just said she wasn't able to sleep. Helen looked at her and said that she shouldn't worry about the ghost anymore because she would say a chant everyday for her to keep it away. My mother was floored! Whatever Helen did worked. My mother said that nothing happened for two months. Then one night, at midnight, she drove up to the house and noticed that every door was open and every light in the house was on. My father had been away on a business trip for a few days and wasn't due back until the next day, and my sister and I had been at my grandmother's all week. Refusing to go in the house, she went to the neighbors and called the police. After the police inspected the house and found nobody in it, she went in to check to see if anything was missing. Nothing was missing, but in the living room all of her knickknacks were pushed to the very edge of the shelf that they were on. My mother had a zillion little glass knickknacks, and they were her favorite things in the whole world. All of them were pushed almost over the edge, but just balancing enough to keep them on the shelf. When the police left, and overwhelming "feeling" that she was in danger hit her. She couldn't stop shaking, or shake the feeling that she was in trouble. Unlike stupid people in horror movies, my mother drove to my grandmother's house and spent the night there. When she went in to work the next day Helen rushed up to her and started to apologize profusely. She was almost in tears as she explained to my mother that she had forgotten to say the chant of protection the day before and she feared that the ghost would harm my mother. Helen said that my mother was pregnant and that the ghost wanted to harm her. (My mother didn't know she was pregnant, but found out later Helen was right.) My mother also looked into the history of the country road we lived on and found out the house right up the street had had a murder in it. A man had killed his pregnant wife fifty years ago in the house up the street. Helen never forgot the chant again.