Great Gramma Tom or Strange Spirit?
Ohio, USA
June 1998
When I was a young girl in the late 1960's, my great Gramma Tom died after a short illness. Gramma Tom had always been one to hide her money at home, not trusting in banks since the Depression. For year before her death, she lived with my grandparents in an apartment over their restaurant. After her death my grandparents, knowing her habit of hiding all of her money, searched her room in hopes of finding the money. They were never able to find it. Things began happening at our home which was 15 miles away from the apartment where my great grandmother lived and died. The first to experience anything was my brother. He was alone at home late one night and as he was sitting on the couch watching TV, he heard someone coming down the steps from upstairs. Our little terrier went to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. My brother got up and went across the room to turn down the TV so he could hear better (and be closer to the door!). When he turned around from the TV, he saw the cellophane wrapping on the package of fig newtons he had been snacking on rattle as if someone were reaching in for a cookie. (Gramma Tom was a great lover of sweets and used to hide those also.) After that my parents and brother (their bedrooms were downstairs) would hear footsteps walking across the downstairs floor into the bathroom late at night. The faucets would come on full force (Gramma would always turn the water on and walk away forgetting she had turned it on.) My grandmother used to pooh-pooh the idea of Gramma walking around the house until one night she spent the night at our house and was sleeping on the couch. In the middle of the night she heard footsteps come down the stairs, walk across the floor and go into the bathroom. She got up, went in the bathroom..no one was there. She became a believer. I never heard the footsteps and my parents and brother did not tell my sisters or me about them for fear we would be afraid. However, a few years after Gramma Tom died my grandparents decided to sell the restaurant/apartments. One night my sisters and I were alone (my parents and brother were all working night shift at this time). At some time during the night, I woke up. There was just the moonlight coming through my window and there by my bed was a solid black shadow. At first I thought it was just a reflection of something in the mirror but then I realized that my mirror was not long enough to account for this. I kept my eyes half closed fearing it might be a burglar and I'd heard that if an intruder breaks in, it's best to pretend you are asleep - a ghost was the furthest thing from my mind. I turned away thinking this would appear to the burglar that I was really asleep. But when I turned back it was still there. I don't know when I've been more frightened. As I watched, the shadow's head would bend down as if it were looking at me and then would turn toward the window where I could see a profile of the face. I wanted to reach over and turn on a light, but by then I'd figured out this was not a burglar and I was afraid it would touch me! This kept up for sometime, I don't know how long exactly - it seemed like hours! Finally, my older sister turned her light on (my father had been remodeling our rooms and we did not have solid walls up yet between our rooms, just the 2 x4 studs) and the when the light shone over into my room the shadow faded away. I never could make out any facial features. When my parents found out what had happened, they began taking us to my grandparents to sleep at night. They were afraid of what might be developing since whatever was in the house was starting to make personal contact. My parents always thought that it was probably Gramma Tom, and were even more sure when the episodes stopped once the new owners of the restaurant/apartments took possession.
An interesting note is that the new owners began remodeling the apartment my grandparents and Gramma Tom had shared. They were suddenly able to pay off the mortgage (a sizeable amount of money). We think that Gramma was probably trying to tell us where her money was hidden and once it was beyond our reach, she gave up. Who knows? Maybe it wasn't Gramma at all. But if not her, who? Could it have been something that moved into house through the building materials from an old house my father tore down and used to add on to our house? We don't know but whoever or whatever it was, it seems to have moved on as there was no activity for the last several years my parents lived in the house.
I had no further experiences with the unexplained until after my husband and I moved into our current home. But that's another story....