Mother's Protection

This is a story of my mother who died when I was eleven years old. My mother died at home during the night on the couch downstairs in the living room.

We were living in a 2 story house, that is my father, sister who was 13 at the time and myself. My mother had worked the evening before in N.Y. city cleaning office buildings. She was very tired and looked ill when she came home. She said she did not feel all that well, but was okay. We all went to sleep and sometime during the night she felt ill again and could not stop coughing. She went downstairs, as our bedrooms were on the second floor. I remember hearing her brush against the wall as she passed my room and hearing her coughing. I also heard her tell my father she was going downstairs so she wouldn't keep him awake as he had to work in the morning. Ultimately after she went downstairs she died while sitting on the couch. My father found her at 4 a.m. when she did not return to bed he went to see how she was. I need to explain this story from the beginning so you can understand what the hauntings were.

After a few months after my mothers death the unusual occurrences started happening. At first it was the brushing up against the wall and the sound of muted coughing. It would wake my sister and I since we shared the room this wall was on. We were uneasy but not to frightened. Then the noises became louder and more frequent coupled with the sound of footsteps descending the stairs. These became more frequent until it occurred every night. My father had his own barber shop so he worked many hours and left us alone. We were latch key kids before the name became popular. In the interim other strange things started to happen. When we were home alone in the evenings. The feeling of someone always being there with us, water turning on in the bathrooms when no-one was there and lights coming on by themselves. They escalated also to every day and evening when we were alone. We were frightened to tell my father since he was going through so much grief of losing my mother.

Some months after all this started we started to feel her presence. She started to touch us physically. We somehow both knew it was our mother, we always felt that way. She began sitting on the couch next to us and putting her arm around us, as if to comfort us. When we felt frightened by this her arms always surrounded us and we could always smell her fresh clean sent of Ivory soap which she loved.

Then everything came to a head when my sister saw her. She was having the most difficult time with everything, I always felt more comfort than fear, maybe being so young and wanting her there with me I dealt with it differently. That is when we revealed all this to my father. To our surprise he had also been experiencing some of these manifestations. We all agreed that is was my mother too. We did call a priest to the house to bless it but it was to no avail. These hauntings continued for 2 years until my father remarried.

We felt that my mother stayed with us to protect us until we had someone that could take care of us. My sister was in therapy for many years to deal with what happened. I always just accepted it and went on with my life with only the memories. My father died only 5 years later and before his death he began increasing his drinking, he never did deal with my mothers death and the hauntings. They were worse for him which I only found out about shortly before his death. He was never at peace because they had an argument the night she died and he always felt guilty of that fact. There are times in my life when things were difficult for me that I have again felt her presence but it was always a comfort and not a fear of her. She loved us so much she stayed on to look over us still.