Old Crockery

I would like to begin my story with important facts that lead up to my experience.

When I was 9 years old I had a hernia operation. The incision was painful, as it left me with a slight limp on my left side, but what was even more painful was the ridicule and teasing I received from family members. Weird Al Yankovic had just released "Living with a Hernia", so I constantly heard my sisters singing that song whenever they walked past me. The most damaging ridicule came from my grandmother. She had been battling lung cancer for a couple years, unbeknownst to me, and had just been released from the hospital after having part of her left lung removed. Before she left the hospital, she showed us the incision from the operation. It went from her navel to her spine on her left side. Jokingly, she began to limp. My sisters laughed at me, which infuriated me. From then on, I hated my grandmother with a passion.

I did not outwardly treat her bad, but I did subtle things that helped me vent my anger toward her. I jumped at the chance to set the table every night to carry out her "punishment". Every night at dinner I gave her the old cups, dishes, and silverware. I did not think anyone noticed. Ironically, someone did.

My grandmother died 7 months later in our living room which we had converted into a bedroom (we added shutter doors to the entrance). The night following her funeral I was deathly ill with food poisoning. That night I looked down the hall and I could see a mist lingering close to my doorway. I shut my eyes after seeing the mist and pulled the covers over my head.

The night of the funeral was only the beginning to a couple years of strange occurrences. Soon after the funeral my mother made a remark that scared me. She was conversing with my father and told him a lot of the old plates, silverware, and cups were missing. He said he did not know where they were and told her she probably misplaced them. She swore she did not move them.

I moved to a bedroom down the hall, closer to the "death room", a few months later. I remember looking down the hall seeing the shutter doors cracked. Peering out at me was a black figure (I could see the outline)with bright green eyes. I could feel the intense stare throughout my body. I closed my eyes and turned over, still feeling the stare on my back.

We moved to a larger house in the same city the summer after my grandmother had died. It was a welcomed change for me, for I was glad to be out of the "death house". One day, my sisters and I were home alone after school and the phone rang. All of us ran toward it and stopped in the doorway leading to the room where the phone was kept. My older sister and I saw the phone, which was laying flat on the table, pick up, hover, and drop on the floor at our feet. That was scary! My older sister does not like to talk about that to this day. We told our mother about the incident when she came home from work and she said, "maybe Nana came to visit."

Thank you for reading my story!