The Yankee Soldier

When I was little girl we moved to a new house that made my Mom really nervous.

My Dad and her had looked at it a year earlier. She said that she had a bad feeling the minute she walked in. At the time the renters wanted too much money. We rented a different house but my Dad wanted this house even though my Mom did not like it. It stayed empty and my Dad finally could afford it so we moved in.

The night we moved in my Mom had a dream that there was a fire in the den where my brother slept, also one in the room next to it. She said she sat straight up in the bed, awake, but could still see what was happening; my brother was screaming and was trapped, and the room beside it was my sisters and mine and we were on the bed burnt to death. She ran through the house but we were all fine, no fire or anything out of place.

After a couple of weeks (my Dad was gone due to being a truck driver) I started seeing my Dad stand over me at night. He had a navy blue uniform on and he had black hair but the only thing about him that bothered me was that even though it was dark I could see his eyes and they were white.

I would wait till he left the room and I would go to my Mom and wake her up and tell her that Daddy was doing that and his eyes would scare me. She would tell me I was dreaming and that my Dad was not home and take me back to bed.

This went on forever. My sister got so bad she would have to sleep with the light on and she said she never saw anything but she always felt like someone was in the room.

Even with the light on I saw him, his face wasn't clear but he had the build of my Dad. He would just stand there and stare at me for a few minutes and leave the room. I was not really scared, it just really bothered me.

My brother started sleeping in the living room because he said it was cold in his room and yet it was August. One day my Dad came in from the garage and said he had found some gas heaters that he wanted to put in my sisters, my brothers and my room for the winter. Well my Mom started screaming at him that he was not bringing them in the house at all. My Dad got mad and said fine he would just put us in the living room in the winter.

Finally my Dad changed jobs and we moved. When I got older I thought about that house and I went in to my Mom and asked her about it. She told me that she had visions of a Yankee soldier standing over his little girl while she slept then leaving to go to war. Then when she saw my brother in the fire and us already dead she saw a gas heater in the back ground that had started the fire. My Mom said that the man that watched over me was warning her that if they put the heaters in the house my brother, sister, and I would die. She said that she had seen him several times and he was really sad. When she would see these things, the room she was in at the time would get very cold and a feeling of sadness would come over her. She told me that the last thing she saw was the man sitting by a tree badly injured and then dying.

I know this story may not be scary, but it is something I will remember the rest of my life. I sometimes want to go back to that house to see if I can see that man again. If I could I would thank him for our lives. Also my Dad threw the heaters in the dump. My Mom made sure of that.