I hope you're all having a fun and safe halloween. Ours was fun, but quiet. It's so cold outside that the few kids in our neighbourhood have likely gone to indoor events, and thus we haven't had any trick or treaters at our door.
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| Pippin guarding the candy bowl |
Ginny had fun going out for a half hour or so with my Beloved (very bundled up under her costume). She got a ton of candy from the neighbours and got to be out in the snow with Daddy. Then she came home and had chicken tortilla soup to warm her up.
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| Our little puppy dog |
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| She was so excited she couldn't stand still. |
And then I stepped it up a little with this one especially for Ginny... Perhaps next year I'll go with something a little more complex.
Last weekend the wonderfully witty Stork (at Stupid Stork) accidentally began a ghost story fest in her comment section, and I wanted to elaborate on the story I shared. I want to preface this with the fact that I'm not one to see faces in every shadow or jump at every little sound. I consider myself a fairly grounded person, but these little happenings were very real.
When I was five years old, I (with my bio-family) moved into an old house. It was a bungalow built in the 1920s. My parents were renting with the option to buy.
We moved in at the end of the school year, so I had the whole summer to explore our new home. There was a bit of an odd layout because the house had several additions built on over the years. The only access to the only bathroom in the house was through my bedroom. There was a parlour off the living room, a huge dining room, and two kitchens side by side. It was a kooky little house.
That summer and the following fall, odd things began happening. Things my parents, initially, chalked up to it being an older home. Cupboard doors that would open and close on their own. Noises in the second kitchen (we used it as a storage room). Hushed voices heard in the parlour. By Christmas that year, my bio-mom was feeling that there was something pretty strange about the house.
It started with my sister, who was then three years old. She would have conversations, full on conversations, with someone who wasn't there. At first my parents thought she had an imaginary friend. Then one day, my bio-sister described the little boy who she claimed to be talking to. He resembled no one in our family's acquaintance and what really threw my mom was how my sister described his clothes. My sister had described him as wearing the knickerbockers/short pants that young boys wore through the 20s and 30s. How would a three year old (in 1980) know the word knickerbockers?
Around that time, things got a little weirder. My bio-mom is a long-time smoker. She had ashtrays in every room, placed beside the spots where she normally sat. She had several spares in a cupboard in the kitchen. Right around Christmas, my mom's ashtrays started disappearing. She would sit down in her favourite spot in the living room or the parlour, would light a cigarette, and would look for an ashtray that was normally on the table beside her, only to find the side table bare. She would have to go to the kitchen to get one of the spares from the cupboard. Often, she found the missing ashtray in the cupboard. It was an upper cupboard, that I couldn't reach, and my bio-dad at that time was working out of town on a regular basis. How had it gotten there? Eventually, the ashtrays would move even after she set them down, or so she claimed. She would get one out of the kitchen, set it down beside her, light up, and then settle in to read or watch tv, and when she needed the ashtray it would be on the other side of the room.
What or whoever had a problem with my mom smoking also had a thing for my toys. Every night before bed I had to put my barbies and toy dishes away in my closet. I started getting into trouble for pulling my toys out in the middle of the night, because they would be scattered all over the floor in front of my closet in the morning. I swear I wasn't getting out of bed at night (my room had an old-fashioned linolium floor and I was scared of how the pattern looked in the dark. I kept my feet carefully tucked under the covers all night), and because my parents had to go through my room to get to the bathroom, they would have noticed my toys being left out after bedtime. They were being scattered after midnight and before I would get up in the morning.
Then, at Easter that year, the Easter Bunny brought my siblings and I a swing-set for the back yard. It was not uncommon to see one of the three swings moving while the others were still when there was no one near the swing set. And there were times when two of the three swings were swaying in the wind, and one would be perfectly still, as if someone was sitting on it.
We moved out of that house about a year after we moved in. I don't remember much of the discussion about why we were moving, we just did. I can tell you, that in the new-to-us house we moved to, my bio-sister didn't have conversations with her little friend any more. She said he wasn't there. And my mom never had any issues with her ashtrays moving, and my toys stayed put at night. And the all the swings swayed in the wind.
Not really scary, just my bio-family's encounter with a mischevious little ghostie. :) Do you have any ghostie encounters to share?
