posted by dave on Sunday, October 31, 2010 at 11:42 PM in category

I don't have anything new for Halloween, so I'll just repost this old entry.

Halloween is in a couple of days, so I thought I'd write about the only "true" story of the supernatural that I've ever been a direct witness to.

My grandmother died on September 27, 1998 in a nursing home. Before she went to the home she'd lived in a relative's home for about a year. Before that, she'd been in the same house for nearly 60 years. That's the house I'm talking about here.

I grew up about 100 yards from MaMaw's house, and I spent a very large part of my childhood in it. With my parents working all the time my sisters and I spent nearly as much time in that old house as we did in our own. All of my cousins would come over to play pretty often. We had Christmas lunch there. From the time I was about 10 until I was 18 I spent at least two nights every week in that house.

No matter how much time I spent there, the house still scared the shit out of me sometimes.

It's just a creepy house. The upstairs in particular - many of the rooms have crudely-nailed panels blocking access to or from the attic. As a kid I was always afraid of those areas and would usually sneak past them while watching carefully for an arm, or a tentacle, or whatever I was most afraid of during that particular time in my life.

But enough background. I was a kid. It was an old house. It scared me.

A couple of days after my grandmother died my cousin Jeff and I went up to the old house to look around. Though nobody had lived there for over a year, there was still electricity and water since my uncle had been using it for storage.

This was the first time I'd been in the house since MaMaw had died, and it was the first time Jeff had been there in at least a few years.

So we went into the house and were immediately stunned by how warm it was. It must have been over a hundred degrees there. The furnace was going full-blast and the registers were almost too hot to touch.

I went to the thermostat against the kitchen wall and, sure enough, it was set at the absolute maximum. I turned it back down to about 50 or so and Jeff and I continued our explorations.

The next day I mentioned to another cousin (one who's father was using the old place for storage) that I'd lowered the thermostat.

He got a quizzical look on his face, and told me that there was no way that the furnace could have been going, that there was no way that the house could have been that warm.

You see, when my grandmother had moved out of the house, over a year earlier, they'd removed the propane tank.

I confirmed this rather alarming fact myself. The house had no gas supply. The furnace had no fuel. The pilot light was long dead.

So that's the story of the weirdest thing I've ever experienced. If I was better at writing about scary stuff I bet you'd be shitting your pants right about now.

comments (2)

Sweet Mamaw. I can't imagine our childhood without her.

In January 1994, when I was in the 4th grade, one of my aunts died following a 13-year-long battle with breast cancer. I never liked her much -- I thought she was mean -- but I threw an ungodly tantrum when I found out that she had died.

Almost exactly one year later, I sleepwalked for the first and so far only time in my life and I remember the whole thing. I got out of bed, pulled my blanket off and dragged it through the house by one corner. I entered my parents' room, dropped the blanket on the floor at the end of the bed and stared at my mom until she woke up. When she awoke, she asked me what was wrong. "Mom," I said. "I have to do this." I turned around and went back to bed.

I woke up at exactly 2:00 a.m., curled up in a ball and shivering. Afterall, it was January and I was now only covered with a thin sheet. I turned over and saw a woman standing across my narrow room, her arm propped up on the top of my dresser. Her head was slightly cocked and she was smiling, watching me sleep. I stared at her, terrified, until she faded away. When I felt safe enough to look away from where she had been, I saw that my blanket was laying across the bottom corner of my bed.

Both of my parents swore to me on their lives that they a) had no idea I'd brought my blanket in and that b) they hadn't gotten out of bed all night.

I guess my mean ol' Aunt Gloria wasn't all that mean, afterall.

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