So, it's been a minute (or six months, but who's counting) since my last post, and things haven't actually changed. You know, still haunted, still bipolar, still casually neutral about the whole thing.
In my last post I hinted at a few other things I've been party to - a seance, a ghost-ship sighting, some moderately worrying dreams. And I'd like to share, because every now and then I get bored and wander back to Reddit.
Let's start with recent history - my new house is haunted. I don't know by what or by whom, but my mother has seen it too. Odd shadows flashing past the windows or door, (the back windows being a good twenty feet off the ground, thanks to the hill, and with no convenient trees in sight) small items turning up in odd places or abruptly going missing, strange bumps in the night. The occasional happenstance could be shrugged off - these things happen - but these are daily occurrences. Little mischiefs, nothing malicious. You know, so far. All the same I reached out to my kitchen witch grandma and I've got sage and a tangle on standby.
So that's just Tuesday for me lately, but I promised I'd talk more about the past, and so I will. I actually got permission to tell this one, because it isn't actually about me, personally, but here you go:
The story of the seance was just a bit of fun between friends. It was a Hunter's moon out and we were bored, so K drew a cross on her forehead in black lipstick and we took a walk to the cemetery up the road. This wasn't one of those spooky abandoned small-town graveplots either. It was a sprawling, well-manicured resting place, but the bridge leading to it was closed to traffic, and the only access road was a tiny dirt trail behind the big mausoleum.
There were six of us, myself included, and within our number were two skeptics along for the ride, one firm believer, one "It'd be better with aliens" , the aforementioned girl with the forehead art, and me, the ringleader in this little escapade. I made a beeline for one grave in particular - see, my hometown is famous for it's very high number of potential serial killers per capita. And this grave belonged to one such frequent-flyer "person-of-interest".
I won't get into how a seance is conducted - you have, presumably, seen at least some movies - but suffice it to say I got my instructions from a very old book my Samma had wrapped in a plastic bag in her basement. And it worked a treat too - by the time we'd finished setting up I had even the skeptics feeling the chill.
So we start the invocation - typical kids stuff, calling out his name, asking rude or accusatory questions, so on - and for awhile it seemed like nothing happened. But one of the other guys with us - call him S for simplicity - started to notice something odd with K. She didn't seem to be breathing much, and her eyes were clamped shut. Like, furrowed brow, scrunched up nose shut. S reached across the circle to tap her on the leg, and the candle behind her - the candle on the headstone - suddenly blew out.
One of the other girls shrieked, K lurched forward and caught herself on her hands, and S just hovered halfway to her. And then she was fine. A little sweaty, a little wide-eyed, but fine. We checked on her, made sure she was okay, and packed up the seance. All of us felt better when we made it back to the main road, though K stayed pretty quiet the rest of the night.
A week later, and K wasn't doing too good. She wasn't sleeping at night, she was getting pretty pale and twitchy, and she was distracted almost constantly. Of course, we checked in with her, but she wouldn't tell anyone what was wrong. Eventually, S cornered her alone and got her talking. He heard her out and came to find me. See, K had begun hearing things - a quiet buzzing at first, but more and more it was sounding like words. And she kept seeing things when she nodded off - faces and places she didn't know, mixed in with flashes of light on her eyelids. (I don't know, personally, but isn't it a better story if the lights were in the same positions as the candleswe'd used in the seance?)
She was definitly scared, and "crazy" entered the conversation, but she didn't want us to tell her parents. And since we were patient, understanding friends (or teenagers scared of our parents finding out we lied about whose houses we were sleeping over at), we agreed. But over the next few days, she wasn't getting any better. And the voice was getting clearer. She told us a little of what it said, and it wasn't... nice.
K was actually the first to suggest it was a ghost or spirit or something. And we weren't arguing. So S and I took her down to see Granny. Technically, Granny was my great grandmother, but Granny wasn't just a cute nickname for a maternal antecedent. Granny was her proper title - all my life, I never heard anyone call her anything but, from total strangers to the priest at her funeral. And as an interesting aside, Granny scared the shit out of me.
Now, Granny was of that old-school "fetch-me-a-switch" variety, and every time I'd been forced to visit her she was sitting there at her kitchen table, chain-smoking cigarettes. I can't even remember a time I saw her so much as get up to pee, but the moment we walked K through the screen door, she was on her feet so fast the ash didn't have time to hit the table. She looked at K, looked at me, and called me some unkind words.
After that, I can't really tell you exactly what happened. K and Granny sat at the table and talked, while S and I had been exiled to the living room. Then, Granny led K to another room, it was quiet for a long time, and then Granny came out with a painting tucked under her arm. It was one of those mass-produced ones, with a barn and a single tree, in some kind of orange sepia tones.
Anyway, she announced that she was driving K home, and I guess Granny told on us, because we were all grounded after that. And that painting? Right up until Granny died it hung in her hallway, right across from a big, upside down brass cross. Which, I later learned, was not in any way satanic, but rather the right way to hang a cross for protection.
Well, we didn't see K for a few days following, not even at school, but when she did turn up it was after much needed rest and looking much better. I've asked her many times since, but all she'll tell me about her conversation with Granny or what happened in the back room is "It doesn't matter." But no matter how drunk anybody's gotten her, nobody has ever gotten her to change her story - she has always adamantly sworn that night in the cemetery, during the seance under a Hunter's moon, something got inside her head.
As for that painting, well, it's quietly hanging in Samma's house now, where it's been since Granny passed away. A couple of years ago, there was one incident though. A thunderstorm had knocked out the power, and while we were sitting around the dining room table, laughing and sharing stories, we heard a huge bang from the hallway. When we mustered the candlelight to check it out, we found the painting hanging by a corner, one of two nails on the floor. Right there where it fell, next to a big brass cross.
We keep that hallway lit now, by candlelight if necessary.
And for Granny's part, the one time I tried to ask about the whole thing, she told me "that's between me and him." When I pointed out I'm the one who called the damn ghost in the first place? "That weren't no damned ghost."
... Alright, I think that does it. Another long one, but in my defense I just get so excited. Feel free to pop off with questions, comments, naked skepticism. Gotta give me something to respond to whenever I'm supposed to be working.
Submitted September 07, 2019 at 11:29PM by apathyfaction https://ift.tt/34y0xzx
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