People look at me oddly when I say, quite nonchalantly, “Oh, I grew up with a ghost.”
But it’s true.
Not long after we moved into The Place, it became evident. We had been told the stories about the original and longtime owner, Charlie Sykora. We were told that after his kids grew up and moved away and his wife died, he became so depressed that one day he went out to the large oak tree at the edge of the woods behind the stable and hanged himself. True or not, the story came to mind when strange things began to happen.
Mother had turned the little back bedroom off the dining room into a sewing room. She hated sewing, as I might have mentioned, but it was a necessity if we were to have school uniforms and she an occasional new dress or apron. And that woman could go through aprons! So one day she was back there sewing when Daddy came home for lunch, as usual, so she put down her fabric and laid her pinking shears on top. After she made his lunch and he went back to work, she returned to her sewing. No pinking shears. Well. Nobody else was in the house but Dale, who was just a toddler. She searched the entire room and then the kitchen for the shears. Nothing.
On Sunday, when we set the table for Sunday dinner (always in the dining room with the good dishes and silverware she had inherited), we opened the drawer in the china cabinet …and there were the pinking shears. Strange.
Mother laughed. “I was nowhere near that cabinet. It must have been Charlie,” she joked. And so it began. Whenever anything strange happened, we chalked it up to Charlie. (He also was a convenient scapegoat for a few things we kids did.)
Sometimes, at night, Mother would hear the stairs creaking. Thinking it was one of us coming downstairs for some reason, she’d get up to see what we needed. But nobody was there. OK. It was an old house, so . . . Andrea complained that Cindy and I wanted the hall light on between our bedrooms. It kept her awake. So she’d shut her door tight and go to bed. A few minutes after she got into bed, the door would open just a few inches. Exasperated, she’d get up and close it again. This time it always stayed shut. We teased her that Charlie was spending the night in her room, because it probably had been his, with the big closet and all. She didn’t think that was funny.
And there was the time that the whole family went into town for some event (not a Catholic thing or Daddy wouldn’t have come!) We left during daylight hours, and came home after dark. When we got to our driveway, we could see that every light in the house was on. Every light. And, of course, none of us had left a single light on much less all of them. Could it be Charlie?
But the most concrete proof we had of the presence of a ghost came one chilly winter afternoon when Dale, was still a toddler. The sewing room also had a twin bed in it, which Mother used occasionally when she said Daddy’s snoring got too loud. It was the warmest room in the house in the winter because the morning sun shone brightly into its large window. Rather than take Dale upstairs for his afternoon nap, she’d place him on the twin bed to keep an eye on him.
But one such afternoon, she walked into the sewing room and it was freezing! She checked to see if a window was not shut tight, and it was. There was no explanation for it being so cold. So she carried Dale upstairs to nap in his own room. She came back downstairs, went into the kitchen and BOOM!
The thick plaster ceiling in the sewing room had given away and dropped its deadly weight right onto the twin bed where Dale would have been sleeping. The heavy plaster could have killed a small child. We truly believed Charlie had made the room cold so she wouldn’t leave him there and that he saved Dale’s life. We forgave him all his pranks from then on.
After a few years, everything stopped. It was at about the same time Daddy paid Grandad the last payment on The Place and it was now truly ours. We believed Charlie was at peace, knowing a family was going to stay here and love his home.
Epilogue: Years later, when our aging parents sold The Place and moved to a lake home, a couple from Minneapolis bought it. Their names were Paul and Polly and they loved The Place almost as much as Mother had, taking good care of it. Not too long after they moved there, Polly was diagnosed with a fatal form of cancer and was dying. Mother had told Polly the Charlie stories and Polly said she’d always wanted to see a ghost, but Charlie didn’t come to her.
Well, not exactly.
The couple were lying in bed one winter night when Polly was close to the end. Paul said the room suddenly got very cold and the thought maybe the furnace had gone out. He was just getting ready to get up and check, careful not to wake Polly. who was sleeping soundly from the pain medication. Then Paul had an unsettling experience. He’d laughed at the Charlie stories and wasn’t a believer. But there, on the far side of the room, he later told Mother, a sort of mist rose up out of the floor. It was shaped like a man and it moved to the foot of the bed. He said it seemed to look at Polly, and he suddenly felt a profound sense of sadness, but when Paul made a movement, it vanished. He was truly shaken.
Paul became a believer. After Polly died, he sold The Place and moved away. But I’m pretty sure he took the Charlie story with him.
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