A Ghost Story

Dear Reader,

I am writing this post on Halloween, so what better time to share a ghost story? This one is courtesy of my grandmother on my father’s side of the family. So sit back, turn the lights down, and enjoy…

My grandmother lived in my hometown, so I saw her often while I was growing up. She was of Scottish ancestry, outlived her husband by twenty years and lived alone well into her eighties. She maintained a greenhouse, blueberry bushes, a garden, played bridge and ran her sewing machine until near the end of her life.

She died while I was in college, and her house sat empty for several years while my father decided what to do with it. A few years after I moved to New York City to pursue dance, he called me to tell me that he was finally selling the house and all its contents. If I wanted anything, he said, I was welcome to go look around and take what I wanted.

My first wife and I drove up to New England for a family visit, and one day we went to her house to have our look around.

I hadn’t been inside for years.

It was much the same as remembered; the same cool kitchen with its green color scheme, the ornate living room with a large fireplace and elephant statue on the mantel, her bedroom, with the sewing machine…

I didn’t feel comfortable there. It didn’t feel right, somehow, to take the things I always knew as hers. I paced around the downstairs for a few minutes, then opened the door to the attic and went up the stairs that used to scare me to death as a kid, because they led to the attic.

They were steep and dark, lit by a single naked light-bulb. They still gave me the creeps, years later. I looked even more quickly through the attic than I had downstairs. In the end, I took a sock monkey that my grandmother had made, to remember her by, and a game of farm animals that I had loved to play as a kid. My ex-wife and I stepped out the back door, locked it behind us and I stepped down onto the grass, relieved to be out in the sun again.

That’s when we heard the phone ringing inside. In an empty house. It rang twice, then a third time…

I was pretty sure my father had disconnected the phone – and I verified with him later that he had. It rang for a fourth time, and a fifth… my ex-wife heard it too.

We stared at each other, without moving. The hair rose on my arms. It didn’t sound like the ringing of a modern phone, but more like an old-fashioned phone, with a heavy, loud ring. Seven rings, then eight…

I finally came to my senses, moved toward the door and put the key in the lock to go back inside.

The phone stopped ringing.

We stared at each other again. The other piece of information you need to know, dear reader, to go along with the fact that the ringing phone sounded old-fashioned, is that my grandmother was one of the first telephone operators for my little rural town, and served in that position until the phone system was finally modernized and the town operators were no longer needed.

We left. Despite having been scared out of my shoes while the phone rang, I felt better; my visit hadn’t been in vain, and it felt like my grandmother had said hello.

A telephone verified as disconnected…ringing with an old-fashioned sound and heard by two different sets of ears – that’s pretty good! I have always remembered it; that incident helped me open further to all that is mysterious and possible in this world.

There is a little postscript.

The man who bought the house from my father was a doctor in town, and he converted it into his office, where he saw patients. Many, many years later – at least twenty – I had the good fortune of visiting that house again, to take both my elderly mother and aunt there for doctor appointments. That ornate living room was now the waiting room – the elephant still sat on the fireplace mantel.

At one appointment, while waiting with my aunt, I told the receptionist and the nurse the story of the empty house and the ringing telephone. They looked at each other with knowing smiles. The receptionist said: “I’m really not surprised to hear that. We feel her around; she helps us find things! Whenever we lose track of a patient’s file, we ask her to help us find it – and it always turns up the next day.”

That’s my grandmother; helpful and efficient as always.

There is perhaps no point to this post – it’s just a good story. And our stories do become a part of us over time, if we let them.

I honor your loving heart,

John