Mind Picking : Happy Halloween

I hope the following picture is legible: That was taken one year ago today – another rainy Halloween – but while today is just an ordinary wet and miserable day, last year we were feeling the tail end of Superstorm Sandy. (And if the messy scrawl of that hand-painted sign is hard to read, some classy homeowner declared, "Screw U Sandy We Have Candy!!!" Mmmm hmmm. Classy. For the children.)

In honour of Halloween, I thought I'd jot down some true ghost stories. I'll say "true" even though none of these happened to me, so I can't swear to them, but I do trust the sources. I'll list them in chronological order.

At the turn of the twentieth century, long before electricity or paved roads or automobiles came to rural Prince Edward Island, my great-grandfather (known as Country Father in my family) was driving his horse-drawn cart home, well past dark. As he approached a long laneway that intersected his path, his horse stopped abruptly, began nickering with fright, and no matter how he prompted (giddyup? a touch of the whip?), the horse would not budge. Thinking there must be a something on the road scaring his horse, Country Father climbed down and approached the front of the animal and saw…nothing. Not a critter, not a weird shape, nothing he could see that would frighten the horse. He grabbed the bridle and tried to lead the horse forward, but with wide eyes rolling with fear, the animal refused, trying to back away instead. After quite some time and effort, Country Father gave up, turned the cart around and took a longer route home. The next day, he heard that at about the time he had been having his misadventure, someone had died in the home at the end of the long laneway that his horse had refused to cross. To the end of his days, Country Father believed that his horse was stopped as the great Carriage of Heaven made its slow procession away from the home, bearing a worthy soul to its final reward.

This is a story about my inlaws.

Bev's father died suddenly when she was in her early twenties and one of the hardest things for my mother-in-law to accept was that her father wouldn't be around to walk her down the aisle when the time came for her to get married. When that time did come several years later, the ceremony took place in Saint Peter's Cathedral; a huge and ornate Catholic church that only underscored how few guests were in attendance. Despite the meager crowd, afterwards many of the guests told Bev that during the vows, her father had been seen watching the event from the choir loft. But wait, there's more...After the wedding reception – and this was back in the days when a bride would have had a going away outfit and the happy couple would be seen off while the day was relatively young – Bev wanted to stop on their way to a Niagara Falls honeymoon to place her bouquet on her father's grave. The day had been wild and rainy and the heavens poured as they approached the country graveyard. Tying a scarf around her head, Bev opened the car door...and the rain abruptly stopped. She and Jim, my father-in-law, took their time placing the flowers and paying their respects, and as soon as they were safely back inside the car, the storm started up anew. They don't speak of the rain as a ghostly event per se, but you can make of it as you wish.

And speaking of my inlaws: My sister-in-law, Rudy, told me that the first night that she and her partner, Dan, spent in the new home they bought together, they were laying in bed, discussing plans for the house, when they suddenly heard the back patio door open and close, the tick-tick-tick of feet walking through the hallway below them, and then the distinctive sound of the front door opening and closing. Dan jumped out of bed and went down to investigate – but both doors were locked and dead-bolted, from the inside, and nothing seemed amiss. Rudy then joined Dan on the lower floor and noted that none of the boxes had fallen over; nothing was out of place that could explain the strange sounds that they had both heard. At some later point, Rudy learned that the previous owners had had a dog die at that house; that they had buried its body in the back yard. And Rudy knows that that first night that she and Dan spent in their new home, the spirit of that dead doggy passed through the house, from the back yard to the front, to go join its family in their new home. 

The following was told to me by an ex-boyfriend and the events happened to his sister. I don't remember her name, so I'll call her Mary.

Being young and having moved pretty far from her family, Mary felt trapped in her relationship with an abusive live-in boyfriend. He constantly yelled and put her down, and she started feeling really awful about herself – a situation that changed for the better after they moved into a basement apartment in an old and lovely home. Several times in the new digs, when they would have a fight and the boyfriend stormed off, Mary would be standing in her kitchen, sobbing, and feel a warm embrace enveloping her. She would turn around, hoping to see the boyfriend…but there was no one there. The hug was so soothing and so maternal that Mary would be comforted instead of scared; she felt that, finally, someone had her back. This went on for some months until the night that the boyfriend slapped Mary during an argument; the first time he had hit her; the only time he would ever hit her. They went to bed, and in the morning, the boyfriend said that he'd be moving out. When Mary asked why, he said: In the middle of the night, he woke up suddenly as though he had been shaken. He realised he was paralysed, he couldn't move no matter how he struggled, and he couldn't even turn his head or close his eyes – and this last was the most disturbing because above him, hovering near the ceiling, was an evil witchy hag, all swirling black smoke and glowing red eyes. Holding his stare, the figure began to lower itself onto him, slowly squeezing the air out of his lungs as it made its descent, and when they were eye to eye and nose to nose, the thing told him he was to leave Mary and never have anything to do with her again. He somehow, suddenly, fell into a deep sleep after that, and when he woke up, he told the story and left – for good. Mary realised she was happy to see him go and believed that the witchy presence was the same maternal figure who had given her comfort – and she remained in that house until my ex-boyfriend moved to the same city – the city I lived in – and took an apartment with her.

My last story happened to my immediate family, although I didn't live in that house with them.

When they were transferred back to Ontario – from a depressed housing market into a crazily expensive one – my parents were happy to find a house they could afford on a beautiful tree-lined street in a prominent neighbourhood. The house was owned by a doctor whose wife had passed away the previous winter and he was willing to accept my parents' lowball offer to get the sale over with quickly – the doctor was still grief-stricken and felt some guilt at selling his late wife's beloved home, and even more so, her cherished garden. After they moved in, strange happenings began nearly immediately: The dog would wake from a deep sleep to start barking at empty corners; doors would bang in empty rooms; a picture jumped off the wall while they were sitting watching TV one night; visitors would often say things like, "Who's upstairs? I saw someone standing up in the window" (when, naturally, my mother was home alone and hanging out on the main floor); they could smell cigarette smoke when entering an unoccupied room (the wife had died of smoking-related cancer); very oddly, a greasy roasting pan that had been soaking was dumped onto my brother's bed while no one was home; and the best story of all: The first February after they moved in, my mother looked out the window, and, despite the snow and frost and chilling wind, the rose gardens were in fresh and glorious bloom. (They don't know exactly when the doctor's wife died, only that it was the previous winter, so for the sake of the story, we all presume this blooming happened on the first anniversary of her death.) They only lived in that home for a couple of years before my Dad's job moved them to a different city, and although they say they weren't particularly scared by these events, I have to believe that my mother, father and little brother – who will each matter-of-factly state these events to be true – didn't make them up.

The strangest part of the last story, to me, is the fact that many years later, my younger brother and his family moved into a beautiful home right across the street from the so-called haunted one. It is a lovely tree-lined street in a prominent neighbourhood…and Kyler has never gone over to ask his neighbours if the ghost yet smokes her cigarettes and slams the doors and makes the roses bloom in winter's dead.

Happy Halloween!