A ghost story, and I'll try to keep this short. That's hard, though, as it's such a long tale.
True story that happened to my mom, her sister, my cousin Shae (my cousin Ali's bro), my grandma and grandpa, and me.
Before I was born, my great-grandfather died in my grandparents' back room. I think he was fifty years old. A retired military vet. My mom's room and her sister's room butted up against that back room. They shared the same room for the weekend while their grandfather — my great-grandfather — used one of their rooms (which I think was my mom's room).
On Saturday night (I may have the day wrong), my mom heard banging in the hallway just outside of the room she was sleeping in, and loud footsteps in the hall, and then the bathroom door shutting, coughing in the bathroom, someone exiting the bathroom, more banging and footsteps down the hall, and then a bedroom door shutting.
The next morning, they woke up to find my great-grandfather dead, lying face down on the bed in the back room.
I didn't know any of this until I was in my teens. But we're not there yet.
Now, my favorite place in the world was my grandparents' house. In fact, my grandmother is/was/will always be my favorite person. I think about her daily.
I digress...
I slept at my grandparents' a lot as I grew up. My cousin Ali and I — practically brother and sister, growing up a few houses away from each other and only a month apart in age — spent many weekends sleeping in that back room. I got the left twin bed. She got the right.
I never did this at home, or anywhere else, but at around 1 or 2 or 3 in the morning, and at my grandparents' house, I'd always wake up bawling. Crying. From a dead sleep to fully awake, tears streaming, crying, crying bad.
I'd think, "Why am I crying?"
Then I'd wake up completely, calming myself down, and go back to sleep, wondering why the mystery cry came on. And, again, it happened almost every time I stayed the night over there, and only in that back room, up until a certain age.
That doesn't mean anything. Or it does.
Fast forward ten or so years.
My cousin Shae was around 20 or 21 years old, me around 16 or 17. For the last year or so, Shae had been living at my grandparents' house with my grandparents, saving up money or something, but living there nonetheless.
Keep this in mind: Shae is neither religious nor spiritual, and he's not one to believe in the afterlife, let alone ghosts.
One night, Shae was woken out of a dead sleep. A man stood over him with a slight blue-ish haze around him.
Shae said, "Grandpa?"
The man began to fall toward him.
Shae extended his arms, palms out, ready to catch him, saying, "Grandpa? Grandpa!?!"
The man fell right through his arms, through his chest, and vanished. As it happened, everywhere the man passed through him — his arms, his hands, his chest — brought a chill, absolute cold, spreading through Shae.
Shae, who was now freaked out, jumped out of bed. Confused. Was this a dream? No, it couldn't be. He felt it. And knew it. That no way was THAT a dream. What just happened to him was more real than reality itself. And, subsequently, he was wide awake the rest of the night, not a wink of sleep to save his life.
In the morning, he told both Grandma and Grandpa what had happened. Grandpa never said much, so he did just that — didn't say much — but Grandma said she knew who that was, that it was her father, who had died in the back room.
"Your father died in that room?"
"Yes." And she explained the story. Then she showed Shae a picture of her dad and asked if that was him, and he said yes.
Fast forward six or seven years. I was maybe 23 or 24, going through a divorce. I was staying at my grandparents' house, and my grandfather was dead by this time, so it was just me and Gram-Gram.
I was sleeping in the exact same bed as Shae had, and for the first week of staying there, the strangest things kept happening.
I'd wake up to this banging sound coming from the hallway, coughing in the hallway bathroom, the door shutting hard, and even weirder, my door open and my lights on.
Every night for a week!
I kept thinking, "Grandma, why are you doing that?"
Maybe she was checking on me, maybe she wanted the light on for some reason, maybe she wanted the door open for some reason. Like an idiot, I didn't question it. I was too tired — getting up out of bed, turning off the light, looking into the hallway to see no one there, wondering what those sounds were, shutting the door, and going back to bed.
Finally, on day five, I asked Grandma why she was making so much noise at night, opening my door and turning my lights on...
She said she thought that was me, that I was making that noise, that I was doing this and that, said she had been meaning to tell me to keep it down.
I happened to tell a friend of mine over the phone about the situation, and she said, "Maybe it's a transient?"
I thought, yeah, maybe.
Grandma always left the back screen door shut but the sliding glass door open, and perhaps a homeless person was getting in and walking through the house, using the bathroom? Weird, but it could be it.
So I closed the sliding glass door the next two nights and locked it, and still... the same damn thing. Light on, noise in the hallway, door open, me getting up, closing it, wondering what the heck was going on.
Finally, I told Mom, and Mom said that was exactly what happened the night Great-Grandfather died.
So I put two and two together, and since I'm a bit spiritual, one night after Grandma went to bed, I crossed my legs on my bed, went into meditation, prayed and imagined and did whatever it is I do, and told Great-Grandfather that it was time to move on, to go to the light, that heaven was waiting, and yada yada yada, all those things.
And it never happened again.
My ghost story.
