Granny F Comes Home

Maybe not the last story.

My granny died in '88, January of '88.

The last five years of her life were spent in the living room in a recliner on oxygen.

It was my responsibility before school and after school to see that her bedpan was emptied, her oxygen was going alright, she had her meds, and she was fed. That is in addition to going to school, schoolwork, keeping the house cleaned, and having meals cooked.

She was bedridden but not terminal; her death was a shock. The doctor gave her medication she was allergic to, and it killed her.

Poor white trash keeps their mouths shut, so we didn't say anything; we agreed that her emphysema killed her and left it at that.

She had rings that she never took off, and we buried her with those rings. The funeral home made us sign a waiver before they locked her coffin, saying those rings were on her fingers.

We come home from the cemetery, and something catches my aunt's eyes, and it's Granny's rings—rings we had just sealed shut in a coffin supposedly buried under ten feet of dirt.
They were just calmly sitting on the mantle in front of the clock, like she'd left them there for us.
They stayed there—no one would touch them.
They stayed until my mom died in '08, and my aunt and uncle sold everything out of the house. I found them in my mom's lock box when I picked up her stuff.
I assume they're still there—I'm not going to go looking though; I have all of Mom's things locked up.

My grandmother had a gutted floor radio from the 40's. When I say gutted, I mean it was a shell, nothing inside it, no electricity, no wires—empty.
That radio randomly would play Granny's favorite hymns for almost a week after she died, and then it went silent.

My grandmother had a bell she would ring when she needed something. We still hear that dang bell, what? Thirty-some years later, the bell is long gone, and it's still ringing.

My uncle was cleaning out the bathtub one day, and out of the clear blue sky he hears “June June Bug” in a tone of voice only mothers can do when you're doing something wrong.

Hell Opens

My last story, I moved out of the house when I was 20.

You would think that I'd have 20 years of memories stored up, but as my cousin's psychiatrist told her, because of the abuse we suffered, she and I both have huge gaps in our memories.

Some things have stayed with me—other things I've forgotten.

OK, so my grandmother died when I was a senior in high school. I was 18; my cousin was 15.

My uncle had custody of him at this time; his mother was gone—our other cousin moved out of state.

My uncle and my mom worked; I was expected to clean the house, cook supper, and make sure my cousin stayed at home and out of trouble.

My cousin today probably would be diagnosed with ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder—back then he was just labeled a troublemaker.

Now why the heck they thought little old me could control this big teen boy with anger problems? I have no ideal, but they did.

So we come home from school, he disappears to who knows where, and I start cooking supper because it was expected that it had to be on the table when they came home from work.

Cousin comes in the door with what looks like a big Bible; he says it's the Satanic Bible.

He says, “Hey, look at what I can do.”

So he starts pacing up and down the hallway and chanting some gibberish, pace-chant-pace-chant.

All of a sudden, all hell breaks loose.

The windows start opening and shutting, every door in the place starts opening and shutting; it was like a giant wind went roaring through the house.

Chicken shit hauls ass out of the house, but here I am with frying meat on the stove.

The basement doors slam open, and I'm in front of the blooming thing. Heavy footsteps and a rattling chain start coming up those steps, and I said to hell with this, the house can burn down. I took off.

I ran next door and got my great aunt.

We walk in the house; it looks like a tornado had gone through, but it was calm again, so we cleaned up, finished cooking, and not a word was said from either of us.

ignore, ignore, ignore

Surprisingly, after that little wave of activity, the house wasn't any more active than usual—the doors and windows stayed closed, and the thing in the basement stayed in the basement anyway.

Grandpa

I have no memory of it, so I can't say this story is true. My grandpa died when I was 8.

I don't even remember Grandpa; all I remember of him is that he wouldn't allow Granny to give us a switch or a belt, and he was a quiet, gentle man.

I refused to sleep in my own room, so I would sleep with him after my mom went to work; she'd leave the house at 5 am, and I'd go crawl in bed with Grandpa. Granny and Grandpa had separate rooms; only one time did I ever hear him raise his voice or curse, and I wet the bed, and he jumped out of bed cussing.

I never wet any bed again.

Rumor has it that his mother was half and half-white father, a Native American mother.
Grandpa looked Native American, as did his brother.
We cannot say if that is true or not; a lot of people have tried to find proof that his mother existed, and there are no records of any kind about her: no birth records, no census records, no school records.
Until she came to Tennessee and gave birth at 17, she simply did not exist.
She always would say, if asked, that she was from one of those damn mean injun tribes from Illinois.
She claimed to have been born in 1887, which again may or may not be true; even her name is questionable as she went by three different names.

I mention this because we do have proof Grandpa's father's people came from Ireland, and if his Ma was actually Native American, then both of those have been known to be more sensitive to the paranormal.

Long, windy story, I know.

When I was 2 days old, I was found in the nursery not breathing and a dark, dusky purple-black color.

Somehow they brought me back.

I was a sickly child.

When I was 3-4 years old, they thought I had leukemia; luckily, it was only anemia.

When I was 6, I almost bled out during a tonsillectomy.

Until the day he died, Grandpa would tell my mom that at night he could hear the devil's children playing in the road and that he believed it meant that I would not live to become an adult.

Well, I turned 50 this year, and I'm still here.

In all the years I lived in that house, I can not ever remember hearing kids outside laughing and playing late at night; whatever he heard died with him.

As far as I know, no one else heard the devil's children, but we were always inside after dark.

I do not remember any of my family staying out past dark.

Imps

When I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, the church where my grandfather worked as a janitor caught on fire, and of course, when he saw the flames—you can see the church from our backyard—he went over to see if he could help.

We all tagged along because, you know, small town, 70's, nothing much happening; a fire was a big deal.

I don't remember what time of the year it was; it wasn't late at night; it was maybe 5 pm-6 pm o'clock.

I distinctly remember seeing imps darting in and out of the crowd.

Now at that time I only thought they were little devils; it was only later in life I saw imps, and it was an ah-ha moment.

They were just running around laughing and pointing at the flames.

No one seemed to notice them.

Maybe this is a good time to mention that the only mental condition I've ever been diagnosed with is social anxiety, generalized anxiety, and attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity.

Going through my daughter's autism journey, there is also a strong possibility that I have Aspergers, but I'm never going to get tested to confirm that.

And I'm an adult survivor of child abuse—physical and mental.

I don't think any of that has any bearing on the fact that our house was very much haunted as witnessed by multiple people in the household and the fact that my cousins and I saw things that had no logical explanation.

Vlad

1995: We lived in a trailer park in the middle of a city. My boys were 2 and 4 years old.

We were getting ready to move, so everything was packed up and in boxes, and the trailer was essentially empty.

The husband worked nights, so it was just me and the boys.

The three of us were sitting on the couch; the littlest one was asleep, me and the oldest had our books, and we were just chilling out.

Out of nowhere, what I call a vampire because that was what it looked like—a featureless black man-sized shadow with wings—swooped up out of the kitchen floor, flew in front of us, and disappeared under our couch.

The oldest boy looked at me. I looked at him, and I just took them to the bedroom, and we all slept together that night—with all the lights on and the bedroom door locked.

This was a brand new trailer in a trailer park in a city, so that was pretty weird.

Bad Friend

I'm afraid to write this down; I'm afraid of it coming back. My daughter named it; I will not acknowledge that names have power.

My daughter is a high-functioning autistic Asperger's, but she wasn't diagnosed until she was 13.

We knew that she was different from the moment she was born; she was nonverbal until she was nearly 3. A lot of anxiety, a lot of fears—we simply couldn't get a diagnosis.

Daughter is the baby; our kids at that time were 2, 8, 11, 13, 21.

Daughter had an invisible friend she liked to play with.

All kids have invisible friends, so we didn't think anything of it, and you can always debunk things or deny them.

We didn't start to worry until the friend stuck around and we would start to see glowing red eyes high in the window behind Daughter.

Toys would move by themselves; dolls would start talking even with the battery removed.

The boys, being boys and older, would make fun of Daughter, and the friend would pinch them, and you'd see the pinch marks, or it would trip them out of clear blue skies; they'd be shoved.

It started being frightening when she'd say **** says he doesn't like you—**** says you're going to die.

Finally, my husband had enough. I mean, Daughter could do nothing unless *** said she could, and the boys were getting a little scared, so my husband asked Daughter where ***** was, and she said, Well, he's standing in front of you, so hubby pretended to grab whatever was by it's neck, shook the fire out of it, punched it, and said, “You're dead now, you're gone, you're just dead & gone.”

I cannot explain why or how, but that ended this friends reign in our house, and my daughter started preschool soon after, so she was around other kids her age.

We do not ever ever mention this.

I do not want this whatever back in my house.

Sometimes one of the boys will mention it but Daughter herself seems to have forgotten it.

 

Strange Tree

My great-aunt died in a house fire in 1999.

My aunt and I came back to help clean up the house and to be with my other great aunt who survived the fire.

GG died in October, so the days were short and it got dark early.

We had just come home from the hospital after making sure BB was all right; it was pitch dark, but my mom's house had the porch light on and the outside basement light on.

We pull under the carport, open the doors, and out of the tree in my aunt's yard came what I can only describe as thousands of bats or birds; it was just a huge sudden rush of silent black coming at you.

Even in the dim light from the two outside lights, they were easily seen; they were not birds or bats. What they were is very hard, if not impossible, to describe.

Shadows is as close as I can get.

Thousands of silent shadows are flying at you.

As suddenly as it started, it ended.

They just disappeared somewhere between the tree and the carport.

We quickly got my kids in the house, and we didn't go out the rest of the night.

If my aunt ever had activity in her house, she never said.

I know that when I was 4 I saw a headless man walk out of a bedroom in her house. I know that I could not go into either of her bedrooms or the back enclosed porch without being so scared when I was small I would literally wet my pants.
Even her bathroom terrified me.

I do remember that the bedroom doors would open and shut by themselves.

Other than the headless man, I don't remember ever seeing anything, but her house absolutely terrified me in a way my grandmother's more active house did not.

My great-uncle died of a massive heart attack in one of the bedrooms.

Neither of my aunts ever slept in the bedrooms; I always thought it odd that they slept on couches in the living room.

I still have nightmares about her bedrooms. As old as I am, as long as the house has been gone, I still have nightmares about her bedrooms.