Freaky Friday

One of the stranger things about me (and there are plenty) is that I’ve always wanted to believe in ghosts. I like the idea of them, for some reason, as long as they’re the cool kind and not the creepy ones who are annoyed because someone killed them, so they start throwing dishes and candles all over the old house you just spent a fortune on, possess your kid, and write “redrum” all over your walls.

That said, my personal jury is still out. Sometimes I think there can’t NOT be ghosts, and other times I decide I’m crazy for thinking that.

Just the same, When Christy Z over at Christy’s Coffee Break started her Freaky Fridays (check it out here and play along: http://christyscoffeebreak.blogspot.com/2007/09/freaky-fridays-new-thing-around-here.html), I decided to share a unique experience of my own. I don’t know if this is a ghost story, just an example of the oddities of the human mind, or some combination of both. But here goes:

As children, my parents were both transplanted from their hometowns to Baltimore. My mother was born in Pittsburgh, and my father in a small, rural community in West Virginia.

My father’s grandmother, my Great Grandma Katie, lived in an old farmhouse on lots of rolling land. She and her husband Norman had raised their six children, one of them my grandmother, there. I never met my great-grandfather, Norman, who passed away while my dad was still a child. But my grandmother and father both had plenty of entertaining stories about him. He was a unique character, a guy who loved his drink and telling a good yarn, who teased his kids and grandkids and always commanded respect.

As a child, I often visited Great-Grandma Katie. I’d pore through her photo albums, and in the faded old pictures my great-grandfather was always a rather formidable figure. When I was a teenager, my grandparents took me and my first boyfriend to spend the weekend with Great Grandma Katie. My grandfather dropped us off, and went to stay at his own mother’s (my Great-Grandma Lucille’s) house. We stayed up late into the night, munching popcorn and talking, visiting with relatives and poring through those old photos. I showed Bobby, my boyfriend, my great-grandfather’s picture. Sometime after midnight, we went to bed. Grandmom and I slept in the guest bedroom, and Bobby slept on the couch.

I woke early the next morning, and found my boyfriend sitting outside on the porch swing. He was shivering because he’d been out there for some time, but didn’t want to come back in the house. He told me he’d had a dream, and in it he’d been sleeping on the couch, just as he really was. My great-grandfather Norman had walked into the room, stood over the couch, pointed at Bobby, and said in a stern voice: “Leave my house. I don’t know you, and you don’t belong here.” Bobby was so freaked out that we ended up staying at Lucille’s house the next night, instead of at Katie’s.

The weekend ended and we left the farmhouses and pastures behind us, heading back to the city. By the time a few days of our “real life” had gone by, and our heads were filled with school and weekend plans with our friends again, Bobby and I were laughing about the whole thing. We decided that since my great-grandfather Norman looked rather menacing in those old photos, and Bobby was probably already weirded out by sleeping in a strange place, that he’d just had an odd dream.

We forgot the whole thing until a month or so later. We were hanging out at my house one night, having pizza and talking to my mom. Laughing about how silly it had been the whole time, we told my mother about Bobby’s dream.

Instead of laughing with us, she got a strange look on her face. She was pretty freaked out herself. After a minute or so, she told us why.

She and my father had started dating as teenagers. Shortly after they got engaged, he took her to West Virginia to meet the family there. They stayed at Great-Grandma Katie’s. That night, while Mom was sleeping in the guest room, she had a “dream.” In it, my great grandfather Norman had walked into the bedroom, seeming to appear right through the door although it didn’t open. He stood in the doorway pointing at her, telling her he didn’t know who she was and she didn’t belong in his house, and she had to leave. Only in her dream, even though she was frightened, she sat up in bed and said “It’s OK. You don’t know me, but I’m here with your grandson. I’m the person he’s going to marry.” Norman nodded then, and turned and left the room.

Like Bobby and I did with his experience, Mom had convinced herself that she was just out of sorts sleeping in a strange place and had a really weird dream. She hadn’t thought about it in years, until Bobby told her about his dream and it was so eerily like her own that she had to wonder.

Over the years, many people my great-grandfather never met – grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were born after he was gone – stayed in the farmhouse. None of us ever had strange dreams about Norman. Did Bobby and my mother really just have a bit of a nightmare because they were in a strange place, and had seen a photo of a man who looked like he could be pretty tough? Or was Norman’s spirit somehow able to figure out when someone not connected to him by blood was in his home long after he was dead, and pop on by to figure out just who they were?

I don’t know. What I do know is that in Great-Grandma Katie’s later years, she needed help maintaining her home and her health, and one of my cousins moved in with her to provide support. That cousin, Cindy, told me more than once that sometimes at night, the radio by her bed would come on for no reason, playing old music she’d never heard before and could never find on any stations if she went hunting for them herself.

Who knows – maybe that was Norman too.
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While I’m not tagging anyone, this was a lot of fun to write. If you’ve got any of your own stories, check out the link above for Christy’s Freaky Friday instructions and join in!