The Ghost in My Grandmother's House (Supernatural Writing Contest)

My paternal grandmother (my dad's mom) lived in a haunted house. Actually, she lived in two. One was before I was born, when it was just her and my dad and their cat, her other two children having moved out and gotten married. She never remarried after her second divorce. That house was haunted, and my dad has many tales of just how haunted it was, such as how the cat refused to go to the third floor.

When they moved out, my grandmother asked the next residents if it was still haunted. It wasn't. That is because the ghost, or whatever it was, apparently followed her to her next house. This is where I had experience with it.

No one questioned her final house was haunted, not even my extreme right-wing evangelical Christian uncle (my mother's brother). He came and prayed over me there when I was an infant, as my parents lived in that house for the first three months of my life. The prayers seemed to work, because the ghost or entity never bothered me like it did other people, but that doesn't mean I didn't notice it was there.

When my parents were living there when I was a newborn, they awoke one night to their closet door inexplicably open, and boxes flying off the top shelf and landing on their bed. My grandmother slept with a gun within easy reach of her bed for years, because of the footsteps in the hallway and voices in the kitchen she heard at night. I'm not sure what she thought a gun could do against a ghost, but it made her feel more secure.

You always got the feeling someone was watching you in that house, but it was especially strong in the long, dark, windowless hallway. My brother and I both recall how creepy that hallway was. You could practically feel the eyes on you when you walked down it, and they were not friendly. It was a malevolent presence that did not want you there (or outright hated you....it was hard to tell which one it was, but it wasn't friendly at all). 

You had to go down that hallway to get to the guest bathroom. We always ran as quickly as we could, we did not linger in the bathroom, and we sped back to the living room if we had to go alone. It was always worse when you were in the hallway alone. If you brought people with you, such as to look at the books on her bookshelf in the hallway, it wasn't as bad. The presence would back off a little, but it was still there. You could feel it lingering in the background, looking at you from more of a distance. 

The bedroom where the boxes flew out of the closet was the only bedroom that opened up onto that hallway. There were two other bedrooms in the house that were creepy, but never had anything outright supernatural happen in them like that hallway bedroom.

After she lived there alone, my grandmother used the hallway bedroom as her sewing and craft room.

So, the house was creepy all over, and no one liked to be alone in any part of it, though my grandmother got used to it (she also traveled a lot, and now I understand why). The hallway was always the worst, though. Whatever ghost or entity inhabited her house lived there.

The creepiest thing I ever saw in that house happened when I was 12. My grandmother was on a trip somewhere, and had a cat that had recently had kittens....the cat, incidentally, chose the closet in the HALLWAY, right across from the door to the hallway bedroom, to give birth to her kittens. She asked me, my mom, and my brother to cat sit for her while she was gone, which I think was for two weeks, and that meant going over there every afternoon to feed the cats.

The cats were kept in the family room, which had sliding glass doors that opened up onto a nice bright screened porch, so it wasn't as bad as other parts of the house, though still definitely had a bit of creepiness to it. If the cats were going to be anywhere in the house, that was the best place for them. 

One day when we were there, one of the kittens got out of the family room when we opened the accordion door, and the tiny thing ran across the kitchen to the wider, open end of the hallway that bordered it. The kitten got about a foot into the hallway, and froze. Its fur actually raised on its tiny little body. 

The mother cat, who was named Samantha, went looking for her baby, and actually looked horrified when she saw where the kitten went. Samantha ran to the hallway to get her kitten, and as she picked it up by the scruff of its neck in her teeth, she froze for a moment, too, the hair raising all along her body, just like the kitten. 

She broke loose of whatever held her there pretty quickly, and turned around to bring her kitten back to the family room. As soon as she turned and was fully facing us, my mother and I noticed her eyes were flashing BRIGHT RED. It was only for a second, but we saw it. Samantha then ran with her kitten back into the family room, seemingly relieved to be out of the hallway. I'll never forget it. The kitten and its mother both knew there was something bad there.

My grandmother gave Samantha away to some of my grandfather's relatives (my grandfather being her second ex-husband) shortly after the kittens were old enough to be re-homed. She said she did it because she traveled so much. I was happy for all cats concerned to be out of the house. The last I heard of Samantha, she was still alive and well at 18 years old, still living with my grandfather's relatives in New England (this was in 2002 or 2003).

After my grandmother died in 1995, one of my cousins, a daughter of my grandmother's only daughter, bought the house from my dad, his half-brother, and half-sister. Thanksgiving of 1996, she invited that whole side of the family over for dinner, and it was the last time everyone on that side of the family got together. I knew my grandmother was the only thing holding us all together. My cousin wanted everyone to see what she did with my grandmother's house.

I wasn't really surprised that it wasn't haunted anymore. After all, whatever ghost or entity that was there seemed to have followed her from her previous house. It made sense that once she was gone, the ghost or entity left, too. It was attached to her, somehow. I hope she's free of it now, wherever she is.

Instead of being dark, the hallway was bright; my cousin and her husband managed to find a way to let light into it, even though there were no windows there. There was no longer the feeling of being watched, no malevolent presence, and no sense of creepiness in the hallway or anywhere else in the house. Whatever bad thing had been there was gone. My cousin said she had no issues with haunting after she moved in, like my grandmother did. My cousin was just as aware as everyone else in the family that the house was haunted, and she noticed the absence of the ghost or entity as much as the rest of us.

I've been in other places that had ghosts, and have even seen a couple, but besides one super creepy cemetery in New York that clearly had an evil presence guarding it (which I wrote about here on Steemit back in 2016), and another cemetery with restless spirits in Alabama (I do genealogy, so I end up exploring these places more often than most people), all the ghosts I've encountered have been gentle and friendly. I wasn't and am not afraid of them, because they mean no harm. 

I even saw the ghost of my beloved great-grandmother from my mother's side of the family once, a year or two after she died, sitting in her old rocking chair which is now in my house. I walked right up to her until I could see all the details of her face, at which point she disappeared. I was THRILLED to see her. My husband, who never met her, saw her in the same rocking chair about a week later. She was checking in on me, and it made me feel so loved (even though I always knew she loved me).

Those are friendly ghosts, and comprise the majority of ghosts I have encountered. The thing in my grandmother's house was different. It was not friendly. The whole family knew it. I don't know what my grandmother did to attract it. However, I'm glad it's gone from our lives. Wherever my grandmother is, I hope she is free of it. I think she is. It's an intuition thing.

#jerrybanfield