ToT 2009: Get Haunted by Poisoned Rationality

Lexie, reviewer from Poisoned Rationality
http://lastexilewords.blogspot.com

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When I met my stepsister she was this seven year old, pale, thin kid with huge brown eyes, long blond hair and a penchant to tell tall tales. She was an only child, whereas I had two younger siblings, plus we had about 6 years between us–our experiences and interests were totally different from each other.

Except for one thing: we both loved a good ghost story.

We bonded over the ‘Haunted Kids’ books from Allan Zullo and Goosebump novels. We went ‘ghost hunting’ in the graveyard by the townhouse, slipping through the hole in the corner of the fence with flashlights and canisters of salt (we were convinced this would keep us safe for some reason). We could sing the Ghost Busters theme song without any help or music perfectly.

In short we were obsessed.

She had one thing over me that I couldn’t compare to, she lived with her mother in a house that dated back to the 1700′s, rumored to have been home to Bonaparte’s brother and was once the home of Thomas Paine. It was creaky, leaky and so drafty I could easily see why she was so sick all the time. It had a dumb-waiter, the earliest version of an elevator I’ve ever seen in my entire LIFE, a lot of the original furniture and some of the creepiest wood carvings ever to grave a house. And, she assured me the Halloween after we had first met, its own ghost.

No one is terribly certain of who the ghost is of–there are no official records of anyone dying on the premises, no major battles were fought near enough for a ghost to want to trouble the house and quite frankly nothing exciting ever happened anywhere in our town. The fact remained however that a Ghost had been seen on the grounds.

Her first encounter with the Ghost had been when she was about five years old. She had gone in search of her mom, who had been working late in the office between her bedroom’s and my stepsister’s, and somehow my stepsister had gone through the wrong door (there’s four doors out of the room). The hallway was dark, my stepsister was too drowsy to really realize what was happening and all of a sudden she felt a chill on her skin. She stopped, backed up a few steps and felt it again. It was coming from her playroom.

Back when the house had been a fancy house in the olden days, her play room had been a parlor of some sort. It overlooked what had once been a beautiful garden and backyard. As she stepped into the room, dark without any lights on or moon to shine through the floor to ceiling windows, her skin grew clammy and she started shivering. She wasn’t afraid, not my stepsister, so onward she went, drifting towards the huge closet at the far wall.

Standing in front of the door she felt a chill on her toes, making them feel numb, and she almost got worried then. Her curiosity got the better of her and she turned the brass knob letting the door swing open. She saw nothing unusual until she leaned forward. “It was only a small cut!” a voice cried out as a ghostly visage came towards her from the depths of the closet. Slamming the door shut she screamed and ran back to her room, slamming that door as well and hiding under her covers.

When her mom was finally able to get her to calm down enough to tell her what had happened, my stepsister relayed the story to her. Her mother checked the closet, but found nothing amiss nor felt the weird chill. Returning to my stepsister she asked what the ghost had looked like ‘A little boy with a weird hat on’ was all my stepsister would say.

After that incident my stepsister reported that several of her friends had seen this weird ghost (though he had no spoken to any of them), she had seen him again twice (only at a distance however) and that all her animals refused to go anywhere near the closet at night. We still haven’t found anything that could explain who the ghost was or what he could have wanted. The closest we came was a brief mention of a boy who had died three houses over from an infection he got from a cut some 50 odd years ago.

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Do you have a ghost story or a truly weird experience to share? Or just stop by and say Trick or Treat, and you could win a huge Halloween treat!