Halloween Ghost Stories, Real Ghost Stories

No one believes in ghosts until they’ve seen one, and I’ve seen more than one. My ghost sightings all started in the tiny little town of MacDougall, New York, which doesn’t exist any more. It got so small it was incorporated into the village of Romulus in upstate New York. Even when it was viable MacDougall consisted of a post office/grocery store owned by a WWI veteran who's survived mustard gas. There was a bar next door to the post office. Across the street was a milk shed and a grain something-or-other followed by a smattering of houses. Dairy farms lay further out in the countryside.

MacDougall was a village in the Finger Lakes area between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake. My family (of origin) lived in a Greek Revival house with pillars in front and a stained-glass window over the front door. It belonged to a Captain Gambee of the Civil War, rumor had it, and the parlor, which was always exceptionally cold, was obviously the first room built the rest was built.

You’d think I would have seen my first ghost, if I were to see one, on a dark night, but that was later. I saw my first ghost on a sunny summer morning with light streaming through the bathroom windows. She was in the mirror when I looked at myself first thing in the morning. I had black hair and white skin with just a sprinkling of freckles across my nose. She had long red braids and a round face freckled all over. My eyes are hazel. Hers were blue. She wore a home-made straw hat. I didn’t wear hats at all. She didn’t have an expression, really, and neither did I. We just looked at each other.

The shock was great. I didn’t tell anyone for two years.

On another occasion, I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and as I came back to my upstairs bedroom, I saw a slender woman in a long nightgown, all white, go into my mother’s room and close the door on her arm, which melted away. My mother was tall and not slender.

Worse than ghosts were the footsteps down the attic stairs, just off my bedroom, the backstairs, and the front stairs. Also, the voice. It was always a stern male voice, much deeper than my father’s: “Clean up your room. Go to bed.”

He might have had a point, but his footsteps were unnervingly heavy on the stairs. A child, too, would sometimes trip lightly down the stairs, missing steps as though floating in between.

Kristin, my younger sister, and I had just finished cleaning the playroom (cleaning the house always seemed to bring out the spirits). We were sitting on the floor next to the door to the backstairs. The door was closed. We heard the child tripping down the backstairs, floating, and then landing at the bottom of the stairs. She stopped behind the door on the other side of us.

“Come in,” Kristin said, with a mischievous grin on her face.

I freaked and rain outside the side door in the playroom. It was cold out there, so I couldn’t stay long. It was always a challenge. Stay outside and feel safer but colder? Or go back in and be warmer but scared to death? Ultimately the cold would push me and whoever was with me back inside.

Once I was home with my mother and footsteps came down the front spiral staircase.

“Honestly,” Mom said. “When Lucy [my youngest sister] comes down the stairs in high heels, she sounds just like a man.”

Then we remembered that Lucy was at kindergarten. We two were the only ones there.

We both rushed outside but the cold forced us back in.

Nothing ever hurt us. We just saw things and heard things and mostly slept as well as we could.

Ghosts were scary, but also fun. I had a field day when our cousins came to visit. I told them ghost stories in my bedroom but they were doubtful. They said they didn’t believe me and that their parents told them I was just trying to scare them.

Just as they said they didn’t believe me and I was making it up, there came a terrific noise from the attic, like a refrigerator being dropped from a great height right over our heads. It was so loud that if the noise was real, I have no doubt that whatever was making the noise would have come right through the ceiling.

I felt so vindicated. Scared, but vindicated. Our cousins sat there, immobilized. They couldn’t account for the noise. I couldn’t have planned it. All of us kids were in one spot, so it wasn’t one of us. The attic door leading to the attic stairs was locked from the outside with a bolt lock inside my bedroom.

Score 10 for the ghosts and zero for the nonbelievers.