Ghostly encounters 2

In my last post I didn’t get round to telling about family members’ and relatives’ ghostly experiences. I think I might have mentioned some of these before, but maybe not here.

My aunt (my father’s older half sister – one of them anyway – long story) seems to have been a little psychic. She told dad a story about how she’d seen some ghosts or at least unexplainable phenomena.

When she was about ten years old, her grandfather lay dying in the little cottage where they all lived (or used to). By then, I think only my aunt, her youngest aunt and her grandfather were still around. Anyway, I imagine that since the cottage was so small, they couldn’t have my aunt lying in the same room with her dying grandfather, so they’d moved her bed out into the hallway outside.

Someone very tall and odd-looking came into the hallway, bent over my aunt and laughed weirdly in her face.

To be honest, I’m not one hundred percent sure if this was an actual haunting, though I suppose it could be. I’m more inclined to believe that it was my aunt’s youngest aunt (who by all accounts was a very mean, unpleasant woman, that my dad used to call ‘seven blocks’ and also named a very wind tortured pine the same thing, after his aunt). She might have been quite young at the time, being the very youngest of several children and I imagine she would have been shaken up by her father just dying. Since she didn’t draw the line at slapping my aunt’s face even when she was about thirty years old, until my aunt had enough and moved away from her aunt, she might easily have wanted to scare her little niece.

Later, when my aunt was grown up but probably still quite young, she was lying in bed trying to go to sleep, when her wall suddenly opened up and a group of men looking like monks or friars came into her room, carrying a coffin. The coffin lid opened and a friend of my aunt’s was lying in it. She sat up and began to make conversation, then after a while, the monks or friars closed the lid and carried her and the coffin out again, through the wall, that closed behind them. The next day, my aunt found out that her friend had died during the night, quite unexpectedly at a very young age. I’d just like to add, that although it’s perfectly possible that the friend could have been a Catholic, my aunt wasn’t and no one in my family that I’ve heard of has ever been (though naturally all our ancestors must have been at one time, or rather whatever it was called before there was a Protestant church).

My dad and his parents used to live in an old apartment somewhere in Stockholm. His parents had put him quite far away from their bedroom so he wouldn’t bother them. Yes, that was the kind of family he grew up in. One night when he had been staying awake until quite late, reading, he saw a dark shape over the far wall. It scared him, but for a dare, he turned out the light anway, to prove to himself he wasn’t a sissy. Then after a while, he couldn’t resist turning the light back on again, and found that the shape had moved closer to the bed. That happened a couple of times more until the thing bent down over dad and he says he must have passed out for a while from fear.

In this case, I think it’s perfectly possible that dad was reading some kind of scary story and scared himself that night. He definitely loved reading ghost stories and horror so it might have been memories from something else he’d read. In any case, he could easily have fallen asleep and had a bad dream. But that’s how he told the story to me anyway. Who knows?

My adopted brother was a very difficult guy when growing up. He drank from an early age, took illegal substances to grow muscle (anabolic steroids or something like that, helpfully imported by a lady from the local Chinese restaurant). For years, we lived in fear of him, because he used to get physically abusive.

At one time he was in a psych ward for kids under eighteen. That place was, apparently, since I haven’t been there more than once and then only to talk to a psychologist and a counselor (about the problems connected with my adopted brother), spooky. The rest of my family had to go there several times. I couldn’t really bring myself to go, it was too traumatic.

Anyway, once my adopted brother, D, saw two kids going into a closet. They had something over their heads, that I always imagined might have been towels, as if they’d come from or were going to the showers but that’s just a wild guess. D went to check inside that closet afterwards, because I think he knew there were no such kids in the ward at that time. He found what looked like a cupboard with cleaning utensils and detergents etc. No kids anywhere.

Several years ago, my family and I were on an outing and at one time we visited an old battle field in the woods. At the time, I was rather sick, possibly even dying (I’ve posted about this before I think), so though I normally feel something if I’m in a supposedly haunted place, I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. My mom and sister though, felt cold and really disturbed. Also – even I noticed this – no birds were singing, even though it was that time of the year when you would have been hearing birds everywhere. I should add that the battle in question was fought about five hundred years ago.

I almost forgot. My maternal grandfather’s family was responsible for the stage coach horses. My grandfather was usually the one who had to ride the horses back home afterwards. On his way back with one of the horses, he would pass a supposedly haunted mill. Almost every single time he passed that way, the horse would shy away. My grandfather always said that there had to be something like a dead animal lying around, because being so Christian, he didn’t want to admit to being superstitious.