I AM STILL HERE

Sorry to my two readers for not posting, but it's been the toughest year up here so far. Laid off in February 2017, a long unemployment followed, and the job that followed that turned out to be the worst job I've ever had with the most cretinous employers possible.

So I am far behind schedule on the Project and will be balls to the wall to get it done before I lose it in December of this year.

I fully intended to post my Emerging Spring Pics, but upon rereading the last post, figured I'd better finish it.

“A G-G-G-GHOST???!”

PART 2

 

When I first found The Standish Farm back in 2012 (I believe I gave an account of the magical way it dropped into my lap in a long-ago post), I did so at Captain Grant's Bed and Breakfast in Poquetanuck (pronounced 'paw-ka-TAHN-ick'), where I stayed for a while as I checked out properties. Built in 1754, it is a great place in price, accommodations, and a HUGE breakfast.

After I’d been there for a few days, I left and tried another B and B, only to return (mostly for the breakfast, drool drool), and I had a strange encounter in the house.

On Friday, I decided to get a nice dinner, and had asked Carol and Ted the owners (no, there’s no Bob or Alice, or so they tell me) to recommend a local eatery. I wanted white tablecloths and a wine list (a long time since I could afford those, now that I own THIS place), and they gave me a name and location in Norwich. I dressed nice and bounded down the stairs for the front door.

All the other guests had left, mostly for the Largest Casinos in the World on either side of us, so I was surprised at the lone guy walking in front of me once I reached the parlor. Ten feet away, he turned the corner around the fireplace as I gained on him, having twice his stride. He was a short dude, balding and wearing khaki trousers and a white dress shirt. A blue sweater hung off his neck, tied by the arms in front.

‘A yuppie George Costanza,’ I thought.

He turned the corner. I turned the corner, fully expecting to introduce myself as a fellow guest on the pother side of the fireplace. I was on his heels.

But.

He was no longer there.

I stopped and took a sharp breath.

“What the hell…”

The room beyond the fireplace is huge, its space taken up with sideboards and the dining room table and chairs. It would have been impossible to hide or run across it, or to walk swiftly to another part of the house.

Yet he was as gone as I want to be.

Add to that the fact that this 1754 house has wide white pine floorboards, and I can tell you from a bit personal and professional experience that every step upon those boards produce serious creaks, cracks, and explosions of stress.

The room was silent.

I walked throughout the first and second floors, my feet causing small explosions of creaking wood with each step. The guy was nowhere to be seen.

He had just…(I know, I know) disappeared.

In fact, the entire house was empty except for me, Carol and Ted, and their poker buddies. I could hear their Friday night poker game in the modern annex’s second floor, where the only television in the house existed. This annex also housed the kitchen below, and I had spent some time up in this ‘game room’ trying to catch the American League Playoffs. I knew they had a friendly poker game each Friday, and I decided to ascended the stairs to…

To see if the guy was there.

He couldn’t have been, though. He’d have had to flown across the dining room and floated up the stairs as an invisible (or light-speed) being.

And, as I expected, he WASN’T there. Three other friends smiled at me as I approached the top step.

I didn’t think was a good time to ask about ghosts and the like (nor to make myself appear the fool in doing so), so I merely asked them to repeat the directions to the restaurant.

Despite my wussing out on the inquiry, I felt the fool as I descended the steps and went out the front door. And the further I went towards my truck, the less important this experience became. By the time I had turned the pickup onto the road, it was forgotten completely.

The meal was mediocre, and I returned to Captain Grant’s full and tired. I’d been looking at properties all day (but still liked the Standish Farm best), and decided to go up to my room, have a couple of single-malts on the rocks, and watch a movie on my laptop.

I watched “The Exorcist: The Director’s Cut.” I’d seen it before, and trust me, it is creepier than the original, if such a thing needs to be creepier. Late September colored the New England Countryside about me, and I wanted some taste of Halloween to come.

I slept well.

 

Now, I have to reiterate something. I have been interested in ghosts for decades, as I said in the last post (lifetimes ago!) So I know something of the subject ranging from candid reports to scientific studies. I have knowledge of the phenomena that most do not. And I still didn’t believe in them. Other people have seen things, to be sure, and the reports are not to be tossed en masse. But I have always looked at the phenomenon scientifically.

One aspect of ghost sightings is shared with those of Bigfoot, UFOs, and Strange Being sightings, and this aspect was one in which I now participated.

It is the amnesia.

MANY of those afflicted (blessed, cursed) with sightings of The Unlikely suffer from a temporary loss of memory of the event. Psychologists say this is a defense mechanism of the mind, to cleanse that which it cannot comprehend as real. But the memory always returns.

Such it did with me.

 

The next morning, I awoke late enough to smell breakfast cooking.

“Bacon!” I slurred as I arose, wraith-like (sorry). I donned my clothes, made myself presentable and went to the stairs, where I descended, grabbed the top of the left newel-post with my left hand, and

 

STOPPED as soon as my feet hit the floor. If anyone had seen me, I’m sure they’d see me turn white. Whiter than I am, anyway.

The entire scene from the night before came flooding back to me as if it had just happened. I stood there, swaying slightly, confused as to just why I had forgotten it. Then my senses returned and I recognized the phenomenon.

Better than that, I had a crystal-clear memory of the event. So crystal-clear, in fact, that I walked to the coffee bar, introduced myself to several guests as I made my first cuppa, and said hello to several that had already met me the morning before. I purposefully walked through the crowd, fully expecting to see George Costanza’s lookalike sitting in an armchair, comparing notes about slot machine performance with another guest.

Even after seating myself at the table (again filled with twelve or so guests bound for Casino Glory), I found it hard not to imagine that one of THESE people must have been my ghost.

None came close in resemblance.

 

After breakfast, I wandered back into the kitchen as I had done a few times before. I was now a regular at Captain Grant’s, having stayed there five nights in seven days, and I knew I’d find Carol and Ted sitting at their own table, doing the crossword, Jumble, sodoku, and any other newspaper puzzle they could find. They did this in concert with directing their kitchen staff, overseeing the breakfast, and enjoying their own repast.

 

“Carol,” I said cautiously, “have you a minute to talk?” Both of them put aside their morning entertainment to listen. “This is going to sound crazy, but last night, just before I went upstairs to talk to you at the poker table, I had something really weird happen. I saw a guy who simply disappeared in front of me.”

The two of them looked at each other, then smiled.

“Tell me what you saw,” Carol said.

I went on to describe my encounter, but I purposefully left out certain details. I’ve learned not to lead people about such things. I did not describe the guy’s appearance, just the way I’d seen him, his disappearing, and the fact that the floorboards would have located him. I also spoke of searching the common areas of the house, including the second floor hallway.

I mentioned my amnesia about the matter, mostly as an aside to the fact that I returned and watched one of the scariest movies of all time.

“Is that weird, or what?”

“Not in this house, it isn’t,” Ted laughed.

I cocked my head and listened for the next few minutes.

Apparently The Two Largest Casinos in the World are not the only attraction for guests at Captain Grant’s.

There are a number of documented ghosts that ply their trade there, including the most famous one, a child that makes its presence known in the room across the hall from the one I stayed in for most of my nights there.

“People come from all over just to stay here in hopes of seeing one of them,” Carol said with a straight face. “It’s one of the prime attractions of this place.”

“So others have seen the ghost of whoever it was I saw?” I asked with a smirk.

“Well, no,” Carol said, “not exactly. Not the guests, anyway. But you told me he was balding.” I nodded. “Did he have a pair of khaki pants? Was he short and rather stocky?”

I stopped breathing.

“White dress shirt? Maybe glasses?”

My mouth went dry. I had seen his glasses for the nanosecond the side of his face was visible as he turned the corner of the fireplace.

“That’s your boy,” Ted said to Carol. She turned to me.

“You might be the only guest that has seen this guy. I saw him only once, when we had just finished construction of the kitchen and game room. I was up in the game room when I heard someone walking across the dining room; the floorboards gave him away. I went to the top of the stair and called out, ‘Who’s there? We’re not open yet!’ The guy I described walked by the bottom of the stairs, paying no attention to me whatsoever. When he walked into the kitchen, I went down the stairs to intercept him and ask him to leave, but no one was there.”

I didn’t bother to ask if she had forgotten the whole thing as soon as it happened.

“Would you mind if a reporter from the local TV station calls you to ask about it?” she asked earnestly. “We usually get them out after a sighting.”

I was game, but no one called.

I stayed there several more nights, and several more in June of 2013, when I worked out the details on The Standish Farm. I always stayed in the same room, across the hall from the child-ghost-room.

I never saw anything else.

But I know what I saw. It was a guy that simply disappeared.

 

Later I’ll tell you about the strange things that happen at The Standish House.

 

But since we’ve just had the first five consecutive days of sunshine and temperatures above fifty since November, I’ll be posting about the last great PUSH that has already started. The Barn, The Roof, The Kitchen and the Bathroom are all slated for this season.

And it has been one HELL of a year getting here to decent weather and a smoother situation. I promise I will not go that long before my Spring Post.