A TOUCH OF AUTUMN BEFORE THE BIGGEST POSTS OF THE YEAR
This was written the first week in October, when it was pouring every other day (just drizzles every third day now), and the temps were still in the eighties. Autumn has finally descended, and the colors were vibrant for about a week before the most recent noreaster took the leaves down.
So let's go back a few weeks.
It’s been raining here since late August, with soakers
drenching New England seven and eight inches
at a time. All from storms with colorful names like Florence and Michael. Might be a Delores or
Minerva in there somewhere, I don’t remember. It’s the wettest it’s ever been
since I’ve been up here. We look up when the sun occasionally shines and say,
“What’s that bright thing up there?”
This on top of the most humid summer anyone can remember.
Eighty per cent humidity was the norm, coupled with high eighties of July,
August, and most of September. I had mold growing on my lawn mower gas
canister, for chrissakes.
I’ve sprung a couple of leaks in the roof, one above a
previously restored ceiling, and though I am (hope to be) close to closing on
the refinance of this place, I won’t get a new roof for a few weeks at the
earliest. But it’s gotta happen soon.
So, before I can post the finished stuff, I thought I’d do a
little Octobering.
I’ve written very little to add to this blog in the past few
months, and that’s because I’ve been scrambling to refinance this beast, else I
lose it.
That will not happen. The refi is almost complete, and when
it is, and all the papers signed, I will be allowed to live here in the house
that the bank owns, rather than the family from whom I bought it.
Actually that’s bullshit. It will be MINE. I’ll give you all
the details of both the refinance (not enough to bore you but enough o thrill
you into considering doing this yourselves before the Corporate Government
decides to grab everything you think you own, including the rights you used to
have) in the next post.
Okay, enough of that.
I’ll also have, as usual, a long post showing what I did to
the Standish House this summer, both to get it further down the Road to Total
Restoration, but also to make it appraise for enough so I could get the house
refinanced. Trust me, it was tough, but it was very much worth it.
I hope to post more often now that I’m almost out from under
Damocles’ Sword.
So.
Hows about a ghost
story?
A G-G-G-GHOST??!!!!!!
I tole you about the strange thing I saw at Captain Grant’s Inn when I was scoping this area for homes back in 2012.
A normal-looking guy walked before me at this very fine bed and breakfast that
I hope you will check out while in the area (Hey Carol and Ted!) . He disappeared as he walked around a corner,
and I mean DISAPPEARED. Turns out people come to Captain Grant’s specifically
to see ghosts. Who knew? Not me. I went for the great price, fantastic ambiance
of a 1754 house, and for the breakfast.
The breakfast!
Droooool drooooooool….
Sorry (wipes chin).
I also tole you of the feeling of a female presence I
encountered the first time I entered the house on that same trip. The feeling
was strongest in the attic and I’ve always thought there is a benevolent
presence of the female persuasion in this house.
And people, I am the biggest skeptic in the world. I should
be from Missouri;
it’s the ‘Show Me’ state.
But I’m from Arkansas, and
we HATE Missouri.
In the same story, I related that I asked Jim Izbicki, the
youngest of the four siblings that sold me this place, if there were any
ghosts. This was before I’d bought the place. He assured me that there were
none.
But as soon as I moved in, he came over and asked me if I’d
seen the spook yet.
DAMN!
He, without prompting, related a sighting of a filmy vapor
at the foot of the bed in the room in which I sleep, and he was sure it was
female. I told him of my feeling, and we agreed there must be something here
after three hundred years.
All this was reported in a couple of previous posts entitled
‘A G-G-G-GHOST?’
This brings us full circle to the present day.
PART 3
I’d been living here at Standish Farm for just under a year
when I had my first encounter with the strange sounds. I’ve been restoring
homes for a long, long time, and I’m familiar with the sounds old homes make,
especially when temperatures change. The wood expands, pops and cracks, and
creaks and groans that might be mistaken for some lost relative looking for a
drink can be explained by simple physics.
What happens here at the Standish House, however, cannot be
explained by simple physics. Complex physics of a variety we don’t yet
understand? Possibly. Probably. I don’t believe in ghosts, even if I have seen
one. If that’s what it was.
My living room is very, very comfortable, and I like to sit
and watch movies or read from the same position Granny did before me. Bertha
Izbicki, the matriarch of this house since 1938, is still known as Granny to
her kids, especially when talking about her to the younger set (such as me,
nearly 60 years old). Her chair is in the same corner as mine in the living
room and she put her teevee in the opposite corner, where mine is.
I don’t watch teevee; I have a small flat screen in the
kitchen that gets two PBS stations, and that’s it. I haven’t watched cable or
satellite since 2005, and network? Early nineties.
But I like movies, and so have a mid-sized flat screen in
the living room.
I very much like to read, though, and do it often. When I
read, I have no other sound going on in the background. Maybe that’s why I
sometimes hear what I hear.
It also extremely quiet up here on this windswept ridge,
especially at night.
Four years ago, in late spring, I was sitting in my comfy
chair reading, my smallest pup Cheerio curled up in her bed on the table next
to me. A full blooded shit-zoo, she’s just big enough to get a job as a potato
bug, but controls both the Giant Pup Speckle (her baby) and Marley, the quiet
one. She sleeps on the table because she likes to be close to me as well as on
the same level.
As I was reading this particular night, the unmistakable
sound of a tennis ball falling to the wood floor directly in front of me was
heard. It bounced, then bounced again, then dribbled across the floor as I
listened. It’s an extremely familiar sound in this house. Cheerio, the Ball
Playing Dog of the household, awoke, pricked up her ears, and lifted her head,
eyes following the sound of the ball as it rolled across the room in shorter
and shorter bounces, as tennis balls do before coming to rest.
I leaned forward and looked at the floor.
There was no tennis ball. I knew there was no tennis ball, because I made sure to PUT UP the tennis
balls in the house after Evening Playtime. If I leave a tennis ball around,
Cheerio is likely to find it, pick it up, and initiate a sleepy game that
distracts me and she’s not really into anyway. So there is a net bag in the mud
room filled with tennis balls of different degrees of filth and dismemberment.
She likes the new, fuzzy ones best, and I only keep the
naked, raggedy, or halfway torn-up ones around for times when I cannot FIND the
fuzzy ones.
I stood up, looking for the nonexistent ball, and Cheerio
jumped down and sniffed around, unable to find it.
“That was weird,” I said.
The exact same thing happened a few weeks later. Mirror
image, carbon copy. Same sound, same reaction from Cheerio. Except this time
the other dogs came in from the bedroom to check it out.
Now it wasn’t weird, it was interesting.
The sound wasn’t unknown to me; I often bounce the ball
along the floor to get Cheerio into the game, and she takes it from there. Our
ball-playing seldom lasts more than ten minutes before she gets bored (she’s
not obsessive, nor is she a pup anymore at age eight), and I don’t leave balls
lying about the house for fear of stepping on one and falling to my death (I am
not a pup anymore, either).
So I have a house that records sounds and plays them back.
I’ve heard a number of examples.
Dog feet tromping across the floor, complete with rattling
knickknacks (before I reinforced the floors).
Growls and sneezes when the dogs aren’t in the house.
It almost always seems to center around the dogs.
I think it’s interesting that the dogs are as involved with
this phenomenon as they are.
I have had no visual expressions or sightings, no vapors, no
filmy images, no wails from the attic.
At least, I hadn’t until earlier this month.
And like my ghost sighting at Captain Grant’s Inn (go back and read it), I suffered a typical case of
temporary amnesia directly after the incident. In fact, I didn’t think about it
at all for three days. Then it came back to me like a hot kiss at the end of a
wet fist.
Sorry, that was Nick Danger, Third eye. A quote.
The temporary amnesia I suffered has been experienced by a number
of others I know, and is a repeated phenomenon in the circles of those who
research such things. Ghosts, UFOs, skunk apes, and other forms of impossibilia
are often forgotten directly after sighting, only to be remembered all at once
in the very near future. I think it’s a coping mechanism of the human mind,
meant to keep from having one’s head explode.
This next encounter did the same thing; I forgot about it
until late the next afternoon.
Again, it happened while I was sitting in my comfy chair.
“No! Not the COMFY CHAIR!!!”
The Spanish Inquisition can be SO cruel. Or so I expect.
“NOBODY EXPECTS THE….”
Aww, YOU know.
Anyway, I was sitting in my chair, surrounded by the myriad
pillows that support my terrible injuries, when a small black sphere the size
of a ping pong ball zipped silently across the room. Sporting a neat little
hole in its center, it left a streak of black behind it and also seemed to
follow another dark line as it traveled quickly across the room.
It was silent and was gone in the blink of an eye.
It took a few seconds for my mind to register just what I
had seen, then I sat up in wide-eyed wonder.
“What the hell was THAT?” I said loudly. Only Cheerio lifted
her sleepy head for a second before laying it back down. The two Big Dogs never
stirred, though the trajectory of the thing, tilted slightly downward, looked
to hit them straight on.
If it did, they never felt a thing.
I swore I’d remember this, the first visible ‘spooky thing’
I’ve seen in the house, but within minutes, it had slipped from my memory, only
to come suddenly back many hours later.
I’ll let you know if it returns.
And, due to popular demand down at Barb’s Place, I have
again placed Samara Morgan out in the front yard, though sans well. Too much
trouble to build, and besides, I never do the same trick twice. She’s standing
on the front stoop, surrounded by a small pile of pumpkins and a lot of dead
geraniums. Reaching out to passerby to ask for help. Or latch on…
Dead geraniums?
Are they REALLY dead????
BWAAA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
