A Ghost Tale for Tuesday...

I've been absent from the blogosphere this past week, and am still trying to catch up. We had a death in the family early last week and I had to go out of town for a while.

My Uncle Harry was a fun guy, and will be missed. He worked as a car salesman for a lot of years, and found me my first car back when I was in high school. A burnt orange Camaro. Loved that car. Fast and cool. I totaled it in college, of course, when I was on my way down to D.C. to live with Harry and my Aunt Kate for an internship with a PR firm. I wasn't hurt, but the front axle broke. Poor car. Harry drove up to Baltimore to pick me up and bring me back down to D.C. Luckily, you don't need a car in D.C.

My thoughts are still with my aunt and my cousins.

Kate and Harry have lived in the Metro D.C. area since they met and married in the 70s, the last bunch of years in Annandale, Virginia, but Harry was originally from Tennessee. At the funeral, I finally got to meet a bunch of his Tennessee relatives, the ones I've been hearing about for years. What a nice group of folks. One of Harry's Tennessee nieces promised me she'd send a whole bunch of Southern ghost stories my way, once things settled back down.

In the meantime...

Last Monday, I was the guest blogger on Writers At Play, talking about my novel Unfolding the Shadows as well as talking about myself. I challenged readers to leave a comment with their own ghost story to win a prize. According to the writer who invited me on there, over 1600 people visited the website that day! There were a lot of good stories - proving to me that a lot of people really do have these ghostly encounters!

The following story was one of the ghost tales posted in the comment section, that I chose as the winner because it gave me goose bumps when I read it - and because "3" is my lucky number... The commenter said:

"My ghost story is a little closer to home - about 2 years ago my sister got up one night to go to the bathroom. She didn’t turn on the light in the bathroom since there’s a nightlight in there and didn’t close the door either. She saw something moving in the hall and said it looked like our dad (he had passed away almost 8 years earlier). She then said it sort of morphed into our Uncle Joe (my dad’s first cousin) who was at the time in the hospital fighting for his life. He died a few weeks later.

After that my sister stopped getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom.

Then sometime this past year, she was asleep in bed and something banged the outside wall in her room, shaking her bed and waking her. She couldn’t figure out what it was, but checked her mattress to make sure she wasn’t imagining things and sure enough, the mattress was moved off of the boxspring by about 2 inches."

Did you get a little chill? I'll be sending that scarecrow to this lucky lady today. I meant to do it yesterday, but there's so much to catch up with!

Have a great Tuesday!