HALLOWEEN BLOG HOP with Still Moments Publishing....

Recently I was asked by Still Moments Publishing to come up with a scary Halloween story so I gave it some thought. It is meant to be a true story if at all possible so when I was having tea with my friend Bernadette one afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I asked her if she had any scary stories I might be able to pilfer.

I picked a good day to go pilfering.

No sooner had I asked the question than we heard footsteps in her hallway, but seeing as we were the only two home at the time, naturally our ears pricked up.

You have to understand, Bernadette’s house it is well over 7,500 square feet and one-hundred and five years old and there is a lot of wood – wood floors, wood paneling, wooden shaker roof at one time – so one would expect things to go creak in the night, and the day as chance would have it.

On this particular day just before we sat down, we had been searching the house high and low for her son’s blue and green striped blanket. We tore the playroom apart and looked in all the usual nooks and crannies, and we even looked in his sister’s easy-bake oven in case he decided to make, blanquette de veau, but we found nothing. We went on to search the rest of the house, but it was gone. Dash (name changed to protect the innocent) would be dashed when he came home from pre-school to find his blanket still MIA.

Bernadette and I reconvened at her kitchen table to re-trace Dash’s steps in the last forty-eight hours when, as I was brining my teacup to my lips we heard the above noted, creak-creak-creak-pad-pad-pad. The mysterious footsteps had walked down the hall and gone up the stairs and I could now hear them travel across the floor above my head as they went into Michael’s room.

“Is Rico home?”

“No,” said Bernadette. “He’s out of town at a conference.”

“Sarah?”

“No,” she said again. “The Nanny is sick today which is why Dash is at pre-school.”

“Michael and Wendy?” (Bernadette has two stepchildren)

“No, they are with their mum this week.”

Bernadette was looking heavenward with me. She too appeared to be listening to where the footsteps were going to go next. Then the door slammed.

We looked at each other and I raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Well if no one is home, who was that?”

“Our ghost,” she replied as calmly as if she had just said it was one of the children.

“You have a ghost? Since when?”

“Probably since we moved in.”

“Do I know about this?” I asked, thinking I may have tuned out on a prior conversation we may have had.

“No, probably not. We have only recently acknowledged the fact that it lives with us.”

I was not really surprised at this news. I had often wondered about Bernadette’s house but how do you ask a friend without raising an alarm, ‘have you noticed anything unusual going bump in the night since you’ve moved in?’ The movie, The Walls Have Eyes comes to mind when I walk into Bernadette’s house, but not in the scary, horror movie way that Hollywood likes to portray. Bernadette’s ghost seems to be rather friendly and it clearly has a sense of humour – or a sense of ‘I feel like annoying you, so I am going to hide your shoes on you…wait, maybe I will only hide one of your shoes…!’ and my favourite on this particular day, ‘I really want to make that little boy cry, so I am going to hide his blanket! Ha Ha! Made you cry and made you two go on a fruitless quest!!’

So this is what we talked about for the next half hour. Bernadette told me about all the things the ghost would hide from shoes, to clothing, to homework. Yes, even the children’s homework is not off limits for this ghost. The ghost even hides diapers and this lead to us discussing an incident that happened not long after they moved in.

When Dash was about one, Bernadette and I could hear her husband Rico upstairs asking us where we had put the diapers. We had been to Costco and we dumped the box in the middle of Dash’s room. When we stomped up three flights of stairs to point out the obvious, we noticed the box was gone. The odd thing was, no one had been upstairs.

I will never forget Bernadette’s astonishment when she said, “I swear, they were right there. We just went to Costco, how on earth could such a massive box of diapers just disappear into thin air?”

At the time we hadn’t thought anything of it. I assumed Dash had probably slid them off somewhere, perhaps pushed them into the closet while he was hanging on to them as he tried to stand. It never occurred to me that a one year old child would not have the body mass or muscle to move such a heavy object. Seeing, as the box was nowhere to be found, Rico was sent on a diaper run to London Drugs, along with instructions to bring home some chocolate. When Rico returned he handed us our oversized Cadbury bar and went back upstairs to change Dash only to return a short time later shaking his head at us. He smiled and said:

“You two are unbelievable. You could have just asked me to go out on a chocolate run, you didn’t have to disguise it as a diaper run.”

We looked at him as if he had two heads. “Huh?” we asked in unison. 

Rico informed us the big box of diapers that had disappeared, was now sitting in the middle of the carpet in the middle of the room – right where we had said we left it. He laughed at us and made some noise about women and chocolate and how ‘they will do anything for it’. He seriously thought we were messing with him back then.

Fast-forward a few years to a couple of weeks ago and the case of the missing blanket. It was the first time we discussed Bernadette’s ghost, and after re-visiting the diaper story and a few more strange happenings, I agreed. It was the only explanation for all of the odd things that disappeared in the house, only to magically reappear again a few days later.

“Well then,” I said. “Now that I know you have a ghost, I’ll get your blanket back.”

“Really?” Bernadette asked hopefully. “How?”

“I’ll show you.” I took a sip of my tea and looked up to the ceiling to where the ghost had just passed by and said, “Hello? Hi. Yes, you, ghosty-ghost. We really need to get that blanket back so if you wouldn’t mind putting it back where you found it, we would really appreciate it.”  I looked at Bernadette and nodded. “There you go.”

“There I go what? Where is it?”

“I don’t know, but I am sure it is exactly where Dash said he left it.”

“He said he left it in the easy-bake oven, but we checked there - twice. You even had a look in there as well.”

“We’ll just have to see if it resurfaces then. Have you never just asked the ghost for the things it takes?”

“No.”

“This will be a real test of faith then, won’t it? And you’ll know if your ghost is helpful.”

Bernadette was now looking at me like I had two heads. I just smiled and kept sipping my tea.

We went on to chat about other things, forgetting about the ghost for a while, but then it came time for me to leave. But before I went I said to Bernadette, “Let’s just go have one more look in the playroom.”

So we went downstairs to the playroom, and knelt down in front of the easy-bake oven. I looked at Bernadette, she looked at me, and I told her she could do the honors. She leaned in, grasped the handle and opened the door. The two of us nearly jumped out of our skin and we actually screamed but then started to laugh. There it was. Dash’s blue and green striped, chenille blanket, tucked away in the easy-bake oven as if it had been there the whole time.

“Seriously!” cried Bernadette. “What the #&%!? I swear, it was not in there! And I looked three times!”

“I know, I was there, I saw you,” I confirmed. “But this proves all you have to do is ask next time something goes missing – and ye-shall-receive.”

“I can’t believe it….”
“Neither can I, but there it is.”

“That is just crazy,” Bernadette said as she pulled the blanket out.

“Yup,” I agreed. “And kind of creepy, but also kind of cool.”

TRUE STORY

AND - Still Moments is giving away three grand prizes.  Just leave a comment below and you'll be entered into a drawing for a beautiful handmade piece of jewellery and one of the books published by Still Moments.  Three lucky winners will be selected from ALL the comments left on ALL the blogs in the hop. Please be sure to leave your email address in your comment below, so we will know how to contact you if you win! And have a look at the other participants in Still Moments Halloween Blog Hop listed below:

October 22, 2012
Terri Rochenski -http://www.terrirochenski.blogspot.com/
Jennifer Eaton - http://www.jennifermeaton.com/
Ceri Hebert - http://cerihebert.wordpress.com/

October 23, 2012
Liv Rancourt - http://www.livrancourt.com
Denise Moncrief - http://denisemoncrief.blogspot.com/
Dani-Lyn Alexander -http://www.danilynalexander.com/blog.html

October 24, 2012
Mackenzie Crowne - http://mackenziecrowne.com/
Maggie Devine - http://maggiedevine.blogspot.com/
Liberty Blake - http://libertysspells.blogspot.com/

October 25, 2012
Darlene Henderson - http://dandwh.wordpress.com/
Em Epe - http://www.emeperomances.blogspot.com/
Clara Waibel - http://www.pomadness.blogspot.com/

Thanks for stopping by.

Maggie