Hi Steemit!
When I came across this contest, I knew I had stories to share, the only problem at first was deciding which story to share! You see, I grew up in an old farmhouse in Alabama that had been used as a hospital for Confederate Soldiers during the Civil War, so it had seen it's fair share of death and horrors. I have read a theory that wooden houses act as sort of "psychic batteries", that is to say that wood can somehow store emotions of those who have lived there, especially strong emotions, and later, the right emotions can be like a psychic "trigger", triggering the house to play back a scene from the past, like some kind of existential dvd ! That is one of the many explanations I have read for the existence of ghosts.
The House (from the side)
I will be the first to say that I have no idea what ghosts actually are, although I have experienced encounters with them many times in my life, mostly in my childhood in that house. The one encounter that stands out, and the one that I will tell you about today, involved not only me but my older brother as well, and it is the encounter that, to this very day, there exists no good "rational" explanation.
The room my older brother and I shared in the house had been the surgery room, so, needless to say, many people had died in that room. The room was very large, with twelve foot ceilings, and a door that opened onto a screen porch, that very oddly, would never stay locked! No matter how many times at night you checked to make sure that door was locked when you went to bed, it was always unlocked in the morning. Also, the screen porch it was attached to has its own haunting story:
The Porch:
According to the lore, a confederate soldier had his leg blown off by a cannonball and replaced with a wooden leg, he died shortly after from infection. Sometimes, you can hear him walking up and down the porch, thumping his wooden leg against the floor and dragging his good leg along. It sounds like this: thump (loud) and draaagggg, (slowly). Everyone who has stayed in the house for at least two nights has heard it. My nephew affectionately calls the ghost "Old Thump". We have checked,and there is just no way that trees are causing the sounds, so that remains a mystery.
But that is not the story I want to tell. The story I wish to tell involves the bedroom my brother and I shared, the surgery room.
Once, when I was eleven years old, I was startled awake, FULLY awake, to discover a large black lady standing over my bed. The room was dark, completely, pitch black dark, and the woman's skin was very, very black, but I could SEE HER against the darkness of the room! Indeed, I could make out every single detail of her clothes and her face! She was large, both tall and overweight, and wearing what appeared to be a blue skirt made out of some kind of rough denim-like material, with a button-up white shirt and a red scarf tied around her head. It was like she had a light inside of her, the woman was GLOWING! And her eyes... they were so large and white against the dark room.
I cannot stress this part enough, even though the room was totally dark, the woman herself was glowing as if she had a lightbulb inside of her.
Now, even though I felt no malice from this woman, I was still terrified! Put yourself in my place, eleven year old child is startled awake from a deep sleep, and awakens to seeing a woman who clearly should not be there standing over his bed! More than that, a glowing woman, clearly not natural... I could not move.
Then, it got even stranger! I had kicked the covers off of me during the night, and the woman bent down and pulled them up over me, then smoothed them out with her hand, and I COULD FEEL HER HAND AND FINGERS THROUGH THE COVERS!!! To me, this is the one feature of the encounter that convinces me that it was not a sleep paralysis episode. Sleep paralysis, which I suffered from as a child, often involves waking up in a state of total paralysis to "see" things in the room, hallucinations. When the hallucinations pass, the sufferer can then move, breathe etc. In this experience, the fear paralyzed me, true, but I felt very vividly the woman's hands, and in sleep paralysis you feel nothing, because it is only visual and auditory hallucinations. I cannot stress enough how I felt this woman's fingers and hands through the covers, I could even see the cracks on her hands and palms, and the length of her fingernails! After "tucking me in", the woman stood up and vanished, but it was long before I got back to sleep!
I kept this occurrence completely to myself, I thought my family would tease me if I told them about it, but a few weeks later at breakfast, when it was just my older brother and I in the room, he went on to say: "You know, I had the strangest thing happen to me a few weeks ago!" and he went on to describe what had happened to him, down to the woman bending over and pulling the covers back over him, exactly as it had happened to me! The one difference, though, was that he could not see the woman's face! Where I had seen her face very vividly, he saw only a blur! Otherwise it was completely the same though, and he described how she glowed, like she had swallowed a lightbulb!
I have thought a lot about this since, and the conclusion that I have come to is that my brother and I engaged the right "psychic trigger" for the old wooden hospital house to replay a scene. I was eleven at the time, and he was twenty-three. Both of us were ages that soldiers in the Civil War would have been, as during that inhumane conflict boys as young as nine, and men as old as fifty fought. We were sleeping in the room that had been the surgery room, two young men, in beds across the room from each other, and to make the picture complete, there was actually a bedpan ( over a hundred years old and unused) under his bed, because there was nowhere else to put it.
The woman was a nurse, and she was doing her duty, caring for the wounded soldiers. I like to believe that she was not actually there in ghost or spirit form, I like to believe that she had long since moved on to whatever lies beyond, and the figure that so lovingly pulled the covers up over me was just a hologram the old wooden house was replaying because two young men were spending the night in the cold former surgery room.
The woman, whoever she was, had undoubtedly been a slave, and maybe even had resided here :
the only old slave quarter still standing on the property. The woman surely suffered in life, she undoubtedly suffered the utter indignities that those who were forced to call another human being "master" were forced to suffer, maybe she had children ripped away from her and sold to others, there is no end to the potential horrors this woman may have faced.
Yet, she pulled the covers up over a freezing little white boy one night. Two hundred and fifty years after her labors had ended, a part of her remained in that house and pulled those covers up, and when I looked into her eyes, I did not see hatred, or malice, which would have been justified given the life she must have been forced to endure. I saw compassion, and pity, compassion for what would have been a human being who had been fighting on the side that was trying to keep her a slave. I saw compassion.
My older brother could not see those eyes, he only saw a blurred face. I have often thought about that and what it means, that a boy of eleven saw her face and a man of twenty-three could not. The love for children is universal I believe, even children that are misguided into carrying guns and calling themselves your enemy. Even children as lost as that, there is still love.
I will never forget that face. I hope dearly that the soul, or spirit, the ESSENCE of that woman was gone long before then, gone to attain a happiness after death that she was denied in life. I hope that the "ghost" who pulled the covers up to my chin was not really there, was just a hologram.
But I felt her fingers.
So help me god, I felt her fingers.