You cracked me up… 
For some reason I had it in my head that Florida was a Union state. My high school history teachers must have been morons. Or I am a moron. Whatever.
There was a John Tilden, farmer, of Scituate, Massachusetts, born in 1773, and there was an Elizabeth at the same time (no record as to whether or not they were married). If these were the parents of Marcus then I’m afraid I have some terrible news…
They’re dead. 1861 and 1841 respectively.
Of course he may know that.
If so I hope for his sake they’ve crossed over. The thought of living with your mom for 200 years is far more horrifying than having a poltergeist. (Though it would definitely qualify him well for computer message boards and gaming.)
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An odd story from my yute:
My great-aunt Carrie, a twin born in 1889, was not only not prone to embellishment but was extremely prone to understatement. (When I asked what it was like seeing electric light for the first time [her home was not electrified until the late 1930s] and what a change it was having a bright home where before there’d only been a kerosene lamp here and there she replied “You could tell a difference”; when I asked if she remembered the first time she saw an airplane she said “Yes”- when I asked where she said “Up there” and pointed to the sky- she wasn’t being facetious or sarcastic.)
Carrie was deeply troubled by the fact she was never baptized. I don’t know why she didn’t just have somebody take her to get baptized, but there was some barrier to adult baptism, at least for her, it in her (odd) religion. One day when she was in her early 80s- old admittedly, but she had NEVER had a hallucination- she was mixing dough in her kitchen when, per Carrie, a voice told her “Do not be afraid”. She said she knew it wasn’t her twin sister, Kitty, speaking, but that Kitty couldn’t hear the voice even though she was standing there. When Carrie told the voice “I’m not afraid… what do you want from me?” the voice, which was according to Carrie as audible as if from somebody actually speaking [i.e. not internal] but at the same time Carrie said she could not identify it as male or female or young or old- but it was kind and gentle- continued and told her (synopsizing) not to worry about baptism- that it was a ritual only and not important for salvation, and that The Voice had seen her parents and her siblings and her entire “generations” (the word The Voice used) on the other side (wherever that is) and that she was to be afraid no more, that her heart was known and that was the important thing, not a symbolic ritual.
I will always remember the day Carrie heard that voice. I was not there when it happened but I was with my father and sister when we came by later, and Carrie told us. She was very animated- pleasantly- excited- now THIS was something just not very common with the twins (again, they were in their mid or late 80s and living in an un air conditioned log cabin with no running water, they just weren’t excitable people [though neither lacked for intelligence]). I was just sort of shocked, her sister Kitty told us “I didn’t hear the voice” but stated with absolute conviction that she believed Carrie did and that “there was something odd about the light in the kitchen that I can’t describe when it was happening”.
My sister- then perhaps 18 or so, and then as now very religious, fell to her knees and praised God.
My father- then perhaps 50- politely informed her “You’re old and your mind’s half gone and I suspect God’s a bit preoccupied spinning planets and looking at wars to fight his way through these cats and into your kitchen to have a chit-chat. You’re just hearing things.” (My father was a blunt man at times, this being one of them- I should add that he adored these old women and that they raised him far more than his parents did- they were basically twin “bonus virgin grandmothers” to me and my sister that we waaaaaaaaaaay preferred to our actual biological grandmother- but Daddy also didn’t believe in the supernatural and wasn’t going to be delicate on the issue.)
I was about 11 or 12 and honestly didn’t know what to make of it. I will say this: I never once knew Kitty or Carrie either one to lie and I am absolutely beyond doubt convinced that Carrie believed she had heard the voice and that Kitty believed Carrie had heard it- I’d stake my kidneys on their belief there as a voice and that it said those things. I will also say that from then until the end of her very long life Carrie took great relief in what the voice had told her. She never heard it again.
Fast forward a few years: her sister Kitty died in a terrible accident (she burned to death) when they were 93. Now consider that she and Kitty had literally been together almost every moment from conception through their 93rd year- they slept together in the bed in the corner in the room in the house they were born from 1889 to 1982. That’s almost the longest closest marriage on Earth, and then BANG! it all ended. We all knew that Carrie would die when Kitty did (or vice versa).
Aw’ight, we damned sure called that one wrong.
Carrie came to live with us in our house. It was a miserable house by then due to mounting financial problems caused by my father’s death (he died two weeks before Kitty) and my mother’s increasing problems with depression, and Carrie was of course intensely lonely.
She had many nephews and nieces but only a couple ever came to see her and those very infrequently; most days she saw me and she saw my mother. It was a strange environment even though she’d been there many times- running water was something she had to get used to (she’d used toilets but she never learn to like them). She did love the television and the newspaper, but she lived on and on and became progressively more feeble. She was absolutely HORRIFIED of going to a nursing home and my mother, God rest her, for all things she was that were not good, could not have taken better care of the old lady (to whom she was no legal relation) had Carrie been her own mother/grandmother and did all she could to avoid having her placed in one until it was absolutely unavoidable (it was one of our many terrors about the impending foreclosure: what’s going to happen to Carrie if we’re put out on the road?)
Anyway, Carrie never became exactly what you’d call senile. Her memory til her dying day was just fine, there was no dementia as far as not knowing where she was or who she was with or anything like.
Must run- TBC
It was a mostly uninhabited state during the War- the panhandle was where the population was but below that there were Seminoles who managed to avoid deportation and the occasional white farmers and small towns. What you may be thinking of is that TODAY it’s a “Yankee” state- millions and millions of transplanted northerners and or their descendants (retirees, the explosion of Miami and Orlando, huge military/NASA installations, etc.) and of course Miami with its huge Cuban population, so it’s generally not culturally southern except in the panhandle and a little south of that; the further south you go the more northern it becomes.
Also, Fort Jefferson on Dry Tortugas off the coast (about 60 miles off) of Florida, built at astronomical expense over many years (and much bitched about) before the Civil War, remained a Union stronghold throughout the Civil War, as did some other forts (way) off the coast of Florida. After the war those found guilty in the Lincoln conspiracy but not hanged (Dr. Mudd [not nearly as innocent as his reputation], Arnold Spangler, etc.]) and a lot of other federal prisoners were held there as it was escape proof; there were no ships that could get anywhere close to it without being blown out of the water and it was too far from other islands or land to possibly swim or even manage in a rowboat.
Hee hee! 
You always make me laugh, Sampiro.
Thank you very much for looking that up though. He says that, yes, those are his parents. He is peeved that the town name ‘Scituate’ makes me giggle. He says he knew I would which is why he claimed he didn’t live in a named town.
Ha! He says he’s never seen them since they died. So I assume they’re not around, and he’s glad – they probably would have been very angry at him for killing himself, since he was the only son.
You think killing yourself makes a mother scream? Try telling her you’re gay.
Okay- so— Carrie cont’d:
About 1983, I was 16 years old and my mother got a job as night manager of a large institution for the mentally retarded. I usually walked her to the car at night and locked the doors. (We lived waaaaaay the hell out in the country, but forget the Andy Griffith crap- when there’s no law enforcement officer within 15 miles and those make Barney Fife and Enos look like Benson and Stabler, you lock your damned doors.) One night I walked her out, let that year’s bald Pekingese out for a walk, and fed the pride of outdoor cats and pack of outdoor dogs, went back in and washed some dishes, watched some TV (TV ended at about 1 a.m. in those days- we got between 2 channels dependably (ABC and NBC), CBS depending on the weather, and then if you twisted the dials and adjusted the rabbit ears (damn I’m old) you could get some foggy but viewable Birmingham stations- I mention this because it’s relevant). I watched TV until test pattern, then started to go to bed, then remembered “I didn’t lock the door”.
I remember this night like it was last week. I admit I sometimes add a little embroidery and embellishment to stories to make them better, but this one on my holiest oath (which is something to the effect “May I live to be a very very old man and spend every moment of it in Albany, Georgia- and may it always be summer”) is completely free from any additives- just the facts.
I walked to the front door of he house and before I got to it the door opened. I thought to myself “Well… the door opened… that’s okay… could be wind” (though there was none) "or maybe a dog brushed against it… " and I actually thought to myself, jokingly, “only if it closes itself is there a problem”.
You guessed it.
Door doesn’t close itself, it slams.
Okay— I saw this… it was not imagined.
Well I
screamed.
And I did the most illogical thing imaginable. I ran at top speed out of the living room, through the den, down the hallway, and into the back bedroom. It was (originally the master bedroom, then after additions my sister’s bedroom, and in 1983) Carrie’s bedroom. It’s hard to explain why- I somehow doubt that even then I thought that a 94 year old woman is going to protect me from anything- I didn’t even sense any danger exactly, I was just freaked out. But, I needed to be around another living human.
Dialogue approximate from memory:
“Jooooooooon… honey is that you?”
“Yes ma’am… I… uh… thought… I heard you… fall… or call me…”
“Naw… I’m fine… I was asleep…”
“I’m sorry… are you sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“Well then… uh… okay… then… it’s… do you need anything while I’m here?”
“Naw… thank you though…”
“Don’t mention it… I… uh… tell you what… just in case you do need anything… I’m going to sleep right here tonight… on your floor right here between your bed and the bathroom…”
"Well… um… alright then… ". She was confused, but if we had told Carrie or Kitty anyone at any time in their lives that “I’m going to paint your hallway bright purple and then tie a live burro to the doorknob and I’ll come down each night about five to feed it and play the tambourine” they’d have responded “Well…um… alright then…”.
So, I lay down on the floor. This was the night that I learned two things: one is that sometimes doors open and close by themselves, and the other was that Carrie was having even more trouble with incontinence than I’d previously realized. As evidenced by those damp spots on the floor.
“I’m going to go get a really thick quilt and put down here on the floor though… if you need anything holler…” (You know how to holler don’t ya? Just put your lips together and see a door open and slam itself.)
“Well… alright then…”
I got the thick quilt and pillow and stretched out on the floor. Turns out those wet spots on the floor had a particular odor, so I moved around so my head was at the opposite end, which was slightly better, but bothered Carrie a bit.
“Are you alright Littlejon?” [childhood nickname]
“I’m fine.”
“Well… you’re welcome to share this bed if you like. I’m little and dried up and don’t take up much space.”
Well, I’ll be honest. I considered it. But it brought home the fact that this was a bit ridiculous: I’m in a house with four beds and three sofas and I’m debating whether to 1) sleep on a pee stained floor or 2) climb into bed with my 94 year old incontinent aunt, which if I she scooched over towards the wall would allow me to sleep on the outside of the bed- the same position on the same mattress of the same bed in the same room where my father had died about 1 year and a half before, or I could climb over Carrie and sleep on the inside of the bed in the same position/mattress/bed/ where I had been sleeping when my father died on the outside edge of the bed about 1 year and a half before. Then the math: my father was 55 and in seemingly good health and died the first [and last] time we shared that bed… Carrie is 94… odds of lightning striking twice in that bed… oh, about 1:2.
Okay, be a man.
“That’s alright Carrie… I’m going to take the dog” (I’d brought Dudley Moore, the bald Pekingese, into the room with me) “and go back to my bed… but call me if you need anything.”
“Well… alright then.”
So I’m calmed down a bit. I consider calling my mother on the phone- decide against it. I did go into her bedroom thought because it had a color TV and this was a night that I needed some frigging sound- if anything goes bump in the night, I’m saying it was on the TV. And Dudley can vouch for it. (Poor thing- that dog’s life was a series of increasingly stranger health problems- at least Bela never scratched out one of his eyes like he had the previous bald Pekingese Niko.)
So… I turn on the TV and it’s well after 1 a.m. so it’s test patterns. I fiddle with the rabbit ears and adjust the knobs and bring in Channel 13 from B’ham- sound good, picture fuzzy, won’t be watching it anyway, just need the sound. It’s a commercial. I got in bed with the little snot nosed bald Dudley Moore.
Commercial ends. It’s the late night movie on. Helter Skelter. True story.
Okay, somehow this isn’t terribly effective at making me rest well.
Fiddle with the rabbit ears and the knobs and bring in Channel 7 out of somewhere. It’s a Love Boat episode. This is better. Nothing scary about Love Boat but Lauren Tewes drug addiction and she’s not here. Get back in bed with Dudley Moore.
A few minutes later Love Boat ends. Up next: the late night movie. Night of the Living Dead (or something similar- it was a low budget pic about zombies anyway).
I stopped cursing when I was in Third Grade as a promise to my grandmother (the good one). I had not uttered any word more harsh than damn- and I used that word very sparingly- since that time. I had never said the word Motherfucker until that night. When I shouted it.
So TV’s no comfort, the door opened and slammed itself, Carrie’s bedroom is just not gonna happen due to pee and dead Daddy flashbacks, and Dudley Moore was pissed off, dripping from the nose, and starting to bark (which was admittedly just a sign he was alive). So I followed the Southern version of “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS” known to kids from 6 months to 67…
“Hey can I speak to Blanche please… Hey Mama, this is Jon… just wanted to make sure you made it to work okay…”
Didn’t tell her what actually happened til the next day, but she knew something had upset me. Somehow I eventually drifted off to sleep. Lights on of course.
That was the first time the door opened and slammed itself.
Again, no embellishment, absolutely true and no preservatives or flavorings added.
A few months (?) later my brother visited. Very rare as he lived 120 miles away and he and my mother were Livia and Tiberius towards each other on the best of days, but he had business dealings with my grandmother (who lived next door to us) and dropped in. My brother was sitting on the sofa in the den, me and my mother and Carrie are all in the den or kitchen (opens into the den) as well. It’s night time.
The [t]house I grew up in had a long gravel driveway](scupprnong | Where the children were spinning (a giant scupp… | Flickr) and we had at any given time between- no exaggeration- five and twenty dogs (the latter figure being when there were pups and new strays- there was a stable population of about three or four and then there was the fluctuating population). The reason for mentioning this is that it was extremely rare for anybody to actually have to make it to the door before you knew they were there- you’d probably hear their tires on the gravel and if you didn’t the dogs would probably bark (most people who didn’t know the dogs were all too lazy and friendly to actually bite would in fact wait in their car and blow their horn). Rarely was it a surprise when somebody rang the doorbell- you already knew they were there.
This night the doorbell didn’t ring. The door just opened and shut. There were no other sounds.
Me, my mother, Carrie… none of us batted an eyelash or made a sound. My brother gets up to greet whoever it is and says “Well who is it?” and went into the living room. “What the hell?”
My mother tells him “You get used to it.” I say “Yup” or something equally corroborative.
My brother: “There’s nobody there… who the fuck just opened the door?”
Me/my mother: “No one. It does that sometimes.”
My brother: “The door just opened and fucking closed. I heard it.”
Us: “Yep.”
My brother: “They don’t do that by themselves!” (By this time he’s looked through the curtains and there’s no one there.)
Us: “That one does.”
My brother: “Bullshit. Someone’s here somewhere…” and he went outside. Walked all through the front yard, calling out “HELLO! HELLO!!! WHO’S HERE GODDAMNIT!” Came back in, took a gun off the rack, went back out. We heard him walking around the house- calling out “Hello!” We heard him fire the gun in the air a couple of times. He came back in…
“What the hell was that? Who opens and closes a door and walks off?”
“Good question” either my mother says or I say. By now some time has passed since that first night, and my mother- who I have to say never doubted it had happened (she later said she’d had weird things happen that she hadn’t told me about- though she did then) and I had heard and seen that door open and close so many times we didn’t even get worked up about it anymore. We would sometimes joke… “C’mon in, take your shoes off, set a spell…” and sometimes curse at it (my mother mainly)- “Goddamn it who are you and what do you want!? If you can open and close a door and a cabinet (and that’s another thing) then surely you can talk or you can write or something!” But, apparently not. Incorporeal illiteracy is a growing problem in rural America.
By the time my brother was there it was routine. It didn’t happen every night certainly- it didn’t happen every week even- but it happened several times. Sometimes it happened twice in the same day, then it might not happen again for weeks. There were numerous witness to the magic door of Locksley Hall (the name of the house I grew up in.)
My brother is a total skeptic, but he does acknowledge this happened and that he has no explanation for it. He says “I think somebody was fucking with you”, but I don’t think even he believes this- nobody’s going to come up to a family known to be well armed, open and slam a door, run off without upsetting any of the dogs and without ever being seen, sometimes in daylight, and for no real reason- and we lived 2 miles from the nearest neighbor who was not infirm (they’d have to have a car somewhere around).
But that day my brother was quite shaken up and yelling “What the fuck just happened!? Who did that!?”
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Carrie’s reply more than one of these times (I don’t remember whether she said it when my brother was carrying on- would make a great punchline but I just honestly don’t remember if it happened- but she did say it one time when the door opened and closed…):
“Hi sister! Kitty’s here y’all!”
And that’s another thing…
Meenie: You’ve got to go on Coast to Coast AM with this. I know you said you don’t want people IRL knowing about it, but if you fear their reaction, then they’re unlikely to listen to the show. So go for it.
That’s the one that used to be the Art Bell show, right? I would have to turn in my skeptic badge if I went on that show, heh. 
Wow…you have some interesting stories from your youth. And in your great-aunt’s case, even if I was as dead-set a skeptic about ghosts as I am about, say, homeopathy or magic crystal healing, it would be hard to fault her for thinking that it was her sister. Poor lady, she must have been so lonely 
My maternal grandfather saw his aunt, “Grandma Becky” (his father’s sister was the second wife of his mother’s father, thus she was his aunt and his step-grandmother), on his deathbed when he was with us. (Well, technically not his deathbed- he lived with us until he suffered an attack and was taken to the hospital- he lost consciousness in the E.R. and died in a coma a few days later.) Anyway, he saw Grandma Becky, and he saw his father (he didn’t see his mother, but then he wasn’t close to her). More enigmatically he would sometimes reach his hand towards an unseen woman and smile and when asked “Who are you smiling at Mustang? Who’s there?” he’d smile and say “Her…”; my sister and aunt will tell people still “He saw [his wife] on his deathbed and smiled and held her hand…”- the truth is he never once identified her as my grandmother (Zulimer, which he pronounced “Sister”), with whom he had a long but turbulent marriage, and Mustang was by all objective accounts a discreet but habitual womanizer throughout his life, so who knows who he was seeing.
BUT… while there’s some comfort in believing that he saw loved ones on his deathbed, he also confused my sister with my grandmother on several occasions (my sister at 21 bore a strong resemblance to my grandmother at that age), said “I guess Jodie drove her” when asked “How did Grandma Becky get here” (Jodie was Grandma Becky’s daughter, who was still alive at the time), which along with his false I.D. of my sister as his wife prompted my father to point out “He confuses the living and the dead… his mind is going and he’s seeing things”. Add to this that often when waking he had to be reminded where he was and what the year was (he once told me as we were going to sleep (we slept on twin beds in my room) “Funny thing… when I open my eyes I’m here with you… you’re my grandson… Jon Jon… you’re 12…” (he was saying this as if to remind himself) "but when I close my eyes… I’m 16… I’m at Grandma and Grandaddy’s house… it’s his birthday… June 9 1909… one’s as real as the other… " and then after a while told me “I love you but I’m gonna go be young a while” and went to sleep.
So, Mustang was groggy from medication, old age, and the illness he was dying from, so while the romantic part of me would believe that he saw his dead loved ones and that he walked through a time portal where he could be 16 for a while, Occam’s Razor and my rational side say “More likely, the old man was hallucinating”.
His wife was dead a few years by this time from a series of diabetic strokes, but by the time she died her mind had begun deteriorating. The term Alzheimers was never used but I’m pretty sure that’s what it was as she had the classic symptoms of Alzheimer’s related dementia: no short term memory at all, erratic actions (trying to bake pies using paper plates instead of crusts, walking up to guests in her home and placing napkins on their head, telling a waitress who went to Birmingham Southern College “I have a grandson who went there… his dick is a foot long if it’s an inch!” (she’d never used that kind of language before [though while I never saw it personally my cousin Harold’s dimensions were pretty legendary and sometimes apparent when he wore tight pants]). Sometimes she would not recognize my mother or remember ever having had a daughter- though she recognized and remembered her grandchildren; sometimes she couldn’t remember who she was, or who my grandfather was; once she walked to the store in the town where she lived- a tiny town with only one store- that one about a hundred yards from her door and a store her parents had owned when she was a child and young adult- and when she got there she had no idea where she was and offered a young man there some money if he’d please drive her home— and opened her purse and held out several hundred dollars. (Luckily he was an ethical man who just walked her home.) She screamed when two black men began beating each other up in her living room and went running to look for a pistol “to kill those n____r sons of bitches!” (and she neither cursed nor used racial slurs ordinarily and was terrified of guns); the black men in question were Muhammad Ali and George Frasier (my grandfather was watching their rematch).
Anyway, I mention the above to illustrate a classic senile dementia: inability to tell fact from reality, erratic behavior, major memory loss, etc… For the most part, Carrie never had this.
Carrie never lost her short term memory- or long term. She always knew exactly who I was and exactly who my mother was and who my father had been and who she was, and she could talk about events from 1978 or 1905 with equal clarity. She could talk about the events that happened the morning that Kitty burned with clarity. She never mixed up the living and the dead: she knew Kitty and my father were both dead. She was a gracious enough hostess not to make too big a deal of it when they dropped in on her, however.
I honestly don’t remember the first time Carrie told us about Kitty coming to visit her. Or my father. Once her sister Maude (who died in 1938) came. I don’t recall her mother (who lived to be 100 when the twins, who lived with her their entire life til then, were about 73) ever coming to “visit”. But… they “visited” her on a regular basis for a couple of years.
Now, I have to add some things in interest of full disclosure:
Carrie did confuse TV with reality sometimes. She would see Vanna White waving and wave back for instance, sometimes even inviting her to eat with us (Wheel of Fortune came on around dinner time). Consider though how confusing it would be to somebody who never saw a television until she was well over 60, and never really watched color television until she was well over 90 and now this full color life sized lady is waving to you- it would be weird, about like one of us suddenly seeing a fully formed 3-D interactive hologram [when we’re 94 at that] might be. (K&C’s set was b/w- we considered giving them a color set but were frankly afraid to because it could be seen through their windows and they were two old ladies living alone next to a busy highway- may not have been a good idea).
Then there was the time that Sandy Duncan wouldn’t let her use the bathroom in peace. *However, **even Carrie later admitted “I imagined that… I don’t know what I was thinking about! Maybe I fell asleep and dreamt it.”) Plus her vision was going: she’d warm her hands at the TV thinking it was a fireplace (then get irritated with herself), or she’d poke her head in the hall coat closet and call the dog in, wondering aloud why somebody hung clothes on the porch- but like the doors to Heaven and Hell according to Nikos Kazantzakis, the doors to our porch and our coat closet were identical and side by side- an honest mistake. :mad:
But Sandy Duncan and Vanna White aside (and which of us doesn’t sometimes think Sandy Duncan’s in our bathroom?) her mind was clear. She could tell you who the president was, what a tragedy the Challenger explosion was (even knew what the space shuttle was and that it was in Alabama), etc… I would actually sometimes ask her “What’s today’s date?” when I needed to know and she could almost always tell me because she read the paper each morning. She even learned how to answer and dial the telephone in her 90s (pretty impressive- she couldn’t look up a number in the phone book [eyesight for one thing] but she learned how to press 0 for an operator (in case of emergency) or to dial her niece’s telephone number (written in big letters on the phone itself). Her mind at 94-95-96-97 was a whole lot better than my senile grandmother’s had been when she was in her early 70s.
And about the time the door started opening and closing, my father and Kitty started coming to see her. Odd thing: she couldn’t see them, but she could hear them. She’d carry on conversations with Kitty especially, who’d sit beside her. A cleaned up snip from a true weird/unexplained story story about her elsewhere on these boards:
What was funny was on the incredibly rare moments when she had live company from an aged nephew or niece she’d sometimes try to introduce them to Kitty or work her into the conversation because Kitty was there on the sofa with them, and the nephew or niece would be too worked up in patronizing her with other things they wouldn’t even notice what she’d said. “How’s that Aunt Carrie? Oh yes, Aunt Kitty was a fine woman wasn’t she… I know I miss her I can’t imagine how much you do. You ever think of her?” “She’s right here!” “Oh that’s right… she’s always gone be there in yore heart” whereupon Carrie would shoot a “get a load of this dipwad” look towards me. I’ve compared it before to being in a Centenarian Players version of HARVEY with Carrie as Elwood.
But anyway, she would talk to me and turn to ask Kitty a question because she couldn’t think of a name- “Oh sister what was the name of that woman had the grist mill over there in Kowaliga? I know her son died of consumption… what say? That’s it! Ramona Bagwell! She was Leon Headley’s sister wadn’t she?” and Kitty would affirm.
Kitty also “told” her that while she couldn’t be with her 24/7, she was going to remain near her until she died and they could be together again. My father, however, eventually told her goodbye. “Said he has to move on… said to tell you though to look after your mama, and he’s sorry he wasn’t more demonstrative but he loves ya and is proud of ya! And to not be sorry about giving up the farm.” (My father was most definitely not demonstrative, but neither was Carrie especially- not exactly a touchy feely family. Still odd.
Apparently he had no parting words for my mother. Not surprising. Once before he left when Carrie had announced “Garland’s here” (Garland was my father) my mother turned around with the most demonically sweet smile and asked “Is he? Where? I’d love to have a word with him…”
Carrie: “Well he was here a second ago… but he’s gone now?”
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Anyway, I apologize for going into this much detail about the odd incidents of that hillside- I really didn’t mean to type this much but these are events I haven’t written about in a long time (and I haven’t told the most interesting or the weirdest and definitely not the scariest of the “weird stories”), and now to really throw it into the realm of "Why the hell tell it in the first place?"dom I will say flat out: I have no idea whether Carrie was hallucinating/self-deluding or having actual experiences.
I have never interacted with a ghost (or whatever else you want to call it). I’ve seen people vanish about three times in my life (children when I was a child, and twice since being an adult), I’ve had a couple of “there is absolutely no frigging reason I should have survived that without a scratch” moments (one involving a loaded gun and another involving what should have been a major car crash but didn’t happen), I’ve seen doors and cabinets open and close and several times I’ve seen cats and dogs both at the same time hiss and bark at something no human present could see and other “mild to medium” odd experiences, but I’ve never had a conversation with something who wasn’t there or heard one say a sentence (word or two, yes, but that I can attribute to any number of things that are natural). This is not a complaint incidentally: to any spirit reading this, DON’T FEEL OBLIGATED TO SPEAK OR IN ANY WAY TIP YOUR HAT TO ME! I WON’T BE INSULTED! 
I was extremely close to my mother. She was a firm believer in the supernatural, particularly in ghosts, and said if there was a way she’d contact me from the other side. It’s been two years and I live in her house with most of her furniture. Nothing. Not a single unexplained happening in all that time. (Oh I’ve had what some would call “dream visits” with her, but I’ve had vivid dreams about characters from TV shows and relatives/friends/acquaintances who are very much alive.) It’s been somewhere between a relief and very disappointing.
I’m an agnostic or an atheist dependent upon room temperature and definitions employed. I neither believe nor disbelieve in an afterlife- it doesn’t inform my moral code or action in any way. I cannot for the life of me understand how sane and rational people can follow religious or irreligious teachings that are based on some kind of “revelation” or insight that another person had but can’t claim- I would never expect people to believe in ghosts because I told them to no matter how much they may like or respect me, because while everything I’ve told about what I’ve seen and experienced is true, I can’t prove a word of it.
And it’s not terribly surprising that a lonely woman in her 90s begins carrying on a conversation with the woman who was her other half for the first 93 years of her life or the nephew she raised like a son (and whose house she lived in), or that she heard a voice telling her it was okay not to be baptized and took comfort from it, but I also do not for a second believe the answer was as simple as auditory hallucination either. She perhaps willed it into becoming real to her senses, I don’t dispute that, but… the comment about my father not being demonstrative was the most chilling thing she passed on, that and the revelation about “Crow’s children” and some other odd things, some comments made to Kitty about “well you scare them when you do that, can’t you just appear?”- it was all just extremely - bizarrely- appropriate and insightful in a way that Carrie, while far from unintelligent or uncompassionate, just usually wasn’t.
Anway, it’s late, I’m sleepy, and while I think I had a better point I forgot it while switching to just telling the stories of Carrie instead (I fear I sometimes use SDMB as something of a memo pad that I can search later to expand). A point tomorrow perhaps. Perhaps in the meantime Carrie will send me an email- now that would be proof (and I did visit her grave today, and those of her parents and both grandmothers for that matter) and perform the usual family ritual (involves a penny and a particular oath and gesture) so the next communicat is hers’ (not that I keep score).
How can I get one?!
I enjoyed your post, and believe it all. I worked in a hospital and a hospice for a number of years and saw many instances of deathbed visions. My own mother saw her mother, my grandmother, the day she died. She told me all about it. Then told me she wouldn’t be going back to her house. She asked me to take good care of my family and be a good person. She died about 4 hours later. It is a great comfort for the dying to communicate with their deceased relatives. Just as it is in near death experiences.
Are you all winding me up or has someone supposedly found objective proof for the existence of an afterlife?
Yup! While you were out partying over the weekend, confirmatory evidence was posted on a highly reputable web-site, stating the existence of ghosties, ghoulies and all things going bump in the night, beyond any form of doubt! Now where did I put that link?
I’m late to the thread, but…
No, I don’t believe. And I have had some experiences that could be mistaken for such a thing but I just don’t believe it’s possible. I believe our anima, whatever we have, is part of our body, and just a bunch of chemicals, so whence the ghost?
Not to mention I have some experience with eyewitnesses and they are an incredibly bad source of information. Trusting your own senses is not really always the best thing to do. Loons sound like people crying, etc.
Still, I wouldn’t say anything to people who do believe…but generally we don’t become strong friends. Most of the ghost people I know really believe, and it’s hard to differ on something so fundamental. I don’t believe in anything, so that doesn’t help - no voodoo, no Ouija boards, ghosts, elementals, spirits, vampires, werewolves, anything.
Meenie7,
There are some very simple tests you could perform to verify your ghost’s existence. For instance - you could get a freind roll a die ten times in one room with your ghost watching. After each roll, have your ghost come in and tell you what the roll was. Have your freind write down each result, and you write down each result as reported by the ghost. If you are truly being visited, you should have no problem getting 10 out of 10 or even 100 out of 100. If you can do it in a controlled environment, you would also stand to make a million dollars (if money is not your thing, you could donate it to cancer research or to a children’s hospital). This could all be arranged very easily. Is this something you have ever tried?
I have a story to contribute. My late uncle died from lung cancer. In his last months,he was very ill. Finally, he had to go to the hospital, and one day my aunt visited him. he had been sleeping, and told my aunt that he had just spoken with “eleanor”. Eleanor was his sister, who died as a young girl. He desribed how he spoke with Eleanor, and she told him that he would be “leaving soon”.
My uncle died that evening.
While your sarcasm machine might be working well your incredulity detector seems to be broken.
I don’t see why this would be even remotely paranormal. He was very ill, probably very medicated and he was sleeping just before. I’m guessing that he knew that he was going to die - so he had a vivid dream about talking to his sister, about something that was very much on his mind at the time. In his duress and medicated state he mistook it for a real exchange. The fact that he died that evening is coincidence. Would you tell the story if he had died two days later, three?