It seems like every family has stories about eccentric relations or haunted family property or just plain weird happenings. Please share your stories!
Here are some from my relations:
My paternal grandfather was the head electrician at Louisiana State Penetentiary (aka Angola). His responsibilities included checking the electric chair to make sure it worked properly and starting up the generator when the executioner waved at him through a window.
Mouse_Spouse has an ancestor that was the minister for the village of Sleepy Hallow NY in the 1700’s. Given Spouse’s love of pranks, I can’t help but wonder. :dubious:
Well, since the 5th of November is shortly to come (at least in the UK), I have a small confession. There’s a tradition in my family that Guy Fawkes is somewhere up there in the family tree, on my maternal grandfather’s side. My mother’s father’s middle name was “Fawkes”, spelled the right way of course, so that is consistent with the story. But I never met him: he died about 10 years before I was born (my grandfather, that is, not Guy Fawkes – I was not born in the early 17th century).
I have a crazy old aunt who has cut off all ties to people in general. She lives in an old, isolated house in the woods in the state of Washington. Vines growing up the walls type of creepy. The neighborhood kids are afraid of her and the property. She wanders the house alone, talking to herself and her cats. She even has the food delivered. One of the strangest aspects of the house is that in the living room, amidst all the clutter, is a giant stuffed Emperor Penguin! Her former husband, back in better days, was an arctic meteorologist and picked it up on a research trip to Antarctica.
When my aunt was in middle school, one of her classmates committed suicide. There was a rumor that abuse at the hands of her father was the cause. She and my aunt weren’t really close, but close enough that my aunt attended the wake at the girl’s house out in the country. Eventually, the girl’s family moved and they tore down the house.
About 15 years ago, my aunt built a house on the property where the girl’s house once stood. The new house isn’t in the exact same spot as the old house, but they are very close. My uncle claims the house is haunted by the girl’s ghost, but no one else has seen any evidence of a haunting.
I have always laid claim to the stuffed penguin. No one else seems to want it, but I do! Unfortunately, no one has spoken with her or been in the house in over a decade, so we do not know whether or not it still exists.
I hope the penguin is still there, and that you inherit it. That is really unique. Imagine yourself in a bar. “Hey, there. Wanna come to my place? I have a giant stuffed Emperor Penguin.”
Another spooky thing:
In the parking lot where I work there has been one suicide (I knew the guy ) and an off-duty dective was shot and killed. I don’t know if the lot is haunted, but it’s working on being cursed! (I’ve started taking the bus.)
My step-great-grandfather is supposedly the ghost at the Empress Theatre in Fort Macleod, Alberta (Canada), where I grew up. He was the caretaker/custodian there for years. I suppose if you believe in that kind of thing, that’s a cute story. Or spooky. I mean SPOOKY! OOOOoooOOoOoOOOOO!
My wife Pepper Mill not only grew up in Grover’s Mill , N.J. (Where the Martians landed for Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds), she’s also related to Rebecca Nurse, who was hanged as a witch during the 1692 Salem Withcraft Trials.
I was the spook in my family when I was a kid. I don’t remember any of it.
My mom says when I was a little, I suddenly started talking about my new friend Herbie. She said I described him as a little old man who was green and had wings. She asked me what kind of wings, but my vocabulary wasn’t sufficient to describe them. So, she showed me books with pictures of birds trying to get me to show her. She says she was a little disconcerted when I pointed to a picture of a bat and said, “Like that!”
One of mom’s friend stopped coming around because of me and Herbie. One day she went to sit in a chair and I hissed, “Don’t! You’ll sit on him!” I guess I had sort of a creepy little kid vibe, of the “I see dead people” kind, long before the movie.
She says that I yammered on so much about him (and she could hear me talking to him when no one else was around, which she though was sort of odd) that she started asking me questions about Herbie. I told her that Herbie lived in a green house behind the grocery store. She took me back there once to show me there was no green house back there because I was so insistant about it. Even after I saw the vacant lot, she says I kept stubbornly repeating that Herbie said that’s where he lived. She worked at the court house at the time and was telling this story to some co-workers. One of the “old timers” spoke up and said that there was a green house back there at one time, but it had burned down many, many years ago, and yeah . . . the guy that had owned it had been named Herbert Something.
My friendship with my little green bat-winged man ended suddenly one day while we were driving. Mom says I suddenly let out a scream and started crying so hard that she stopped the car to try to calm me down. Between choking sobs, I told her that Herbie had said goodbye and flown out the window. She says I never mentioned him again after that day.
The logical side of me says that I must have overheard a conversation about Herbert Something who died in a fire in a green house behind the grocery store and for some reason, latched onto that name as the one for my invisible friend. But my mom still somewhat semi-belives that I “saw” something that adults could not.
Dear Og, did I ever misinterpret that thread title. “Man,” I thought, “if my hyper-conservative southern aunts don’t want to admit there’s Cherokee blood in the family, how would they react to that?”
We don’t have anyone in recent memory who fits the OP’s description. However, one of my uncles who recently started getting into genealogy made a side trip during a business conference in Germany to visit the town our ancestors lived in before coming to America. He went to the town’s records office and discovered that the family name was actually well known (at least among the local historians).
“Great, there must be a lot of information about the family then.”
“Well, there’s some, but unfortunately our records only go back to 1670.”
“Really? Why is that?”
“That’s the year your ancestor burned down the village.”
Apparently, we had a baker in our family history who was a bit careless about tending his ovens. There didn’t seem to be any hard feelings over it, fortunately.
My mother’s family has lived on the banks of the Ohio river ever since… well, ever since they killed all the Indians there and claimed it for their own (that’s an amazing story, btw, but not a spooky one). Sometime around the turn of the 19th/20th century, one of my ancestors got into a fight that ended up in the river–said ancestor was drowned.
Thirty years later, so said my great-aunt, who was there, there was a family reunion along the riverbank at approximately the same place. Everyone there–thirty or forty people–saw said ancestor emerge from the water and begin to walk up the bank towards them. There was a wire fence between the party and the riverbank, and when the apparition reached it, he grabbed it with both hands, the fence hummed as though electrified, and the ghost disappeared.
The other story is about my grandfather, the great-aunt’s little brother, who apparently had a psychic bond with their older brother (who was one of the many people who simultaneously invented television). When my grandfather was in the army during WWII, he was retreating along the banks of a minor river in Europe and looked down the riverbank, where he saw a dead German soldier with its arm blown off. Grandpa knew, instantly, that his brother had broken his arm–and he was right.
Several years later, when grandpa was out of the army, the same brother caught influenza and was taken to the great-aunt’s house to convalesce. My grandpa was sitting in the front room downstairs (where I was sitting, when the great-aunt told me this), and was amazed to see a woman dressed in gray silk walking down the staircase. At the bottom of the stairs she turned down the hall and went to the back room–where there had once been a doorway, now long blocked up. Grandpa got up to see what she was doing and–she was gone.
He ran upstairs to tell his brother. The brother was dead.
) and an off-duty dective was shot and killed. I don’t know if the lot is haunted, but it’s working on being cursed! (I’ve started taking the bus.)