Well, Marvel, since you asked…
I’ve gone through most of my good stories, so I’ll mine the stories of my relatives.
From my grandad Jack:
He was a very large but soft spoken and gentle man who had that Irish gift of storytelling down to an art. (No, that’s not the creepy part!)
In the forties or fifties in the town where he lived there was this awful man. He beat his wife, one of his children had died under very mysterious circumstances. A real piece of shit, if you will. Towards the end of his life, his wife took off with the remaining kids, and everyone in the community did their best to avoid him. When it became pretty clear that this man was dying, my grandad offered to wait with in the house with him until he died. As despicable as the guy was,(sorry, I wish I had a name for him, but I heard this story a while ago and as you’ll see, the name isn’t the most memorable part of the story) my grandad thought that nobody should die completely alone.
One night, grandad had a terrible, unsettled feeling. He knew something was up, and that the other man would be dead by morning. At this point in the story, he would look you right in the eye, and say in his soft quiet voice:
“Make no mistake, I know that the devil was in the house that night. I could feel him. He was waiting on that man’s soul.”
(I’ll give you a minute to shake that weird chill from your spine. I know that I need it.)
So as he went to bed, he closed the bedroom door and jabbed knives in the door jamb so that it could not be opened from the outside.
In the middle of the night, he was awakened by the feeling of preesure on his legs. He looked up, and sitting on his bed was a huge black dog. (Remember - the door was jammed shut) He looked at the dog and said “You’ve got the wrong room. I’m not the one you’re waiting for”. At that, the dog disappeared into the air. Sure enough, the other man was dead in the morning and the uneasy feeling in the house had completely disappeared.
From my brother, who looks exactly like my grandad and seems to be developing his storytelling ablity, too:
My brother is a chef, and a few years ago worked at this posh little hotel. One night, he finished up the last of his work in the kitchen and got into his car to go home. A few hundred metres from the hotel, his car skidded on the wet roads and went into a ditch. The car was undamaged, so he decided to walk back up to the hotel and sleep in a vacant room. He’d call a tow truck in the morning to get his car.
As he was walking up the path to the hotel, the power went out. No big deal, it happened a lot out in the woods there and the generators would come on soon. With all the lights around him out, he realized that the sky looked really odd. The clouds were quite low, but they were glowing, as if lit from within. First the glow was white, then sort of blue, then pink. “What the hell is that?” he blurted out. A few seconds later, he heard “What the hell is that?” he turned around, thinking that someone had come out of the hotel and was also wondering about the weird sky. Then it dawned on him that the voice that he heard was HIS, as it sounds on a tape recorder, and that the sound seemed to come from right above his head. Eeeekkkk.
Suddenly every light in the hotel complex came on, but exremely brightly. He described it as being almost like sunlight-bright. A second or two later, they dimmed to their normal levels, and everything was groovy. The sky was dark again, and nothing seemed amiss.
From my great aunt Deannie:
She was about 3 years old (she’s getting close to ninety, this was during the first world war) and playing in her front yard. A man in a military unifrom stops at the fence and kneels down. She’s never met him, but he knows her name. He tells her to run into the house and get her mother, that John is here to see her. She does, and her mother is ecstatic. They run out to the front yard, but he’s nowhere in sight. None of the neighbours have seen him, either. Deannie is accused of trying to play some sort of trick, but why would she make this up? She’s never even met the man that was at the fence. Her mother goes back into the house and resumes her work. Later that afternoon, another man stops by the yard and asks for Deannie’s mother. Unfortunately, he was bringing over the telegram telling Deannie’s mother that her brother, John had been killed in France a few days before.
Ok, I must stop for a while.
