Growing Up Ghost Girl

*This was originally posted on my LiveJournal, but since the season has arrived, thought I'd bring it up here. 

So why “Ghost Girl”? Perhaps it’s time to explain. Could be my fascination with ghost stories. Yes. My mad desire to write about the spirits. Uh huh. But where did that come from? Growing up in a haunted house might have something to do with it:

In 1973, my family moved into a brand new house, built on the edge of a small river valley in rural Northeastern Indiana. I was 9 years old and the quiet country life was something new to me. But as I would discover in the next several years, it was anything but quiet.
It started with a feeling. This huge house full of new, interesting rooms, even a shadowy, unfinished basement where we could walk through the walls and play hopscotch on the floor. But that feeling only fluttered through my guts in one room. The brightest, cheeriest space in the house.

My older sister’s bedroom was in the far corner at the top of the house, plastered with flowery wallpaper and grass-green carpet and banked by a solid wall of windows. It was a meadow all its own, full of light and bright colors. But the moment I stepped into that room, something, some indescribable thing dragged my spirits down and seemed to smother all the vibrance in the room. We never could explain it.

We had lived there for a few years before anything significant happened, but happen it did. It’s hard to say which came first, but I think it was the three fingers. Three tentative, questioning fingers. You see, my sister had awakened in the middle of the night. She couldn’t say why. She just suddenly woke up to a silent, moonlit room. So she rolled over on her back and waited for sleep to return. But something else arrived first. As she lay there, patiently waiting, she felt something lean on the bed, as if a cat had crawled up on the mattress and was walking towards her.

Her breath caught heavy in her chest and her heart pounded so loudly in her ears that she was sure it would wake up the house. And then, it touched her. It felt like three fingers pressing gently on her thigh, as if to see if she was real. And then it was gone. And so was sleep for the rest of the night...

Pop back in for more details of my haunted childhood home. And believe me…they get more interesting, especially by the time I go to college.