Family Home Haunted
The house sits as it always has, on a quiet residential street in the city of Cicero, Illinois which is by the way, a southern suburb of Chicago. Nothing stands out about it, not that anything would of course from the outside. Throughout the spring and summer months, the lawn is mowed and watered as are the other houses which line the block, and from time to time workman are seen doing the normal repairs and upkeep which is required of a house that has stood for more than a hundred years. Come winter, the walkway to and from the house is shoveled with each snowfall, including the driveway and the sidewalk in front. Salt is sprinkled about to melt any ice so that people walking past do not slip. In the autumn, leaves are raked up and bagged at set to the curb for pick up. And year round, if you were to drive past the old house throughout the evening and night time hours, you would see lights going on and off inside as though it’s residents were up and moving about from room to room. The thing is though, the house has been sitting empty for almost five decades now... Well, not exactly empty. It’s a bit haunted and under curse. I know this to be true because the house was once the home of my Grandmother...
This story begins in the winter of 1966. That was the year that my Grandmother died at the age of ninety-three. She’d lived in the house for a good many years of course, having moved into it back when she first married my Grandfather. Let’s see, that was in 1904. At the time, my Grandfather had worked for the railroad and did so for most of his life, starting out as a thirteen year old kid who hauled a water bucket back and forth for those men working on the tracks, until retiring some fifty years later as a District Regional Supervisor for the freight division of the Santa-Fe Railroad. Anyway - My Grandfather had bought the house with the help of a bank loan that had been co-signed by his father, my Great-Grandfather and the moment that he brought Grandmother into the house, he promised that the house was hers forever... Unfortunately, my Grandfather passed away a short number of years later in 1943, having suffered a heart attack one Sunday morning as he listened to the radio in the living room while Grandmother was at church. Grandmother did marry again ten years later to a man named William and was still married to him when she passed...
My Grandmother died on the way to the hospital, in an ambulance. On her death certificate it listed the cause of death as “Natural Causes.” Her heart was tired and it was just her time and so she crossed over in a quiet manner, as though she closed her eyes to go to sleep. I tell you that she died on the way to the hospital in the ambulance for a reason of course.
Some people claim that there is an odor connected with death - Perhaps they are referring to the odor of (and I don’t mean to be crude and rude about it) a bowel movement and of urine which is released when a person dies - the body relaxing totally I would suppose, but I have never noticed anything. Shortly after my Grandmother’s death and which many say continues on to the present day, there is the faint scent of my Grandmother in her bedroom. But it is not of feces or urine which I speak of --- It is the scent of vanilla and peach blossoms, two of her favorites when it came to perfume. Of course, a scent is liable to linger on for days and even weeks, especially if the person’s belongings still remain in the room, but not years - not decades and not if the room has been emptied of all belongings and furniture. And yet it remains... Not everyone can smell it; only a few, but when they do catch a whiff of it, you can tell those who catch a scent.
For a while, Grandfather William continued to sleep in the room which he had shared with my Grandmother, but eventually moved into the guest bedroom down the hall, claiming that as much as he loved my Grandmother, he would get spooked in the middle of the night when he would wake up for no reason and smell that scent of vanilla and peach blossoms. He would also talk about other things occurring within the house as well, such as lights turning on and off by themselves, the feeling of being watched and stared at, especially if he had his shoes on and his feet on the coffee table, a habit which Grandmother had tried to break him of.
My Grandmother enjoyed baking and there is quite a bit of activity which surrounds the old Iron stove in the kitchen, a hold over from those times before gas ovens were used. Grandmothers was black and made of iron and used wood and coal until in the 1920‘s when Grandfather allowed the house to be hooked up to the city gas line, after which time the stove was converted to work on gas. It’s still there as far as I know sitting unused. Visitors and relatives who come to the house from time to time have caught the aroma of baking bread or pie in the air... And there is the most famous family event regarding the stove, but of course I will share that with you in due time.
But I am jumping ahead of myself in this most private of family ghost stories. Yes, it is the consensus of everyone who has ever been inside of the house since my Grandmother’s death, that the house is truly haunted by her spirit and perhaps by the spirit of my Grandfather. What I need to relate to you first, are of the events which took place a short number of days later following my Grandmother’s death at her wake...
PART TWO TOMORROW
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