Another Little Ghost Story...

In a previous blog I mentioned my own experience with what might have been a ghost a short time after losing my grandmother. I also mentioned my uncle and his experiences with otherworldly phenomena. And that he was a spiritualist minister (and a fantasy-driven personality) and ran a spiritualist “church” out of his house every Friday night. I’ll get into some of the things that went on during those “services” in later blogs.

But for now, as an addendum to my own experience, I should add my uncle and his family’s supposed encounter with my grandmother’s “ghost”.

My paternal grandmother, who died in 1973, had lived with my uncle, Dr. Herbert Hopkins, since the late 60s (my grandfather having passed away only a few months before I was born in 1961.) The house very large, old,with three levels, and she had a room upstairs. (and fitted with those old steam radiators in every room that could make anyone think a house was haunted in the dead of night—no fictional ghost ever made as much clanking noise as came out of those things.)

Not long after my grandmother passed on, my uncle and various members of his family started claiming her ghost was doing peculiar things. The TV in her room would suddenly come on while everyone was downstairs; they would find her butt imprint in the cushion of her favorite rocking chair in her room. The scent of a flowery perfume she wore would suddenly reek throughout the upstairs hallway. And of course the usual assortment of whispers, creaking rocking chairs and ghostly coughs. I think once he even claimed he discovered the upstairs bathtub filled with water (now that happens sometimes in this area but there’s a perfectly natural explanation—which is neither pretty nor fragrant.)

As I mentioned in the Men in Black blog, I spent a lot of time at my uncle’s house as a kid, especially that summer when I practically lived there because my mother was experiencing health problems that required hospital stays and my father worked 12-hour days. I have to admit, being barely twelve I was pretty nervous about going into my grandmother’s room after she passed, and the ghost stories coming from my relatives didn’t help that much.

And while I was there I never heard the TV come on by itself, though I did see the imaginary imprint in the chair cushion (which was pretty much always there and larger than my grandmother’s rear-end, so I am fairly certain my uncle was doing it late at night after he’d spent a few hours with Captain Hooch.) I did smell the perfume too, but that one is even easier to explain than the imprint. I have only their claims on the TV, but being a fan of the Ghost Hunters series, I also tend to go into these things with an attitude of debunking, especially if it is something I don’t experience myself.

Did these things happen to them? Based on what I know of him, his family (and this is intimate knowledge) and his Men in Black episode, I have strong doubts, despite my own “might-have-experience” with her ghost.

I sometimes wonder why, for all his claims of experiences with the supernatural, my uncle’s ghost hasn’t come back to haunt me. How do I know he hasn’t? Well, if he had I’m pretty sure his spook would have kicked my ass for writing these articles about him by now…