I still remember the uneasy, almost sinister feeling I sensed, when moving into my house 16 years ago this month, on Halloween weekend. I sensed it as soon as I was in the driveway and really felt it when on the front porch. I could smell the fear, but I have to admit, most of it was attributed to the 17 potpourri air fresheners scattered all about the house that I found and threw away. My husband had already found and disposed of a dozen himself. They were everywhere! I’m not kidding. The smell hit me like a wall before entering the house. Apparently the people who owned the house before us, were the owners of five dogs, and instead of cleaning up after them, or shampooing the carpets occasionally, they just stuck another air freshener on the wall, ceiling, closet door, etc. Anyway, this isn’t a story about stinky dogs and obsessive uses of potpourri. It’s about ghosts!

Once I was settled in the house, the creepy feelings disappeared. It wasn’t until several years later, when I slept in my newborn son’s bedroom, that I began to have strange experiences. There were a couple times I awoke to see a black hand come down towards my face. Other times I saw strange colored lights suspended about six feet above the floor, next to the bed, morphing into different shapes and colors. Needless to say, the black hand freaked me out the most. I’d jump up and sleep on the couch. I attributed the experiences to sleep deprivation and I never thought much about it once I no longer stayed in the room… till my son, who doesn’t make up stories, told me he was having the same experiences! That unnerved me a little because I never told him nor anyone else about what I had seen.

All before this happened my daughter had seen a strange shadowy “thing” walk out of the same room and slink creepily across the hallway years before her little brother was born. I remember we had come home after visiting my parents, and she began freaking out as we were still taking our coats off at the front door. She told me she saw some black hunched over creature exit the bedroom and go across the hallway. I had a hard time calming her down. A few months ago, she came to my room, looking like, well, she had just seen a ghost. She had seen a shadow walk across the same hallway and then through the bathroom door. This is when I told her about mine and her brother’s experiences.

This Summer we remodeled the house. My son’s bedroom is no longer a bedroom. It is the entrance to the new addition. It will be converted into an office and pantry soon. I wondered if all the construction would rile up our ghost and I think it did. At night, when the new addition wasn’t opened to the rest of the house yet, but closed in so nobody could have entered it from outside without a key, I’d hear boards dropping on the floor, footsteps and other bangs, while I watched tv in the old master bedroom. It even awoke my dog who began growling at the sounds. This happened several times on different nights. When I’d inspect the addition in the morning, nothing would look out of place and there hadn’t been any boards that could have just fallen over. Boards were stacked in a neat pile and unmoved from the day before.

Now I get a creeped out feeling in the new master bathroom, where the sounds came from when it was still under construction. A couple months ago, I was speaking with my daughter in the family room and heard banging sounds coming from the new bathroom. We thought it was the cat but he was with us in the same room. We joked it was our “ghost” and laughed. Right after that we both heard footsteps and the doorknob to the patio door move, as if someone was trying to open it. We stopped laughing.

Other than these experiences, the house has always seemed welcoming and cozy, so I’m not concerned. I’m not a “believer” in ghost. I could be convinced that the experiences are all the result of active imaginations but who knows?

Happy Halloween!

I think a lot of my old neighborhood and growing up in Decatur and there’s one television show that always takes me back there, The Wonder Years.  The dad in the tv show was a lot like my dad.  My dad and I locked horns like Karen and Jack Arnold, not because we were too different.  Our problem was, we were too much alike.  Like Jack, my dad often grunted at the dinner table after a hard day at work instead of forming full sentences, especially the time when my mom told me to use “protection” if I were to have sex.  My dad growled, snarled in fact and about choked on his food, while giving my mom a look of disapproval.  It was more than disapproval.  It was as if he was accusing my mom of sacrificing his virgin daughter to a volcano.  I’m sure there was probably a discussion between the two later but the growl pretty much told me what he thought of the matter.  Dad’s are that way about their daughters. Moms are more practical.

My mom wasn’t a stay at home mom like Norma.  She worked for a Chevrolet dealership in Decatur for over 22 years.  There she too locked horns with various managers who came and went.  Being a female in a workplace filled with so much testosterone wasn’t always easy but she was always up for the task.  She started as a cashier for the service department until it was realized she was probably more suited for a behind the scene job, especially after telling a rude customer to drive his car in the lake or a foul-mouthed abusive one to evolve into a human being before speaking to her again.  Other than that she was really a very quiet person, with a very short temper.

One thing I always enjoyed about The Wonder Years is how it made me feel about my childhood in a romanticized way.  Hearing the street lights humming, the locusts imitating emergency defense sirens,  seeing the glow of lightning bugs beneath the willow tree and the lamp inside the living room where safety abounded were all wonders.  Yes, there were many parts of growing up that I’d rather forget but the good memories keep me grounded in the faith that God is real.  I never questioned it then.  God’s evidence was everywhere.  Somehow those feelings went away after graduating high school and getting married.

Bills awaited me in the mailbox and dishes in the sink never washed themselves.  Jobs I’ve had have left much to be desired.  My bank account is too small to collect dust, let alone interest.  Still, I’ve been an adult long enough to know that I can look back at early adulthood with some of the same nostalgia as my childhood years.  Remembering how the house looked when we first moved in and how I felt the first few months by myself, alone, at night, with nobody else.  I was scared out of my head!  While my husband worked the night shift, I was left to fend for myself in a strange house, surrounded by neighbors who weren’t friendly like the ones I grew up with, in fact they all seemed weird.  It didn’t feel much like a home.  The house felt as safe as a tent in grizzly territory.  It always felt like that at any moment an ax was about the chop through the front door or the sight of a knife-wielding maniac standing at the foot of my bed would awake me in the middle of the night.  Those were the days!

But now, I’d love to go back to those days and relive them, just for a little while, this time much wiser and appreciative – especially knowing I lived through them without being hacked to death.  To be with my dog Davey again and Minnie when she was young and healthy would be awesome.  To see that hideous carpet in the living room and that God-awful brown toilet with that truly terrible faux painting technique on the bathroom walls  would be like heaven.  Come to think of it, I’m satisfied with just seeing the house from yesteryear in just my memories.  I would love to have Davey back though.  I guess I’ll have to wait for heaven for that sight.  I wouldn’t even mind if the brown toilet was there.  It’s part of me – a brown toilet. It may not be evidence of God’s handiwork like lightning bugs beneath the weeping willow but it’s still part of what has made me, me.  Even a toilet can become a romanticized memory.

My mom passed away in 2004 and I get along a lot better with my dad now.  He rarely grunts or growls, except at the thought of his grand-daughters dating.  At least some things never change.

It’s sad for me to see the old Holiday Swim Club property in Decatur be converted into commercial office space.  I had held out hope that somehow through some sort of a miracle, the pool would reappear beneath the dirt  and the old bathhouse would somehow reconstruct itself.  There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of my old Summer hangout.

I hung out there with my best friend Eric.  To be honest, we were a couple of real brats.  The lifeguards had us sitting out of the water as much as we were in it.  It was a game to us.  The lifeguards liked us though.  We weren’t bad trouble; just kind of goofy mischief!  We certainly were the odd ones though in the neighborhood.  While others were consumed with looking good, fitting in or being cool, we’d wade in the creek or sit on the nearby pedestrian bridge crossing Spring Creek, within a short walking distance of the pool.  I loved that bridge.  It had character.  Built out of bending arches of steel painted red, it was our own mini-Golden Gate Bridge.  We’d sit on it, dangling our legs over the edge and watch the water flow by as we laughed, dreamed and talked.  It was still in hearing distance to the music being played over the pool’s speakers too – good 70′s and 80′s rock filling the Summer air.  How can you beat that?

After several floods, the bridge tilted to one side, lost some of its’ boards and had to be removed.  Another bridge was built a little further down the creek to take its’ place but it just wasn’t the same.  All the character had been stripped away by safety rails and other worry wart measures.  There was no dangling our legs over that bridge and daydreaming to the gurgling of current. We might has well been wrapped in bubble wrap, wearing life preservers and attached to safety chains as we walked across.  There was nothing fun or adventurous about that “litigation proof” bridge.  I guess I can say that bridge was the beginning of the end of kid fun in the world – at least our world.  The fear of litigation and high insurance costs that become the demise of the pool too.

The Holiday Swim Club was also the scene of my first unrequited love affair.  Who doesn’t fall in love at a pool or beach?  All that skin, coconut oil, and music is the perfect recipe for romance and bad relationship choices.  Up until the age of 13, the pool was just a fun, carefree place to go.  But in the Summer of 1984, when I was 13, that all ended.  I fell hard.  My heart would go aflutter at the sight of the object of my desire.  I was quite the hopeless, pitiful creature for the next few years.  The sappy love songs had a new meaning.  The world looked different.  I was kind of still me but my mind was floating about 12 inches above my head, with only a few tethers still attached.  I could be brought back to reality once in a while but for the most part I was lost – lost in love!  I was pathetic, like all those who fall in love are.

I sure miss walking to the pool from my parent’s house and walking home in the dark.  Yeah, what a crazy time.  Kids actually walked home at night then without the protective assistance of the National Guard.  Lord, I miss those days!  Sometimes, I can’t help thinking that heaven isn’t something in our future after we croak; it’s in our past where we can never go back to it again.

Now the property is filled with piles of dirt and political signs for the upcoming city council election.  I wonder if the developers and politicians even know what that place once was and what it still means to a middle-aged woman reminiscing about it?  I doubt it.

Someday, I’m going to go back to that creek, put on an old pair of shoes and walk right down the middle of it, just like I used to do!

Tonight it’s official:  I am the mother of a teenage daughter.  13 years ago tonight I gave birth to a healthy baby girl and boy did my life change – all for the better.

I can remember vividly the day I learned I was pregnant.  No one was more surprised or excited than me.  I came out of the bathroom and fell into a chair and told my husband I was pregnant.  The exact words of the conversation, I couldn’t tell you.  All I could think about was, sooner or later, this child that was growing inside of me, was going to have to come out.  The fears of labor were real but soon relieved, or rather replaced by more present matters – like throwing up constantly for the next two and a half months.  I lost nearly 30 pounds and wound up in the hospital hooked up to an IV bag for dehydration.  Later I’d have to keep an eye on my blood sugar after developing gestational diabetes.  Luckily, I could control it with diet and exercise alone.  One good thing about the diabetes, I got to see her every week on ultrasound for the last ten weeks of the pregnancy.  However, I kept thinking that these things weren’t in the pregnancy brochure.   It seemed like I was having a much more difficult time getting this child into the world safely than other mothers.  I’d have an even harder time with my son, nearly seven years later.

Luckily, once the morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night sickness was gone, I could enjoy planning for her arrival.  Learning that I was having a girl was a little unnerving however.  I had always been more comfortable with boys.  I grew up with two older brothers and my best friend as a kid was a boy.  I had always worked with men.   Men and boys are easy to understand.  The female sex on the other hand is more complicated.  My greatest fear was that she’d go through the same things I did as a teenager – those horrible, awkward years of which no amount of therapy could ever repair.   What if she wasn’t pretty enough?  What if she had a weight problem?  I couldn’t imagine how I was going to raise her.  However, all my worries were erased the first time I saw her.  I looked at her and she was perfect.  Moments after her birth, her eyes were wide open, examining the room.  It became very evident that she was in control.  She had no worries.  She was going to be okay, in spite of her imperfect, clueless parents.  She is growing up to be exactly the same person she was ten minutes after her birth.

In grade school, she was the student the teachers left in charge of the classroom, when they stepped out.   Teachers always sat the troubled kids next to her – they still do in junior high.  She’s a straight A student and as competitive as they come.  However, even with all the confidence and ability in the world, being a teenager is not easy business.

Yesterday she went to her junior high school dance. She and her friends worried excessively over their appearance, who would talk to them, and what boys would be caught dead with them.  If it were up to her father, every boy caught with our daughter would be dead.  I often find myself playing the mediator.  There’s more than one pimple-faced boy in town who can thank me personally for saving his life.  Of course, if any of those boys do more than admire her from afar, all diplomatic ties will be cut off.  I have  no intention of being a grandmother before my time nor before my daughter has earned her doctorate degree, is earning a six figure income and happily married.

In five years, she’ll be graduating high school and heading off to college.  Five years.  That’s a blink of the eye.  Realizing that makes me want to fall back in my chair.  One day soon, this child is going to be leaving me behind.  Words can’t explain how that makes a mother feel.

It’s my favorite time of the year again.  Well, Christmas is probably my favorite for sentimental and religious reasons but Halloween is up there.  For the past few years I’ve had a “haunted basement”.  My daughter would invite 6-8 of her best friends for a creepy night of fun.  It wasn’t hard scaring third-graders but now that she’s more mature (and boring) my basement will remain what it currently is – full of junk, spider webs and stained glass.

No balloon vampire bats, moaning ghosts on fishing line, plastic glow in the dark skeletons,  smoke machines or strobe lights.  I have to come clean.  The party was more for me than her because I loved transforming my basement into a haunted dungeon, telling ghost stories and making little kids scream one night every year. Well, I’ll only have to wait a couple years for my youngest child to be old enough to scare the pants off of!  It’s nice having two kids almost 7 years apart in age.  I get to relive and repeat the good parts all over again and appreciate it.

For this year, I decided to have some good old fashion Halloween fun myself by visiting Greenwood Cemetery – by myself.  I visited it last year but never stepped foot out of my car.  The video of it from then is on the site.  Yesterday, I walked through parts of the cemetery and took pictures of some of the most interesting tombstones and mausoleums.

At first it wasn’t scary at all.  I thought of it as a history lesson.  “Wow, this person was born in the 1700′s.  How cool!”  The “Who’s Who” of early Decatur were all there.  It was like visiting the Decatur Club, the postmortem version but more lively and interesting.  I was near the maintenance garage and traffic from nearby roads could still be heard.  That was comforting.  “What ghost would come out so close to the entrance?  How lame!  There’s nothing scary about this place.  People just make up stuff.”  I thought to myself.  However, the deeper I went into the cemetery, the more creeped out I became.  I quickly understood why that place has such a reputation.  Every acorn dropping from a tree was a footstep behind me.  Squirrels skittering by and up the trees were corpses climbing out of their graves.  The wind blowing through the trees were voices from beyond scaring the living daylights out of me!  My imagination was running off with my spine and senses.  Still, I plunged  on and braved it out.

I pulled the car over and walked up a steep embankment to take a photo of a large Celtic cross in the Powers’ section.  It smelled really bad there, which isn’t really a good thing in a cemetery.  Some kind of rotting fruit was covering the ground ( I think persimmons) making it a treacherous, stinky and slick journey.  I took photos of the cross and an above ground burial vault for one of the Power’s kin.  Maybe it doesn’t bother some people but knowing a dead person is only a few feet away from me with only a concrete slab separating us, kind of freaked me out.  I didn’t stay in that area very long.  As I walked back to the car my right foot slid beneath me and I skidded on my knee, down the embankment and towards the road.  It hurt!  Actually it startled me more than it hurt.   The terror of realizing that I could be stuck in Greenwood Cemetery, alone, with a broken leg, next to stinky trees and dead people filled my mind.  All those Troy Taylor stories crossed my mind. I got up fast.  I didn’t care how much it hurt.  It didn’t matter if my right leg was now attached to my left shoulder; I was getting back to that car!

As I was driving I thought, “I’m going to be writing about this tomorrow on my blog.  I hope those people who read it appreciate what I’m going through right now for a good story!”  You better!  I drove on and just around the bend, from my persimmon tumble, was a very steep hill.  If my car were to go off of it, well let’s just say I would find my name in a Troy Taylor book next year.  Those are some of the steepest hills in Decatur.  I really don’t know how people visit the graves of people buried there.  They would need a harness and rope tied to a tree to keep from rolling down to the river.  I think there was a river down there.  I didn’t look that close.  My car was hugging the left side of the road.

I quickly made it back to the cemetery gates, relieved.  I stopped and took the time to look at my leg, which I hadn’t even bothered to check in my mad dash to getting the heck out of there.  The skin from my right knee, leg and foot was scraped but not bleeding.  My leg was throbbing in pain and is still a little sore but it wasn’t broken.  Before I left, I got out to take a couple photos of the Busher mausoleum.  I admired it for its two lions which adorn the front.  One is awake and frisky looking.  The other one is sleeping.  I want sea lions on my mausoleum, just for the record – assuming one day I become a billionaire.  I don’t want any angels!  Those statues are so creepy looking!  Go take a gander at the Mueller mausoleum and you’ll know what I mean.  C-R-E-E-P-Y!

Anyway, it was an interesting afternoon and I would love to go through the cemetery again with a guide who could tell me stories of who’s buried there.  I really think a brochure should be printed up for visitors to take with them on a self-guided walking tour.  Put the brochures in the Transfer House.  It would be a fun thing to put together.

I didn’t see any ghosts.  Of course, I didn’t stick around long nor look very closely at anything in particular.  If I thought I had seen a ghost, my scream would still be circling the planet this afternoon.  If ghosts are there, they’re probably still laughing at the sight of me falling down that hill.  Well, anything for a good laugh for Decatur’s past, present and future generations!

I triple-dog dare all of you to walk through Greenwood Cemetery alone, like I did and share your experience!

———Click on the photos to see larger view.———

Creepy!

I thought these were the coolest headstones ever until they stood up and started moving!