one that I call a spooky coincidence, but others call it a ghost presence.
This is one false ghost story that I've told here before, so apologies to anyone who has already read it. It happened at Thanksgiving, 1956, in Erie, PA. I was 6 years old.
My mother's cousin, Willie, and his wife, Jennie, drove from Buffalo to have Thanksgiving dinner with us, normally a two hour drive. They planned on staying overnight with other Erie relatives before going back to Buffalo. Willie would not stay in our house after dark. My parents had bought the house from a family friend after her husband had died in the house. Willie believed in ghosts.
Erie had an unpredicted very heavy snowstorm that Thanksgiving, much worse than surrounding areas, so Jennie and Willie did not know how bad it was until they got too close to Erie to turn back. Throughout dinner, Willie stared out the window while several inches of snow per hour fell fast and the wind got stronger. By the end of dinner, visibility was zero, roads were impassable, and Willie's car was buried. They had to stay overnight.
My brothers offered them their room, but Willie refused. He would sleep in the living room, so Jennie took the couch and Willie chose a lounge chair. After the rest of us were in bed, Willie went into the bathroom, which was right next to my bedroom. I could hear him brush his teeth and gargle.
My door was open so I saw my older brother (13 at the time) sneak up to the closed bathroom door. He gave me the shhh signal and then called out in a spooky voice, "Wiiiiilliiieee." Willie yelled back, "Who is that? What do you want?" My brother said, in the same spooky tone, "You know me, Willie. It's Joe."
Willie ran into the hallway screaming, "He's here!! I heard him!" My brother ducked into my room, still shushing me, and then joined everyone else in the hall who had come running. Willie insisted that Joe's ghost had spoken to him and my father kept saying, "Mind over matter, Willie. There's no such thing as ghosts."
Next morning at breakfast, while the adults were arguing over the ghost, I could not help giggling, which my father noticed. I didn't dare "rat" on my brother, who was kicking me under the table, but my father knew because my brother was the practical joker in the family. Jennie burst out laughing and talked my father into letting my brother off easy.
The snow was blocking our door, so my father gave my brother the job of clearing it away. My brother dropped from a dining room window into a clear area below it and my father handed him the kitchen broom and a shovel from the enclosed back porch. Once the door was clear, my father and Willie joined my brother in clearing enough snow to walk in. A few main streets were getting cleared and a relative with a jeep came to rescue Jennie and Willie from the ghost house. (They came back for their car the next day, when the city had dug out from the snow.)
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