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barb.story
barb.story
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 1995 14:20:45 -0600
Sender: night-l@unicorn.acs.ttu.edu
From: Susananita@aol.com
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Meeting Uncle Joe
I collect true ghost stories as a hobby and have compiled jillions of
them over the years. Most of them come from close relatives and
friends whose integrity I respect. Occasionally I'll get a real zinger
from somebody whom I think is pulling my leg.
However the following story was told to me by a woman named
Barb who came to do some interior work on our house for several
weeks. As it turned out we both experienced poltergeist activity in
our lives and she told me the most incredible ghost experience I've
ever heard. I kept the notes to myself thinking no one would
believe it, but with the posting of 'A Ghost Story For Your New
House, I feel a little braver in submitting it.
Hope you like it.
====================
Barb's Grandmother owned an old and very large plantation style
house in southern Ohio. The house had three floors and sat on a
large parcel of land that even once had a built-in reflection pool on
the property.
The house was turned into a convalescence home in the early sixties
which was managed by Barb's grandmother and her grandmother's
brother, Barb's great-uncle, who died before Barb was born.
Even then the house had a reputation for being haunted. Employees
often heard footsteps going up and down the hall when no one was
there and Barb's grandmother found the bare footprints of a child
on the third floor balcony one morning after a snowfall. In one
closed off room that was locked up, the sounds of furniture could
be heard moving around at all hours of the night. Some of the
patients complained of ghostly visitations which were met with grim
sadness by the staff at first, considering some of the conditions of
the residents. Later some employees quit because of their own
experiences
In the 1970's the house was too difficult for Barb's grandmother to
keep up so she closed up the convalescence home in preparation
to sell.
Barb and her family drove out to the old house to help with the
endless amount of work that needed to be done in order to get the
house ready to be place on the market. It was not unusual to have
workmen on the premises working in numerous areas of the old
mansion, so Barb and her siblings were accustomed to running and
bumping into them as they chased each other around the house.
Late one afternoon Barb was playing on the fire escape stairs, an
area she was not allowed, but since her mother and grandmother
were so busy in another part of the house, Barb felt she could easily
get away with it. At the top of the fire escape looking through the
window of a third floor room, she spotted a man in his late sixties
with iron-grey hair and wearing dark horned-rimmed glasses sitting
at a desk that was stacked high with papers. He had his shirt
sleeves rolled up and was rummaging through the amazing sea of
papers as if searching for some important documents. Behind him
hung a sport jacket on a coat rack. The only other thing that Barb
spotted on the desk was a glass jar of stick candy. Barb assumed
the man was her grandmother's lawyer or some such fellow hired by
her grandmother to deal with the sale of the house. Apparently the
room was an old office of the convalescence home.
The man glanced up at Barb and sat back in the chair smiling at her.
He motioned for her to come in but Barb worried about talking to a
strange man so she started to turn away. Then she heard the man
call out, "Now Barb, come back here and talk to me!" The man
knew her name! She turned back to him expecting to be warned
about playing on the forbidden stairs, but instead the man seemed
very friendly and talkative.
The man said he knew her and insisted he was her Uncle Joe but
she replied she had no uncle by that name. She had never seen him
before in her life and she was feeling unnerved around this man
whom she felt was just teasing her for his own amusement. He then
turned to general questions about school and her siblings but Barb
just hung back shyly, politely answering yes or no to his promptings.
The man noticed Barb keenly eyeing the candy jar and asked her if
she would like a piece. She hesitated, telling him her grandmother
would have a fit if she were caught with it so close to dinnertime but
the man urged her to help herself. Timidly she took the stick of
candy and backed out of the room thanking him. She left the room
skipping down to the first floor where her grandmother and mother
spotted her eating the candy. They inquired as to where she got it
and she replied, "From the man upstairs." The grandmother and
mother turned to look at each other then told Barb that all the
workmen had left for the day and she'd better buck up and tell them
how she got the candy.
Barb insisted that a man was upstairs working on some papers at a
desk in a room near the fire escape door, and that he had teased
her endlessly about being an uncle of hers. The grandmother
gasped and ordered Barb to show her where she had seen the man.
Barb lead her upstairs to the room where she had just been, but
when the door swung open, the room was entirely free of any
furniture. The mother glared at Barb and chewed her out for telling
such an outrageous tale but the grandmother insisted Barb tell her
more of the details. Flustered, Barb told her about the coat on the
coat rack, showed her where it stood in the room and where the
desk had been.
Her grandmother turned to Barb's mom, "If I didn't know better, I'd
swear she was talking about my brother, Joe."
Barb's grandmother asked her where exactly the candy had come
from. Barb described the glass candy jar that had been sitting on
his desk.
"Oh the candy jar!," she said, "I'd completely forgotten about that.
He had the most awful sweet-tooth. You could never see the jar
because it was always covered up with all the paperwork he had on
his desk."
Barb asserts there was nothing ghostly about the man who had
given her a piece of candy. He was as real as any living person she
has ever seen so she has trouble believing she talked with a ghost
that day in the old building. Still, she can't figure out
what happened to the coat on the coat rack and the paper-piled
desk with the glass candy jar.
Sue
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