The Ghost Lady

My sweet mother-in-law, Tessie Childress, loved to tell ghost stories.  If she ended up with 6 or 7 grandchildren on a Saturday night, she would dress up, take her teeth out, jump in the room and scare poor kids into going to bed.  She always told all of us that there was a ghost of an old women in her in house.  She had seen her several times and so had several of her children.  There was unexplained noises like the sound of chains and windows and doors would shut on their own.  According to Tessie, the ghost lady's favorite spot was in a small rocker that sat next to the wood stove.  Tessie claimed she had heard her putting wood in the stove, except it wasn't the stove that she had now, it was the old stove that was there when she moved into the house.  It apparently made a different noise when you opened the door.  The lady was said to have died in the house and was "laid" out in the front bedroom for viewing which was common at the time of her death.  I didn't believe in ghosts, but still enjoyed hearing Tessie and her boys tell about their experiences.  Tessie also had a habit of telling really scary, scarier than normal, stories if she had a pregnant daughter-in-law whose due date had passed.  Tessie claimed she could scare them into labor.  I actually think that happened once, but I don't remember which sister-in-law it was.

When Mike and I got married, he worked in Louisville at General Electric.  I was 18 and he was 22, much too young to be married.  We picked out an apartment, moved in our hand me down furniture and waited for the magic to begin.  Mike worked second shift which meant I was stuck at home alone. Two things bothered me,  first, it didn't feel like home to me and second I was scared to death.  We didn't have a phone and only had one car, which Mike drove to work.  Remembering Tessie's ghost stories didn't help much either.  We both disliked Louisville and our life there so much that as soon as Mike got off work late on Friday night, we would pack the car and drive 2 1/2 hours home to our mamas.  One of those weekends home, we were spending the night at Tess's.  It was winter and there were so many quilts on the bed that once you got in you had to sleep that way all night because you couldn't turn over because the quilts were so heavy.  Also, we slept in the bedroom that the ghost lady died in.  Sometime late into the night, I woke up needing to use the bathroom which was in the back of the house.  I would have to go through the living room, the dining room and the kitchen to get to the bathroom. It was pitch black dark and I knew I would fall over something trying to get there and I didn't want to wake anybody up by turning on a light, so I opted to try to go back to sleep.  Well, that didn't work, I absolutely had to go.  I thought about waking Mike up to go with me, but once he's asleep he could sleep through anything, so I let him be.  I felt my way through the house, found the bathroom without falling or breaking anything.  On my trip back to bed, I felt somewhat secure since I had made it through the dark maze once already.  Feeling around for the door to the bedroom, my foot hit something and I realized I was off kilter and was touching the chair sitting by the stove.  Using my hands to feel my way around, I felt something soft and hairy.  What in the world was that?  I felt around some more and then it came to me, the ghost lady was sitting in her favorite chair and I had my hands in her hair.  Yikes, she will grab my hands any minute, run.  I did run, more like lunged, for the bed.  I lifted up ten pounds of covers, jumped in bed, and covered up my head.  I was so scared that I felt faint.  I really had to get Mike awake.  But, like I said he was hard to wake up and this night he seemed dead to the world.  I laid there for hours afraid to move.  It was a good thing I was on my way from the bathroom, because if I hadn't visited it yet, I wouldn't have needed to anymore once I petted the ghost lady.  Finally daylight came.  When I heard Tessie get up and go to start breakfast, I was brave enough to go to her and tell her about my experience.  On the way to find Tessie, I had to pass the chair.  Surely she wouldn't be sitting there in the daylight.  I turned my head slowly to gaze at the chair just to make sure and that's when I saw IT.  Hanging on the back of the little rocking chair was my winter coat which had a fur collar.  The collar was at the same height as a dried up little ghost lady's head would be if she were sitting in the chair.  How dumb could I be?  I had let my coat scare me to death and lose out on a night's sleep.

Now, I am the kind of person who can laugh at herself and this was a good time to do just that.  When everybody came for dinner that day, I told my ghost story.  I've been in this family for thirty-seven years.  I've seen sister-in-laws come and go, watched babies grow up and have babies of their own, but no one will ever let me forget the night I became acquainted with the ghost lady.

Tessie passed away in 1997, almost twenty one years after my scare.  She must have told that story a hundred times or more.  I think it was one of her favorites.  I miss her and I  miss the old house.  Her sons built her a new house and tore the old one down.  We wondered if the ghost lady would make the move to the new house, but she didn't.  I think we all kinda missed her, but wouldn't say so.