Scary Stories

I live in a new house on my farm while working on the old one. We do use the old one in the summer very often, since it is on the water. It is fully furnished and has a complete kitchen.

We frequently have weekend guests, and we joke about Uncle Truman (not really my uncle) who built the house. His relatives come to visit "Uncle Truman's house," so I call him Uncle Truman also. We have a photo of him as a young man. I even talk to him. I have never seen or heard him. But strange things do seem to happen. Nothing sinister. He reportedly had a sense of humor. All the relatives who have visited have spoken very kindly of him.

One weekend, when entertaining an unusually large group in the old house, I took along extra cooking utensils. At the end of the weekend, I thought I took everything home. But when I went to make the Thanksgiving turkey gravy, my gravy making spoon was missing. I knew it would be at the old house. So I went to get it the next day and could not find it. Three more times before Christmas, I went to look for it, even taking everything out of the utensil drawer. No luck.

In May, during our first picnic of the season, I looked into the drawer again. There was the missing spoon, right on top.

Also in May that year, I took an antique dealer to the house to look at an oak buffet I wanted to trade for a walnut marble-topped dresser. We entered the kitchen door and walked through the house to the front hall where the buffet sat. Arriving in the hall, we discovered the front door sitting wide open. The old key which is always left in the lock was missing. We have never found the key. The other unusual thing was that the roll top desk, which had been accidentally locked six months earlier (and we have no key) was open; the top was rolled back. Neither the lock nor the wood was damaged in any way.

The sheriff's deputy who responded to our call to investigate a break-in could not find any sign of forced entry to the house or the desk. While examining the desk, he looked at me and said, "Do you have a ghost?"

A friend recently lived in the house for a year. During her tenure, I brought back Truman's photo which had been lent to some of his relatives for almost a year. After I returned the photo and hung it back on the wall, the bedside lamp in my friend's bedroom kept turning itself on and off. After I mentioned returning the photo, she started telling Uncle Truman to cut it out; she was tired and needed to go to bed. The light would then go off and on one more time. Then she could go to bed.

Now whenever anything seems out of place or unusual, we blame it on Uncle Truman.

And another Uncle Truman story...

Tonight I arrived at the old house and unlocked the side door. But I couldn't get in because the second refrigerator's freezer door was open enough to prevent the exterior door from opening. I finally got the doors to cooperate. Almost everything in the freezer was thawed but still cool. Some things in back still had ice. The refrigerator was not running. The circuit breaker was tripped. I reset it three times and it tripped again three times. Finally I left it and just cleaned up the mess. But why would the door open because the circuit breaker was tripped? Must have been Uncle Truman alerting me to the problem. Wish he waited until just before my arrival to open the door.