From Ann:

I've got two for you as told to me by my mother, whom I would never dare to doubt .

Back in the mid-sixties, already afflicted with severe rheumatoid arthritis, mother was hospitalized with a serious burn from a heating pad, which became infected, endangering her life. According to her, one night - the one which I later learned the doctors did not expect her to live through - she said she heard her name called, that it was time to go.

She said she looked to the foot of her bed and there, standing in a pool of white light (remember, no bright lights at night in hospital corridors - definitely nothing that bright), stood her great-grandmother, a woman whose face she recognized from family photos but of course had never met. the woman was in period costume and hairstyle - nothing to make mom think she might have hallucinated on a nurse or something.

Well, mother being mother, a fighter until the end of her life five years ago, insisted that she couldn't possibly go, that she had two daughters to raise, she was not going anywhere, and that dying would simply have to wait.

Her attitude must have worked, because great grandmother smiled serenely and disappeared.

By morning, the consensus was that mother would pull through after all. I once asked her if she had been close to giving up, so sick had she been, and she said, "yes. i think great-grandmother's purpose in being there just might have have been to jump-start my will to live."

In the years since her death, I have to admit I've wondered who might have come for her when it finally was her time to go.

The woman never thought too much about ghosts as a rule, but she sure seemed to be a magnet for the unusual. The place: Upstate New York. The locale: some friends' weekend getaway party. The time: late sixties.

The arthritis hadn't completely shut her down yet back then, but by afternoons she was generally needing a nap to replenish her reserves. so, while everyone was out swimming, boating, etc. and the house was quiet, she went in to take a rest.

Sometime later, she was awakened by the sound of heavy, measured footsteps coming down the uncarpeted hallway. her bedroom door was open. she sat up, listening as the steps approached the doorway. Then they stopped. The term 'hair on the back of the neck going up' never rang truer, she told me, but there was no one there. well, nothing visible to the eye anyway...

Pretty soon the footsteps moved on, and the house was quiet again. hard to believe, but she went back to sleep!

At dinner that night, she relayed the peculiar experience and while she was doing so, she realized her host and hostess were staring at her in shock.

Turns out they neglected to tell their guests about their ghost, fearing it might put some folks off.

Although the realtor had told them about the ghost (ghosts are evidently very popular out east. Do little to drive down the value of the house, apparently), they hadn't had a 'visit' in the eight months since they purchased the residence - until my mother arrived on scene. They also confirmed that everyone had indeed been outside at the time mother was napping, and they did not employ servants (I later confirmed this whole story with my father. He insisted it all went down just as i've written here.

The exact details are now fuzzy with the passage of years, but I think the ghost was allegedly the original owner of the 200 hundred year-old residence, either killed inside the home in an accident or died by natural causes. Previous owners had reportedly had numerous run-ins (or should i say listen-ins) with those mysterious footsteps in the intervening two centuries: they were always heard walking up and down the old floorboards of the house and always upstairs. To date, no one had actually ever seen the mysterious owner of those footsteps.

Now, the whole thing would have given most people pause. I asked her if the experience had frightened her at all, and she shrugged.

"Not really," she said. "There was never a sense of menace. It was more like an old friend looking in on me to see if I needed anything."

Sounds like my mother. Pragmatic as they came.

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