Beech Tree News Network

My granddaughter, Sabria, loves to scare me, and since I startle easily, that’s not a difficult thing to do.  My daughters, Natalie and Nikki, were the same way.  When they were in our house, they lived for the times when they could catch me asleep on the couch.  Sneaking carefully across the floor to where I lay nearly unconscious, they would reach out and touch my face then jump back out of the way of my flailing arms and abrupt stumbling feet.  I can still hear them laughing. 

On Saturday, Sabria decided we were going to tell ghost stories.  She closed the door to her bedroom, turned off the lights then placed a flashlight in her lap, pointed upward so that it cast an eerie glow onto her face.  

Her story began with a young boy who was digging in his yard when he discovered a toe.  He pulled on the toe until it loosed itself from the foot to which it was attached beneath the ground.  The boy heard the creature whose toe he was now holding begin to groan.  The boy was not about to give up his treasure, so he ran quickly home and hid the toe under his bed.

That night, when the boy went to bed, he heard a faraway voice crying, “Where’s…my…toe?”

The boy was a little frightened but reasoned to himself that the creature didn’t know where he lived, so he really had nothing to worry about.  The next time he heard the voice, however, it was much closer, in front of his house, as a matter of fact.  “Where’s…my…toe?” the voice cried.  The boy pulled the cover over his head.  He heard the front door open then the steps up to his room began to creak with the weight of the creature.  His bedroom door opened.  He could hear the creature drawing nearer to his bed.  The creature yanked back the covers and yelled, “YOU’VE GOT IT!”  As Sabria yelled, “YOU’VE GOT IT!” she grabbed my arm, and I screamed like a little girl.  She fell off the bed laughing.

Because Halloween is in sight, her class is reading “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (The Headless Horseman), and we’ve been talking about hauntings and spooky stuff all week.  Before I tell you about the next incident, I have to first tell you that for some reason, Sabria’s underwear is constantly disappearing, not just being misplaced and found later, but completely disappearing.  One day Sabria’s mom, Natalie, walked me into Sabria’s room, pulled open the dresser drawer and said, “Sixteen pair!  I bought her 16 pair of underwear, now if we can’t keep up with those, I don’t know what else to do!”  

As I said before, Sabria and I have been talking about hauntings this week.  According to Sabria and YouTube, there are three indications that you are being haunted.  “If you are in a warm room and all of a sudden you feel cold air all around you, there is probably a ghost in the room,” she said.  “Second, if you feel like you are being watched, you are probably being watched by a ghost,” she added.  “And third, if things in your house disappear for no reason, you are definitely being haunted.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?” she said.

“What does this mean?” I asked.

“There are ghosts out there running around in my underwear,” she said.

When I told my nephew, Brad, what Sabria said about ghosts and underwear, he said, “Well, they’ve got my socks, so I guess they’re set.”

Maybe it’s a sign of approaching bad weather or maybe, we really are haunted.