it's a BOOfest! and i've got a real life ghost story for you



Quinn and Patricia A. Timms are hosting a BLOGFEST for today!  Click on image (up there) to read other participants' haunted recounts (real life horror stories)! 

I, personally have never experienced any form of haunting, but a colleague of mine lives with one every day-- and has since she was very young.

Here is her story.

Years ago, when she was just a little girl, she took a walk down her street to visit the woods at its end. Ever since, the man has followed her.

The dead man.

Thirty years have passed since that day on the street in front of the trees, the day he first attached to her. He's followed her from home to home, and even now, in the house she built with her husband, he remains.

She's never seen him, but knows he is there. He rests at the top of the stairs. She can feel him. His prescence chills her. She smells the putrid smoke from his cigarettes.

So do her children.

His fingers poke at her in the middle of the night and tug at her bed sheets. She knows he stands at her window and watches her while she lays in bed.

Professionals have come to rid her house of him. He is too strong. He laughs in their faces.  They tell her what he looks like.  What he says.  And that one day soon she, too, will see him.

Her light draws him in and he plans to stay.

Her son wakes with nightmares. He may have the light, too--with his own dead who follow in it.

She's searched for the dead man's history in data bases at the library: obituaries, articles. She has yet to pinpoint his name. More than likely, she's told, he's been dead for over 100 years.

Halloween is not a spooky time of year for her. It makes no difference. Every day she is reminded that some who have died choose not to move on.

And every day she's haunted--

by a ghost of a man who once was.