Welcome – From October 27th to October 31st, I’ll be participating in Nancy Gideon’s Haunted Open House Giveaway Blog Hop as part of Nancy’s 4th Annual Haunted Open House! Stop by Nancy’s Haunted Open House to read Halloween posts by some awesome authors, wander into the spooky Game Room or sample some of the spooktacular Halloween drinks, appetizers and desserts. And don’t forget to check out Nancy’s Tricks-or-Treats!

Do you believe in ghosts? Apparitions? Visits from the dear departed?

I do.

Naturally, it helps to believe if you have encountered one of the aforementioned spirits during your lifetime.

I have.

It also helps if you’re a child who hadn’t yet closed her mind off to the paranormal.

I hadn’t yet–as it turned out.

I was the first grandchild of my maternal grandparents. They doted on me. Even after my sister and a female first cousin were born, I remained my grandparents’ favorite–my grandfather’s especially.

I loved it. What child wouldn’t?

In my tenth year, when my grandfather was fifty-five, he underwent a hernia operation. It wasn’t a hernia that his surgeon found. It was colon cancer.

The two younger girls and I weren’t told, of course, so we thought nothing of it when everyone encouraged our grandfather to take a trip to Sicily to see his family. When he returned with gifts for everyone–I requested a huge provolone cheese of my own–he seemed perfectly fine, tanned and healthy.

Soon afterward, he went into the hospital again, but this time he didn’t come out alive. It was a sad, solemn day when we received the news of his passing. None of us could stop crying all that day. The worst of it was that the girls and I were too young to visit him in the hospital. I never got the chance to say good-bye to Grandpa.

Late that night, something roused me from a sound sleep and I sat bolt upright in my bed. At first, I thought my sister woke me, but she was still asleep in the other bed in the room that we shared.

I saw that the door to our room was open, and in the open doorway an electric blue mist began to coaslesce. My grandfather–my dead grandfather–appeared in the midst of the mist, only he didn’t appear the same way my grandfather did in life. Instead, he looked like a film negative in that mist. The features that should have been light were dark and those that should have been dark were light. He began to walk toward the foot of my bed.

How could he be in my room? He was dead. Fear unlike no other gripped me. He was a ghost! I tried to cry out for my parents, for help, but my vocal chords were unable to cooperate. I did the only thing my ten-year-old self could think of to do. I pulled the covers over my head and cried, trembling with fear, praying that it was all a bad dream and that my grandfather’s ghost would be gone when I poked my head out of the covers again.

When I finally gathered my courage to peek out, he had vanished and so had the blue mist. I lay awake the rest of the night with a night light on. I never told my parents or anyone else what I had seen. I was sure they wouldn’t believe me, but if they believed that I believed what I saw, well, I didn’t want to spend the next several years on a psychiatrist’s couch.

As I grew in age, and I hope in wisdom, I began to suspect that my grandfather did not appear to me that night long ago in order to terrorize me or to take me with him to the other side. I’m certain he came to me that night to say goodbye. After all, I was his favorite.

It bothers me to this day that I was so frightened that we didn’t get to say our good-byes, although I’m sure my grandfather understood a ten-year-old’s fear of the unknown. I believe that I’ll have the chance to make it up to him someday when it’s my turn to cross over to the other side. I know deep down that I will not be afraid when my grandfather comes to take me home.

My Treat

Let’s see what everyone else is handing out!