Spirit World...

Being raised with an alcoholic father who was abusive to my mom after moving out of her parents house, I had seen many a times where my grandfather and grandmother would try and protect her and us kids. But my mom always went back. When my grandmother passed away, she was buried with her wedding ring and mothers ring ON. I remember the discussion my family had about those 2 rings and that my grandmother would have wanted it that way. Well.......she DIDN'T!

We had moved into an old house who only had heat downstairs and 1 vent in the ceiling leading to the upstairs, and with the great haste my dad made in getting out of my grandparents house, I don't think they cared when they bought it. We had to sleep in the downstairs living room on a fold out couch in the wintertime. After my grandmother died, my mom told me when I was about 20 that she felt like my grandmother was watching her, and she told me about a night that had sparked my memory, but was never talked about until then.

She told me about a month after my grandmother died, she would hear a knocking on our back door in the middle of the night and she would get up and go to the door, but there was no one there... Until one night, when we kids who were on the fold up couch, awoke to my dad screaming and hollering that my mom had tried to choke him while he slept. She of course denied it. But I remember that same night, I awoke to someone knocking, and I saw my mother pass the couch to answer the door. And then she came back through the living room, and I asked her who was there, and she said no one. That is the night that my father said my mom had tried choking him to death. When she finally got him to believe that he must of been dreaming, he insistently told her that he was being choked and that he threw the person choking him off the bed, which meant they would have landed between his side of the bed and the dresser.

Well there I am sitting at the table with her at 20 having coffee, talking about the haunted house my grandparents lived in, and all the goings on that happened there (mine were not the only accounts, all of my family believed it was haunted, I learned years later). My mom asked me if I remembered the night my dad said he had been choked and I said yes, then she told me this...and to NEVER say anything to my dad.

She said since her mom had died for that first month, she always felt like she had been being watched, just an uneasy feeling that made her hair raise at times. She told me about the knocks on the door when no one was there, until that night, the night my father said someone tried to choke him, and he was ever so right. That night my grandmother appeared at our back door, my mother heard the knock, opened the door and she said my grandmother was there, and just as she was there, she was gone. My mother told me she thought she was dreaming until I asked her who was at the door (I was 12 at this time). She said right then, she knew I had heard the knock also and that she wasn't dreaming.

About two weeks after my dad's ordeal with the choking incident, my mother said she was cleaning her room when she went to clean under my dads side of the bed. When she bent down, she said she saw a ring. She pulled the ring out and to her surprise, it was my grandmothers mothers ring (the one she had been buried with). She said she sat back against the dresser and all of the sudden started laughing. You see, my Grandmother hated my dad with a passion for his alcoholism and beating up my mom, and she believes that the night she seen her mother at the door, she came right in, and tried to kill my dad, and when my dad described throwing whoever off of him, the only place to land was between the dresser and the bed, the side of the bed where my mom found her mom's mothers ring!

She said she called my grandfather and her brothers and made sure that her mother had been buried with that ring and the all agreed it was on my grandmother. And when she told them she had it and what had happened, they believed that my grandmother was looking out for her, her only daughter. NOW......when she told my dad.....she said he turned all white when he saw the ring, and couldn't believe that the ghost of my grandmother had tried to choke him.......but it was true.

My mom said that she had the feeling that my grandmother had been watching over her that whole time and the feeling continued until she divorced my dad when I was 14. Then my grandmother rested in peace.

-The Hangmaster