GHOSTBUSTERS

…If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? If there’s something weird and it don’t look good, who you gonna call?…Ghostbusters.

In the middle of the night my wife, Karen, heard a loud bump. She awoke to see a ghostly figure of a man standing next to the staircase. He was wearing a biker’s outfit with a yellow bandanna wrapped around his head.

“Tom,” she shouted, waking me up.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“There is a man standing next to the stairs,” she gasped.

I jumped out of bed and grabbed the baseball bat I always keep next to the bed.

Lake Waukomis was established in 1947. It started out as a hunting, fishing, and poker-playing place for men to come and relax. It’s even said Harry Truman would visit to partake. Many stories have filtered down through the ages that can’t be confirmed. But, the story that comes from the house next to us has witnesses to confirm that there may be a ghost wondering amongst us.

I bought the vacant lot from the daughter whose parents had passed away. Strange things started occuring as soon as I built my house and moved in. Her parents had purchased two lots when the lake development first started. They built their house on one of the lots and left the other vacant because they didn’t want anyone living next to them.

The lady of the house was an established artist interested in the Victorian style and she painted women in beautiful gowns and hats on her bedroom doors. Their son was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly thereafter.

Since their passing, four families have bought and lived in the house. The first family removed the paintings from the doors. They would hear their two cats hissing at night and see them staring at the doors they had painted over.

The second owners’ daughter several times saw a Victorian-looking apparition in the hallway at night. The female apparition didn’t look very happy and seemed upset. The daughter’s cat would hiss and scat under her bed in fright.

“I don’t see anyone,” I said.

“He was right there,” Karen said, pointing to the top of the stairs.

I turned on the bedroom light. Nothing. I searched most of the house and saw nothing unusual.

“The noise seemed to come from our walk-in closet,” Karen said, so I slowly creeped into the closet, with her following, peeking over my shoulder.

To our surprise there lay a large empty plastic storage bin on the floor in the middle of the closet. The bin had been stored on the upper shelf for a number of years. So why, all of a sudden, had it fallen to the floor in the middle of that night?

The next night Karen awoke as a loud thump again sounded in the middle of the night. There in the dim moonlight next to the stairs she saw him standing. This time he stood there wearing only the yellow bandanna.

“Tom,” she shouts in fright. “He’s back.”

Good thing she didn’t know where I kept the gun or I would have probably died that night. Heaven forbid having another ghost wandering around the neighborhood, especially one wearing only a yellow bandanna. .

Excerpt from: “The Comeback Kid, The Memoirs of Thomas L. Hay” by Thomas L. Hay . Available on Author’s website: www.thomaslhay.com or on Amazon http://www.amzn.to/1bWV44N