Lois Wells Santalo, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Lois Wells Santalo
Adventures with the Paranormal 10/24/2012 11:28:06 AM
The world of the paranormal has touched my family four times that I know of, each contact having to do with a death. The first occurred when I was thirteen, when my beloved grandmother died. It was not a peaceful death. Grandmother knew she was dying and she was terrified. Having abandoned her Mennonite community in order to marry my grandfather, she felt guilty. Mennonites threaten their followers with hell fire if they leave the community with its restrictive ways, and Grandmother had no confidence that their dire warnings were untrue. Now, with no time to return and re-establish herself in the fold, she faced the reckoning.
Grandfather stayed in her bedroom with her, holding her hand and trying to reassure her that the Mennonites had no private phone-line to God, and that as a good person, she was safe. When I arrived home from school at half past three, the doctor was just pulling up at the curb and my mother was standing in the doorway urging him to hurry. Carrying his black bag, he took the steps up the bank from the street, and up to the porch, two at a time. She stood back to let him in, then, as he rushed toward the bedroom, turned to me to explain that Grandmother was having a worse-than-usual attack of the chest pains called angina pectoris, and that she and Gramps were very worried about her. She pointed to a taxi coming from the direction of downtown. “If that’s someone for us, tell them we can’t have visitors right now. I need to get back to Grammie.”
She hurried indoors. The taxi pulled up behind the doctor’s car, and to my amazement, my Aunt Florence from Chicago climbed out, all gloved and hatted as women always were for the out of doors in those days. She waved to me, paid the driver, retrieved an overnight bag, and followed the doctor up the steps. I stared in astonishment. I certainly couldn’t send her away. This house was her childhood home.
When close enough, she asked, “What’s going on? How’s Mother?”
“I just got home from school.” I held the door open for her. She entered, set down her bag, hastily removed hat and gloves, and headed straight from Gram’s bedroom, off the dining room. I followed, and beside the doctor and Gramps, I saw my mother bending over Gram in bed, smoothing the sheets. She paused, looked up, and also stared in astonishment at her sister. She paled as if seeing a ghost. She said, “Flossie! Where in the world did you come from?”
“Chicago, of course,” Aunt Florence said, matter-of-factly—and again inquired what was going on. Mother persisted. “But how did you know to come?”
It was Florence’s turn to look surprised. “Why, you called me at six this morning. You said, ‘Come quick, Mother is dying.’”
“I did nothing of the sort,” Mother said. “How could I call you? We have no telephone. Besides, I didn’t know.”
“I assumed you went up to the grocery store. It was certainly your voice.”
The doctor took charge then and commanded Florence to rub linament on Gram’s left arm, which was very painful, and Mother to find another blanket. Gram was moaning in pain and Mother ordered me out of the room. I went, but I didn’t stop pondering the mystery. I knew that the train trip from Chicago took six hours. Florence had to have taken the 9:10 from Chicago. Add to that another two hours to dress, pack, and ride the El to the downtown station (she’d have taken the El because a taxi would have been stuck in morning traffic), add an hour or so to prepare, to find someone to mind the cat and water the plants, to make reservations for Uncle George at a downtown hotel where he would be within walking distance of restaurants, and even allowing for the time difference, that phone call had to have occurred by seven in the morning. At seven, I was getting ready for school, and when I came downstairs, I’d found my mother cooking breakfast in her bathrobe. Gram had sat at the table, also in her bathrobe, having coffee, and there’d been no hint of anything wrong with her. No one left the house. No one but Dad and I even got dressed. Since, in those depression days, no neighbor had a telephone, we had to go to the grocery store two blocks away—and the grocery store didn’t open until nine, too late for Aunt Florence to have traveled downtown from her home in North Chicago, near Evanston, and caught the 9:10.
Gram’s pains eased thanks to the doctor’s meds, and her fears seemed to ease on seeing her youngest daughter. She died a half hour later, peacefully. Aunt Florence stayed on to help plan the funeral, and during the planning there was much discussion of her miraculous arrival. She repeated many times, “It was your voice on the phone, Ina Mae.” Mother and I repeated many times that it couldn’t have been. It simply wasn’t possible.
To this day I don’t know the answer to that mystery phone call. Some would say an angel; others would suggest that our unconscious really knows what’s happening to our loved ones and sends us messages when needed. I can only say, “Whatever. It occurred. I was there to witness it, and to marvel at it.”
The second visit to the paranormal came at the death of my Wells grandmother. I’ve recorded that one in my memoir, Oops. It had to do with a card fortune predicting death and a long trip. No matter how many times we re-shuffled the cards, we always got the same prediction. Dad didn’t believe it for a minute. He had no plans for any trip; he kept saying something must be wrong with the way he was shuffling and laying out the cards. Yet that very afternoon the telegram came: my other grandmother had died on a winter visit to California and we were expected for the funeral. We packed hastily and set out before dawn the next morning for the drive across the country. With no expressways yet available, it was a very long drive and we barely arrived in time, after harrowing adventures which I’ve described in the book.
The third visit was a more conventional one: a haunted house. My first husband, Lewis, and I rented a room in a town in Missouri during World War II—without, of course, knowing it was haunted. The landlady took pains to conceal the fact. But, though I never saw the ghost, I soon knew. The sounds in that house were incredibly spooky. As soon as anyone stepped into the upstairs bathroom and closed the door, they heard the sound of the downstairs door opening and closing, and someone with heavy masculine footsteps entering, closing the door, and coming up the steps. It was even possible to count the steps—seventeen of them. Then the footsteps came down the hall and stopped right outside the bathroom door. Then there came a loud slamming or popping noise. It was all so real that as a new tenant, one would call out, “I’ll be out in a minute.” We soon learned to stop doing that. On opening the door, we saw only an empty hallway, while in the bathroom, a chill would creep in. There was a space heater for those wishing to bathe, but some of us, me included, never worked up the courage to climb into that chilled bathtub, and instead confined ourselves to sponge baths during the brief time we lived in the house.
When I asked the landlady if something had happened there in the past, she denied it, as did the neighbors. It was the soda-jerk at the corner drugstore who finally told me the truth. A teenaged slave girl had taken refuge in that bathroom when her master had announced his intention to “breed” her, and when he found her and began breaking the door down, she drowned herself in the tub.
I’m not sure the slave girl is still around, but clearly the slave-master was doomed to climb those stairs and repeat that action forever. I hope no one ever performs a ritual to free his soul, for in that case he would surely go from Missouri to hell. Best leave him where he is.
I can find no scientific way to account for any of these events. I only know they happened. I was there.
