This seems an appropriate time of year to relate the account of the poltergeist in our old farm-house.  Settle in for a ghost story and keep the lights on.

About nine years ago, my young adult son moved into the big white farm-house on our other farm. We have two farms located near each other in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and both homes are well over one hundred years old, going  on two.  Some of his guy friends moved in and everything was fine, then he and his fiancée (now wife) started remodeling the house. At first, no one thought much about the noises. Neither of them even mentioned a thing to me.

Then one night my son called, alone and uneasy. He was hunkered downstairs with his cat. Seems there were footsteps he couldn’t account for and a certain bedroom upstairs with a door that wouldn’t stay shut. No matter how many times he closed it, come morning it was always open. Earlier that week, his fiancé had been distressed when the bathroom doorknob turned and the door opened on her.  No one was there.  It freaked the cat out.  Didn’t do her much good either.  She was promptly converted from a disbeliever in ghosts to one strongly considering their reality.

 

Now, she’d gone away on a trip with her church and none of my son’s other friends were around. The last of his roomies had moved out. I suspected all the remodeling they’d done to the house had stirred something up. So, I went over. Here, I’ll digress to say I’d dreamed earlier of a small grave plot way back in the fields behind the house and of a restless spirit associated with both. As it turned out there is just such a cemetery, an antiquated one. After I arrived that evening, my son and I went upstairs to the suspect bedroom and shut the door. The sensation that came over me was of wanting to scream, and not just because I’m claustrophobic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 We held hands and I repeated the Exorcism prayer sent to my mother from an Episcopalian woman in England.  She’d written mom about visiting the church manse at the invitation of the new priest who was plagued by a poltergeist–one so violent, it had flung portraits down from the upstairs hall, shifted heavy furniture in front of  doors, and hurled a saucepan lid across the kitchen. But the congregants, along with the priest, had prayed it out. As this was a Christian prayer, my son and I did the same in the old farmhouse. Never again did he or his fiancé hear footsteps or have any more trouble with doorknobs turning. That bedroom door remained as they’d left it and the chill feeling I had in the room is gone.

 

 

*Here’s the Anglican prayer. Do not try this alone if the presence you sense is evil, only with a strong group of Christians, the more, the better. And join hands. Even if you think I’m nuts. “In the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, may this distressed soul be relieved of his obsession with this world and sent to where he belongs.”  I added, ‘go to the light,’ although a truly evil presence won’t, but a troubled, restless one may. Seems only right to offer that as an option. ~