Life in a haunted house.

When I was about 12 or 13 years old, we moved into a rental property in Greenwood Springs Mississippi. It was very convenient for us as it was just a mile or two down the road from property Dad had just bought where he planned to build us a house. In the evenings we would go and work on clearing out the house place and such.

My grandfather, Daddy Straw spent a lot of time with me during the time we lived at this place. He would take me hunting and teach me other skills that a boy my age needed for life in the country.

We had lived there a few months before we started noticing strange things happening. One of the first things I remember out of the ordinary was when I gave my mother a magnolia blossom as a gift. Normally these seem to wilt quickly once cut from the tree but for some reason, this one just never withered. I set it in a bowl of water on the dining room table and it stayed fresh for over a week. We finally got tired of it and threw it out but it still looked as fresh as the day I cut it from the tree.

The next strange thing happened one evening when we were all sitting around the dining room table after dinner. We heard a noise in the kitchen and we all looked up in time to watch the doorknob turn and the kitchen door open. We were expecting it to maybe my Grand Daddy Straw as he sometimes came in the back door instead of the front.

But to our surprise, the door simply closed on its own and no one was there. Then our attention turned to the other door to the dining room. This door led to the rest of the house. Just as before, the doorknob turned and the door opened on its own and then closed again as if a person had just walked through the room from one door to the next.

After a while, we got accustomed to sharing the house with our invisible roommate. We knew to look for missing shiny things under a certain board in the closet and to expect small items to move around when no one was looking. We even decided that our dog was not crazy for jumping on and playing with an invisible friend in the yard.

Never did any of us ever feel threatened by the ghost. We felt she was female and began calling her She. Once, my mother was ill and sleeping alone at the house. She said she felt a presence wake her up and as she awoke, she saw a white figure at the foot of the bed gently shaking her to wake up. Once she awoke, the figure was gone but she realized that the pilot light had gone out on the gas heater and the room was slowly filling with gas. The ghost had protected her.

The only scary time I ever experienced was one day after hunting rabbits with my Grand Daddy Straw; I went inside to put up the butcher knife I had used to clean the rabbits.

I tossed the knife onto the counter near the sink and turned to go back outside to get the rabbits. As I turned around, I heard the knife fall on the floor. I did not think anything about it, I just figured I had missed when I tossed it on the counter. I was more careful as I set down the knife by the sink and turned to go back out.

Again as I turned and headed out the door, I heard the knife hit the floor. Still, I thought nothing of it as the countertops were not quite level and I assumed it had slid off after I set it down. So this time I picked up the knife and carefully placed it on the countertop. I put it all the way back against the backstop near the sink. As I lifted my hand away I made sure it was stable and was not going to slide off again.

This time however as I turned to go back outside, the knife flew across the room and landed near the door on the opposite side of the room. This time, I decided to leave the knife on the floor and go back outside. I am not sure why she did not want the knife on the counter, but she made it very clear she did not want it left there.