The following are ghost stories from my family, just in time for Halloween! They may not be the spookiest, but hey, they are true.

The first two stories come from my mom and are from her childhood. They take place at my great-grandmother’s home. A bit of background here. My great-grandfather built the house and when he dug the foundation for the house he came across civil war artifacts and bodies! The Smithsonian was called in to excavate and it turned out the land was once the headquarters of a Civil War general named Mosby who lead a pack called Mosby’s Raiders. The Smithsonian took the bodies and most of the artifacts, leaving some of the poorer preserved rifles with my family. On Sundays when the family would gather at my great-grandma’s and the kids would all play war with these rifles.

Anyways, one Sunday as everyone had gathered for lunch, the kids were outside playing as usual. Suddenly the attic window opened and someone, or something, threw an ugly witches mask down at the kids. The strange thing was, nobody knew where the mask came from and all the adults and kids were accounted for!

In another story from my great-grandma’s house . . . . My great-great-grandma Mimi lived in the house until she died. Every night she would get up and walk down a long hallway to the bathroom, take her medicine out of the cabinet, and then walk back to her room. After she died, my mom, uncle and aunt were spending the night in the house. Late at night they heard the all too familiar footsteps of great-great-grandma Mimi walking down the hallway, opening the medicine cabinet, and walking back to her room! They thought it was their uncle playing a trick on them, but it wasn’t!

This quick story comes from my grandma. She told this to me when I was in undergrad and we were watching a program on ghosts. Shortly after my grandfather died she said she woke up one night and saw him standing at the end of her bed looking at her. She felt it was his way of telling her everything would be okay.

The following two stories come from my mom. Last year my grandmother passed away after a battle with cancer. On the day she passed, the family had gathered to be with her. My mom and the woman who was my grandmother’s caretaker were sitting with her in her room. Suddenly the door to my grandmother’s room opened and then closed, as if my grandmother’s spirit had got up and left to see what the family in the other room was up to. She passed away in the evening, and that night my mother instinctively woke up in the middle of the night to check on her, as she usually did. She found that the light in my grandmother’s room was on!

So there are the ghost stories from my family, that I can recall. As I experience more ghost stories in my house I’ll be sure to let you know about them.

Dustin