ghosts Archives - The Misfit Farmer

I had an interesting thought the other day: Where do ghosts go when we bulldoze their haunted farmhouses, when we pave purgatory and put up a parking lot? If you ask me, it’s an issue that rarely gets the attention it deserves.

The Kendrick Family in Front of Our Farmhouse

Our old farmhouse was built in 1897. You can tell Kendricks built it. Kendricks, my in-laws, have a tendency to build on the fly and verbalize all their decision-making processes at the moment of cognitive conception. They decide in milliseconds what to do and move forward, no second thoughts, no regrets, hammer to the nail, then another nail, another nail, and so on, till they have a house with as confusing a floor plan as a house of mirrors. It may seem impractical to have three front doors, a bathroom as a hallway, and a fireplace in the closet, but, as I said, Kendricks built my house and there are no regrets.

These three front-doors doors make it easy to flee the premises from Kendrick ghosts who are equally vocal and decisive in the afterlife. Don’t get me wrong, decisiveness has its place, like the Battle of King’s Mountain, when my wife’s ancestors fought with the Overmountain Men to whip the British. (If the battle had depended on the Bishops, my ancestors, we would have surely lost for fear of hurting the British’s feelings. Or, we would have starved to death, unable to choose which campfire to eat at and insisting someone else choose. My wife has studied my genealogy and says I have a French ancestor, which explains a lot).

But self-assured and outspoken Kendricks are not who you want haunting your farmhouse. Kendrick ghosts have no qualms about terrifying an in-law now inhabiting their old domicile with disembodied utterances and footless footsteps. I’m certain it’s Kendrick ghosts because no other ghosts could navigate our house without getting lost and asking for help. Plus, a Kendrick ghost would never ask for help as a point of pride.

Furthermore, I did see a real Kendrick ghost once, no joke. It was a grayish apparition in the shape of granny from the Beverly Hillbillies. I saw it on the same night my wife was laughing in her sleep with a strange, childlike giggle. When I rolled over to investigate the cause of her laughter, my wife was still clearly asleep, yet still clearly giggling. And standing beside the bed, beside her, was this grey granny. I rolled back over, put the sheet over my head, and tried to convince myself I was dreaming. The next morning, I told my wife about the giggling and asked her what she was dreaming about. I had yet to mention anything about the ghost. She said she had been dreaming about her great-grandma, at which point I nearly created a fourth front-door in our house.

I should have knocked on wood. Lo and behold, a few days after I wrote a post about ghosts, I had my first ghostly encounter. Of course, it was at night, which seems to be a prerequisite for paranormal experiences—at least according to horror movies and ghost hunting TV shows. What time of night it was exactly, I’m not sure, but I woke up to the sound of laughing.

The laughing wasn’t the ghostly part, but it was strange. Natalie occasionally talks in her sleep, and she was apparently laughing in her sleep then. But instead of her normal laugh, it was a child-like giggle. I asked her if was she was having a funny dream, and she responded, obviously still asleep, with the following: “I’m counting without numbers.”

“Okay, that was kind of funny,” I thought, and knowing she was so averse to mathematics, it seemed reasonable to believe she was dreaming about bypassing numbers. I should have gone back to sleep.

Instead, I rolled over and opened my eyes, and what I saw was an old woman standing beside the bed in front of Natalie. The woman just stood there. I couldn’t see anything except her outline and silhouette, in a smoky-gray color. There was no detail to her face or texture to her clothing, but her outline resembled that of a woman in a traditional dress with an apron tied around her waist, with her hair pinned up in a bun (like Granny, for lack of better example, from The Beverly Hillbillies). A few seconds later, the figure just dissipated.

For the two of three seconds I saw or imagined the figure, I didn’t feel scared or threatened, and the woman didn’t look real enough for me to wonder if an intruder was indeed in the house. It was just strange and surreal. Eventually, I closed my eyes and refused to open them again. The next morning, I asked Natalie if she had any dreams. To my surprise, she said she had a funny dream, but couldn’t remember what it was about.

Why a ghost would appear next to Natalie while she was dreaming a funny dream, I don’t know. Maybe the ghost has a sense of humor. This could explain why she appeared a few days after I wrote about never experiencing ghosts in the house. Or, maybe I had been thinking too much about ghosts and imagined the whole episode. Whether or not it was a figment of my imagination, the woman’s figure had a striking resemblance to Natalie’s great-great grandmother Ponola. Thankfully, Ponola seems like a very pleasant lady in the pictures of I’ve seen of her.

Of course, we’ll keep you posted if we have any other paranormal activity.