First, let me preface my story with the fact that I am now 49-years old. Although I have experienced several encounters with, what I believe to be, someone from the other side, the following is the most vivid. Over the years I have tried, desperately, to logically explain what happened to me, but have come to accept the fact that there are things that happen to us which we will never truly understand. When I was a young girl, 13 or 14 years old, I would help my father repair old houses he had purchased and he would then rent them out for extra money. He must have bought 15 very old houses in need of repair, over a 10-year period. I married when I was 18 and my parents gave my husband and I the option of renting one of the old houses for a very minimal amount. Of course, we jumped at the opportunity to have our very own home, knowing we could decorate and do what we wanted to with it. The house we moved into was about 75 years old with three big bedrooms and a large living and dining area. It still needed some repairs, so we spent much of our free time painting and making the place presentable. In a years time, most of the work was done and we were quite proud of our new home. Up to this point, there was nothing unusual I had noticed about this house. My husband was in sales and would leave for work around 5:00 a.m. in order to miss the heavy morning traffic on his way to the office. I would usually sleep in for another hour or so because I didn't have to be at work until 9:00 a.m. One morning, after he left, I started to doze back into a slumber when I began to get a very uneasy feeling. Our bedroom had a door that lead into a long hallway, but our bed was positioned so that I could only see the doorway and not into the hall. I had my back to the doorway, but felt someone was watching me. I was almost afraid to turn around and, also, afraid not to! I did, finally, look over my shoulder toward the doorway and saw, what looked like a man in a suit, just standing there. It was still rather dark in the room, so I opened my eyes wider and sat up in the bed, thinking I must be dreaming! The moment I sat up, this "man" turned and drifted down the hallway. I say drifted because, although he turned and went towards the hall, his feet weren't moving. It was like he was floating away. I, immediately, jumped out of bed and looked down the hall, but saw nothing. I thought it had to be my imagination and I, surely, must have been dreaming and just awoke at a bad time. I couldn't explain it and I didn't believe in silly things like ghosts! About a week later, after my husband left for work, I began to get this same eerie feeling. I know I was not dreaming or asleep because I looked at my clock on the headboard and it read 5:49 a.m. I slowly turned around, and there was this man again! I sat up and tried to scream, but nothing would come out of my mouth. I felt frozen and unable to move. The moment I was finally able to move, I sat up. He turned, slowly, and, again, floated down the hallway. I really thought I was losing it. I called my husband, at work, and attempted to tell him what had happened. Of course, he thought I was just dreaming and told me to quit thinking about it. Yeah, right!! This man appeared to me almost every morning over the next year and a half. As long as I didn't sit up in the bed, he would just stand in the doorway looking at me. No expression, no movement. Just stand there for several minutes. I memorized every detail about him. He wore a dark brown suit, a white shirt and a tie that had diagonal strips of blue and brown. He was mostly bald, but his hair color was brown. His expression never changed. His hands hung down straight on his sides and I could never quite see his feet. I would have to sit up to see his feet and that is when he would disappear. My fear finally left after several months and I, simply, expected to see him when I awoke each morning. My husband never saw him and began to think I had a very vivid imagination. I didn’t mention him to my husband anymore because he started suggesting I see a specialist! My parents lived two houses from us and they would visit us often. I mentioned this apparition to my dad a couple of times, but he too, thought I must be dreaming. He had bought this house from an old woman that had lived there for many years and now lived in a nursing home. He said this woman called him and wanted to see what we had done to the house. She knew we were remodeling it and wanted to see the progress. The following Sunday, my father went to pick Ms. Brady up from the nursing home to visit with us. I had baked some cookies and had coffee and tea ready when she got there. She was a very sweet old lady and loved what we had done with the house. We sat and listened to her tell us how things were back when she was young and how she had lived in the house over 50 years. She began to pull out some old pictures of how the house looked in its younger years and, there in her wallet, was a picture that made me lose my breath! The picture was of her husband and daughter some 40 years earlier. When she saw the shocked look on my face, she turned to me and said, "have you seen Joe before"? I searched her eyes trying to figure out what she meant. When I didn't answer, she said, "you know, Joe used to visit me every morning after he died". My eyes began to tear up because I knew for certain I wasn't crazy and what I saw was real! I told her I had seen him many times in the doorway staring at me. She said, "oh, he's probably wondering why you're in the bed and not me". When I described to her what he was wearing, she said those were the clothes he was buried in. She then told me, how he died. He was walking home from work and a streetcar passed him going very fast. A rock popped up from the street and hit him in the temple. He made it home, but told her he was going to lie down before supper because he had a headache. He never awoke, but died in his sleep. She said her daughter also died in the house and asked if I had ever seen her. I told her I had not. She said that she always set the dinner table for three after their deaths and saw both of them often. I never saw "Joe" after that day. He never again appeared to me anywhere else in the house. Mrs. Brady died about a year after our visit. I hope they are together and happy. To this day, I will never doubt anyone's word about seeing a ghost. I know how real Joe was to me.
Jays note: Thanks so much for the Great story