Monday, June 7, 2010

A Pennsylvania Ghost Story

This, I am sure, will be the first of many stories--and don't forget to share your own tales of Pennsylvania ghosts.
Let me confess that I have always believed in ghosts and the paranormal. These things have touched my life personally, but other members of my family--notably my sisters and my father--have experienced them in much greater depth.
I have heard or read somewhere that any house in which someone has died is by definition a haunted house. That's a lot of potential ghosts. Also, it seems to me that an old place with a rich historical past must be prime ghost country.
That certainly would define Pennsylvania. Old and with a rich past, and with some spirits who haven't yet worked things out.
My sister Carole seems to have encountered such a spirit when she and her then-husband rented a house in Hazleton. She became more aware of it than other members of the family because she spent more time at home than anyone else.
Evidently this ghost was a woman, and a dedicated housewife. Carole could tell that because, while she never saw her, the house's former tenant made her existence known through cooking smells, the clatter of dishes from the the kitchen, the aroma of perfume, and much walking back and forth, as of someone checking to see what needed to be cleaned or straightened.
Carole recalled that her daughter was unnerved by these ghostly manifestations, but she herself was not. Her coexistence with the ghost of the former tenant was peaceful and--if this is the right way to define living with a ghost--uneventful.

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