Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 18:04:48 -0700 (PDT)
To: stories@ghosts.org
yourname Tammy C.
email invisigoth13@yahoo.com
I grew up in Southeast Louisiana, next to the Mississippi border. There are many ghosts stories floating around in those rural areas. I think it is because one is closer to the earth in rural areas, and there isn’t a lot of cement and steel between people and nature, like there is in the city. ….anyway, here is my story. I hope I do not bore you. IT IS A LONG ONE .
I grew up in a house that was definitely HAUNTED. The stories goes like this. My grandparents bought land in Tangipahoa Parish in Southeast Louisiana around the 1920’s. We were the first black family to move to that area, that would later become a town. Apparently, when my grandparents bought this land, there was an old shack there. They were told that the shack belonged to an old Voo-Doo Woman who had died years earlier (yeah, voo-doo and Louisana, who would have guessed :)) Anyway, in African American culture, it is considered bad luck, or a sign of disrespect to tear down someone’s home and build another one. So my grandparents built “on to” this shack and built a beautiful southern home. The Master bedroom of their new home is the part of the house that was once the shack of the voo-doo lady. Before I go any further, I want to say, that all voo-doo is not bad, good and bad is in the heart of the practitioner, not the magick. Voo-Doo is a valid spirituality, it is as valid as ANY spirituality. But apparently this voo-doo lady had a lot of bad in her heart, and there were rumors of human sacrifice. (I don’t know how true the sacrifice stuff is)
When my mother and uncle were growing up in the 1940’s and early 50’s, my grandparents had quite the time keeping them safe. My uncle would crawl under the house and try to set it on fire. When my grandmother would ask him why he had tried to do this. He would say “the people in the house told me to”. This went on for years.
By the time I was born in 1968, our house had become the family’s SECRET. I was the youngest in the house. And boy did I get the brunt of it all ! I would wake up in the middle of the night, paralyzed with a black cloud hovering over my bed. I could not speak or scream or anything. I have been slapped awake in the night. I have had someone “knock” on my head in the night. I have almost been dragged from my bed by unseen hands. I was able to scream and it just stopped. All of this was poo-pooed by my grandmother who did not want to validate this I guess, so I would not be TOO scared. It did not work, I was terrified. If you walked into the master bedroom of the house, your ears would ring sooo loud you would have to leave. NO ONE slept in that bedroom!! My grandparents slept in the another bedroom as long as I could remember. In the Master Bedroom, sometimes you could also hear people having conversations, like a big party was going on. As a child, I would strain and strain, an!
!
d I still could not understand anything that was being in said in these “conversations”. Even guests that would come for a visit, and knew nothing of this, would refuse to sleep in the Master Bedroom. It remained empty throughout my childhood.
If you walked outside and sat on the porch of our house, you could VERY CLEARLY, hear someone SWEEPING (of all things) in the house, when no one else was inside. I use to try to sneak up on the “sweeper” when I was a child, by quietly trying to re-enter the house without any noise. It never worked. Sometimes if you were on the porch, you could hear people plainly having conversations in our home, and no one would be inside. I use to hold my ear to the screen door and strain to understand, but, I could never understand a thing anyone ever said in those “conversations”. I know this may not sound that scary here, but , trust me, growing up in that house, was nothing like growing up in “Bill Cosby’s House”. It was terrifying !
After my grandfather died when I was 8yrs old, I saw a trail of blood leading from the bathroom to his bed. (he had begun to throw up blood in the end)and then saw him appear right before my eyes ! I screamed louder than I ever had before. Of course my grandmother refused to talk about it, even though she saw the blood too. I don’t know if she saw my grandfather though. The blood disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
I have awaken in the morning to see a black civil war soldier standing at my window, in his dress uniform and bayonette. He just slowly disappeared.
I have seen black “caped” figures run across the living room in the night. As a child, NONE of the spectres I saw would even come close to being called an “IMAGINARY FRIEND”. This madness continued until I was 17 and my grandmother and I moved to California,to be with my parents and my uncle, and also so I could go to college.
Interesting Notes:
- My grandmother would never talk about the events in our home, and became very angry with my great-uncle for inquiring about the “sweeping” noises. I guess she wanted to pretend it was not happening.
- My mother is considered a pathological liar by most of our family. She is quick to exaggerate a story, especially one as sensational as a haunted house, yet she refuses to talk about growing up in that house. One day I was trying to get more information about our house in Louisiana from her and she snapped, “I DONT WANT TO TALK ABOUT THAT DAMNED DEVIL HOUSE!!!!!”.
- My uncle refuses to talk about it too. He said, “I want to put that house behind me”.
Our beautiful southern home is almost 80 years old, and now stands in ruin, because no one in my family will go near it.
I will post more, as I remember.