In October, thoughts of ghosts flutter through my mind. I don’t believe in ghosts, but there is some sense of relief for me every year when Halloween is over and talk about ghostly things subsides.
The first funeral I ever attended was for an old uncle in Jackson, Miss. I was in grade school, and the funeral experiences alone were enough to spook me even without what my Aunt Annie Belle saw.
It was not unusual in those days for a body to be viewed at the home of family members leading up to a funeral. Uncle Robert was on display in the living room when we arrived to spend the night at my aunt’s house.
I never went in the living room but got glimpses of my late uncle from the hallway. He was removed from the house later in the day and returned to the funeral home. But I could hear strange sounds from the living room that night as I laid awake in my bed upstairs.
It was what I heard the next day, though, when we went down for breakfast that unnerved me the most. Aunt Annie Bell said, “I saw Robert clear as a bell standing here making coffee when I walked in the kitchen this morning.”
The Uncle Robert I caught sight of the day before didn’t seem up to making coffee. I watched him later at the church service and burial and was sure he had not been walking around in the kitchen earlier that day.
After asking my parents a lot of questions, I realized that Aunt Annie Belle seeing Robert was just some kind of illusion or vison. It was sort of like the times I could picture myself in Yankee Stadium playing for my favorite team.
But the thought of Uncle Robert making coffee the morning after people were viewing him laid out in the living room in his best suit gave me chills for a long time.
That boyhood experience and memory helped me understand our little granddaughter Charlee Ann’s reaction to a discussion about ghosts that we were both involved in a few days ago.
Actually, Charlee was listening much more than talking when her older sisters Allie and Ava were asking me questions about the legend of the ghost on Northwestern’s campus.
Northwestern students have heard tales of the mythical ghost Isabella for more than a century. The story goes that she lived in a mansion that became the first building at the school and took her own life after her fiancé was killed in a duel.
The original columns of the mansion that still stand as the symbol of the university are near the elementary lab school where Charlee, Allie and Ava are students.
Bits and pieces of the Isabella legend have floated among lab school students for decades. Allie is in the fourth grade and Ava the fifth, and they have heard the tales that seem to spread every year as Halloween approaches.
But Charlee is a first grader and was learning about Isabella for the first time that afternoon as the four of us were riding around the campus.
The older girls wanted to know what happened to the ghost after the mansion was torn down. We talked about Isabella living in another historic building until it burned and then being moved to the next oldest structure at the university.
They wanted to see it. As we rode by the building that was once a women’s gymnasium, I assured Charlee again as I had been doing since the conversation started that there was no such thing as ghosts.
One of the girls asked Charlee if the talk about the legendary ghost scared her. “I’m not scared right now,” Charlee said, “but if I ever think about this when I’m by myself, I’ll be horrified.”
I could relate to that. For years when it was near Halloween and I remembered my Aunt Annie Belle saying she saw Uncle Robert making coffee a few hours before his funeral, my spine tingled.
Even now, I’m like Charlee and try not to think about ghosts when I’m by myself.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES