The farmer’s ghost
Judith Gmerek Jernigan, Hazel Dell
In Arizona, I used to live in what appeared to be an old farmhouse.
It really stood out, surrounded by homes built in the ’60s and ’70s on a residential street in a small town. There were no records revealing where or when it was built, only that it had been moved to the site in 1936, and a local high school art teacher had owned it the longest.
I bought the house from her daughter in 1991.
While lying in bed, I often heard footsteps on my bare wood floors. They came into the bedroom through a door on my right, followed the length of the bed, then moved across the foot of the bed before stopping, perhaps floating invisibly out the open window.
Other nights the bedroom lights would turn on and off several times. Sometimes in the middle of night, I heard the living room TV go on and change channels a few times before turning off (or sometimes, staying on).
The ghost also liked to listen in to my telephone conversations. I could hear the click of a receiver in another room, then the volume decreased and I heard background noise from that room. (Of course, no one else was home at the time).
My husband never believed the house had a ghost until a waitress at a local restaurant recognized him as living a few houses away.
She asked if he had seen the ghost yet. Then she told him how the high school art teacher had several times walked into the kitchen to see a man sitting at her table drinking coffee, before he vanished into thin air.
