A Story About Our Family                                                                    

            The house I grew up in from the age of about 2 years old until after my 6^th birthday was thought to be haunted. It was at the bottom of Devil’s Elbow Hill on the old route 17C.  The road use to have a very sharp curve midway up the hill where a lot of cars accidents happened. Years later the curve was taken out of the road because of the number of accidents.

            The story that I heard, and was repeated by my mother, is that in the early 1900’s a young woman, who use to  live at the house, was on her way to her wedding when she was in a tragic accident and lost her life. She was wearing a white wedding dress at the time of her death.

 For many years it was reported that people traveling the hill at night would occasionally see a woman dressed in white trying to flag a car down. They would stop to give the woman in white a ride and she would ask that she be taken to the house at the bottom of the hill where she lived. When they got to the house she was no longer in the car and they would go to the house to ask about her. Hanging just inside the door there was a picture of her in her wedding dress on the wall in the house. The occupants of the house, her family, would explain that she had died on the hill where she had just been seen.

 Of course while I lived at the house there was no picture of a woman in white hanging in our house but the story was known by most locals. I remember on at least one occasion someone stopped at our house asking if we had seen the woman in white because they had picked her up and she had disappeared. Maybe it was just someone trying to scare us but the story always felt true to me for some reason.

The house had other interesting characteristics. In the back of one of the closets upstairs there was false door that lead nowhere. Like a lot of old houses it made strange sounds of cracks and pops in the night. I also can remember waking up at night and feeling like someone else was in the room. In my bedroom, which I shared with my brother Mike, there was a picture of a wolf standing on a hill and I thought the wolf’s eyes followed me wherever I was in the room.

            I think my mother, Grandma Joyce, believed in paranormal activity and felt she had psychic gifts. She would tell stories about having out of body visions and seeing events that later actually happened. She was, I think, afraid of these feelings and insights that she had, they made her very uncomfortable.  She didn’t like us playing psychic type games which were popular when I was growing up. Someone once gave us an Ouija board and she threw it away.

When I was a teenager a game that was popular at parties was “up table”. People sat around a small table and would rest the tips of their fingers on the edge of the table. Everyone chanted “up table” and the table would slowly rise up. You could ask the table a question about a person sitting there and if the table dipped towards that person the statement was true. We would also try to communicate with a dead person through having a séance. My mother always stopped us if she knew we were playing these games but often we did it at someone else’s house.

            When we moved to a new house in Tioga Center it was right next to an old cemetery. She didn’t have a problem with us walking through or playing in or around the cemetery which we did often as children. We loved to read the old gravestones and make up stories about the people buried there. On Halloween night we would sometimes hide in the cemetery and jumping out at other kids walking by.

            Maybe because of this early introduction to ghosts and the paranormal I have never been afraid of thinking about things like this.  But don’t ask me to watch a scary movie. I’ll walk through a cemetery on the darkest night before I’ll watch a movie that is too scary.

written 1/10/18