How to begin telling this haunting tale that, I myself, still do not fully believe. I guess by starting with the blunt, hard, bone-chilling truth. I use to see this ghostly figure in the hallway late at night in my basement leading towards the laundry room and this room my grandma stored her ancient 150yr old piano and all her tax files. One day I was in the filing cabinet room, as I called it, with my grandmother. She was going over tax papers and I was playing with the old, out of tune piano. I felt a cold, tingling feeling wash over me, and suddenly in the blink of an eye, my grandma was standing by me yelling and crying. She was demanding to know why I’d play her such a horrible song on the piano, and how I knew of this tune in the first place. She was also quite puzzled to know how I managed to get the piano in perfect tune.
Confused and slightly dizzy, I wasn’t sure what she was going on about. That is, until she uttered the words “Why would you play that song that use to air during the war when my brother was drafted in England? That’s a horrible thing to do to me.”
Stunned I sat up and exclaimed that I had not done such a thing, but she wouldn’t believe me. She kept insisting I had done this, and I could see the hurt written all over her face. As the weeks went on, a friend suggested that I may have been possessed, but I was still on the fence about that sort of thing. It seems ridiculous. But night after night I kept seeing this same figure in the hallway, feeling the chilled air as I’d walk past that hallway. Could it really be true? Could there be an entity there, in the house I lived in, waiting, lurking, to cause harm?
I use to spend all my nights as a teen in the basement watching tv. My bedroom was on the main floor of the bungalow style home I shared with my grandma and mum, but I often fell asleep watching tv. Only to be awoken by strange sounds and strange feelings of coldness, and not from the dank basement temperature. I would feel something unsettling looking but could never put my finger on it.
Night after night I’d walk, sometimes run, past the hallway leading to the laundry room and filing cabinet room and I’d always see something floating in a white dress with long white or blonde hair. I never got a good look at the face, but I heard these sounds I can’t quite describe. It was as if something was waiting there, hoping I’d step foot down there. I never could unless it was light out. A few times I tried in the dark of night but I always felt sick doing so and would bolt back upstairs. This, thing, whatever it was, would never leave that general area. For what reason, I’m unsure.
I chalked up that ghostly womanly figure to a character I had seen as a small child on an episode of a popular Canadian tv show, ‘Are You Afraid of The Dark’ and couldn’t wrap my head around what I now know I was truly seeing. Maybe I was too frightened to admit the truth. Could be. Or it could be that staying in a state of disbelief kept my anxiety at bay over this whole ordeal. Either way, the thought of all this was hard to ignore as time passed.
Several years later, I got word from my Mum that she and my late grandfather also had run ins with this spirit (or evil entity), which they both believed it meant to cause harm in some form. I wasn’t given many further details except a brief description of what they had seen long ago. I knew telling my Grandmother would lead to no good because she wasn’t one to believe in spirits or anything of the sort, so I knew deep down I’d never be able to convince her of what happened that horrible day in that dark, dingy basement room with the ancient piano. To me it wasn’t that unfathomable, but in the same thought I could understand how it could be to someone who didn’t believe in that sort of thing. I let it go and never spoke of it with any family member. Especially not my Grandmother.
Now it’s 2023, the years have indeed passed, quite quickly unfortunately. This all happened back before 2008, and I’ve since then moved out of said childhood home, my grandparents, and my Mum are gone now, and the house was sold and torn down by a side of the family I no longer communicate with. I still find myself wondering, and daydreaming at times, about what became of that old piano in the basement, what happened to the spirit, and if anyone came to any serious harm do to it.
Where did she come from? What is her story? So many questions, and only answers that evade me. In the back of my mind I know that this is something I’ll think about for the rest of my life, especially since I still hold onto the old thought of “It was probably just my imagination. That old tv character, right?” As much as I’d rather not go down that path of thinking again, I can’t dismiss my experience any longer.