Reader Submission: Making Amends from the Beyond
“This happened when I was about 16. My best friend and I were on a summer trip with her grandmother. While in Oklahoma, we were staying at her grandmother’s vacation house. It was our first night there, and my friend and I were in the guest bedroom on our cots. Her grandmother and sister were sleeping down the hall in the master bedroom.
For some reason, I could not go to sleep. I sometimes get creeped out in new places, but I also kept thinking I heard someone walking on the gravel driveway next to the house. I could hear a voice, but not clearly. It sounded to me like the voice was calling someone, and I heard the name Jeremy. I figured it was just a neighbor looking for their pet, but it still weirded me out a little since it was around 3:00 in the morning. Then I started hearing banging in the kitchen, like cabinet doors were being shut. At this point, I was majorly creeped out so I woke up my friend. She was kind of annoyed at first, but once I told her what I had heard she grew wide awake and started getting creeped out too. We sat there for a few minutes, not hearing anything else, just talking and giggling and basically being teenage girls.
After a few minutes, my friend said she had to go to the bathroom, but at this point she was too scared to go by herself. So we both stood up to leave. The second our feet hit the floor, we heard pounding footsteps running down the hall towards our door. This was one of those houses that’s raised off the ground so the steps were very loud. We flew back onto the cots and the sounds stopped. We sat there for about 15 minutes, huddled up on the same cot, laughing uneasily and wondering what the hell just happened. My friend still needed to go to the bathroom (a little more urgently now), so after a couple of minutes of gathering our courage we climbed off the cot.
Again, the split second our feet touched the floor the pounding footsteps came running down the hall. This time we totally lost it and started screaming our heads off. We jumped back onto the cot, which promptly collapsed under our weight, and sat there on the floor, tangled up in blankets and a broken cot, screaming bloody murder. We didn’t hear anymore footsteps, though I’m not sure if they stopped the second we jumped on the cot like before. We were screaming too loud.
While we were shrieking, the door to our room opened, making us scream louder, but it was just my friend’s grandmother wondering what on earth was wrong. We told her about the footsteps, but she just told us we were being silly and gave us that old line about there wasn’t anything in the dark that wasn’t also in the light. Then we told her about what had kept me awake in the first place- the steps outside, the voice, the cabinets -but she was shrugging it off until I said that I thought I heard the name Jeremy. At that point she shot my friend a very strange look and asked her how I knew about Jeremy. My friend asked what she meant (she didn’t know anything about a Jeremy either). Turns out that Jeremy was the grandson of the man that used to live in the house (both relatives of my friend’s grandmother) and that they had had a falling out and hadn’t made up when the man died.
At that point, I think her grandmother believed us a bit more. However, she didn’t really say much, just that Jesus was always watching over us and that we should go back to sleep. My friend also got up and went to the bathroom (finally) and there were no steps that time. Nothing else happened during that visit, or any others, but we didn’t get much sleep either. I guess the ghost of that man is still looking for his grandson, trying to patch things up.”
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Photo: morgueFile
