Grandma's House

I remember the night I saw the old lady out in what most would consider the ‘Boondocks’. Her name was something like ‘Margret’ or something. I seriously don’t care. Anyways, after that I never saw her again. The story behind it is actually a bit amusing.
Me and my father had gone out to check some pipes and our truck got stuck in the mud. He was really mad, and probably said a lot of things that at my age were something you didn’t want to hear. The only upside was my chance to explore the forest.
I’d been there multiple times before, walking through the trees and exploring wildlife. Most of my family advised against going into the forest. They said there could be a cougar or something. Yea. A cougar in the middle of Illinois. Eventually this did get proven after some hunter shot one attacking his calves, but that doesn’t matter either.
I remember my father trying to push the car in a fit of blind rage, but it wouldn’t budge. Eventually he just gave up and told me to wait for him to come back as he left for the house. It was less than ten miles away, probably about an hour’s wait. For me. It pissed me off but I realized an hour wouldn’t be too bad.
About ten minutes into the wait I got bored and walked down the trail into the wooded area. I had walked here before, both alone and with friends.
I kept close to the river so I could return at any time I wanted. Fortunately I had my I-pod with me so I could listen to my favorite music while I was walking.
I remembered my I-pod saying it was at about 7:40 p.m. when I had last checked it. My father wouldn’t come back for a while, but I was still getting a bit creeped out by the fact that the sun set so early in the middle of August. My mind went off to different topics before I came to the end of the river.
I had never went this far so it came as a shock to me that it even existed. It was basically just a large pool with a few trees growing out of it. I think I saw a turtle, but other than that none of the little fish that lived in the river came out here. This struck me as odd, because the stream would carry them here if nothing else. I looked up and noticed something else I had never known existed; a house at the end of the river.
It looked like it had been there for ages without any sort of work on it. At first I thought it was just the red sunlight over the hill but after a few fleeting moments I found out that in fact there was a light on inside.
My better judgment was seriously going against it but I knew I had time so I went up. It was on top of the hill overlooking the little gully, what appeared to be a nice place to put a house. I didn’t see any telephone lines anywhere, so apparently these people lived off the land. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Anyways, I walked up to the door and knocked. I’m not a very strong boy and I was only twelve at the time, so it really surprised me when the door almost fell off its hinges. I cringed; afraid some crazy hillbilly would come out with a shotgun and blast me down, but fortunately that didn’t happen. Quite the contrary.
Almost a minute after knocking down the door an old lady began walking down the hall, her walking stick tapping along the floor. Something about her sent shivers down my spine, but I didn’t know what at the time.
She tried to greet me, but apparently she had lost her hearing so I could barely respond. She didn’t know sign, either, so I just made primitive hand motions to alert her that I also acknowledged her. She invited me inside, telling me the door was fine and she would just replace it later.
I walked inside of her surprisingly clean and utterly old house. The place looked like it was early 1900’s era, probably before the world wars. Even accounting for this it was still old as dirt. Not saying that I could compare it; there wasn’t a speck in this place. She didn’t appear to have other family members, or even a pet. She was just… Alone.
She walked me into her kitchen. I had noticed by now she had no television and an old radio that didn’t work when I fiddled with it behind her back. I soon realized it had no way to get power; there was none in the house.
She had an old gas stove, something that I was sure to stay away from because I figured it would blow at any second. As for the old lady… Mary. Mary was her name, she showed me around her house, I noted the odd way things were arranged.
For one there was no food in the kitchen, but an apple with a large bite out of it. It looked fairly new, like she had just went to eat it but went to see who I was. Yea, that had to be it.
Anyways, she invited me to sit with her on the couch. I did, not wanting to be rude to the obviously senile woman. I sat down, expecting her to offer me something. It never came. After a short amount of time that seemed to last forever she finally broke the chilling silence.
“You should go, honey,” she said softly. I stared for a moment, confused on why this woman wanted me to just up and leave after offering me inside. Plus, it was a bit chilly outside, making her remark seem more… Sinister.
“Why do you want me to leave… Ma’am?” I asked, as politely as possible. I knew she probably couldn’t hear me but she responded anyways, quietly saying that “You should go before Jerry comes.”
My mind swirled with questions. Who was Jerry? Why did I need to leave? Maybe this old woman thought she had a husband coming back, but that seemed highly unlikely based on her age. Probably one of those sad stories of someone going senile and wasting away because they wait for someone never coming back.
I thanked her for the hospitality and left, still a bit ticked that I had to leave but happy to meet the crazy old thing. I remember her saying something as I left, but it was much too soft to hear.
I returned to the truck just as the sun went down. My father was just coming down the road with my mother and the other truck, so I had arrived just in time to avoid a lot of yelling. We hooked the old truck up, got it out of the mud, and left.
I told my family about the woman and the strangely clean house. Neither of them knew anything about an old lady in the middle of that part of the forest, but apparently they were worried because Dad called the sheriff to check out the house.
The next day we went out there, me, my Father, and the Sheriff. Even though it was almost noon the sky was still a menacing shade of gray. As we got to the house, with the door still knocked down, I had almost sworn to seeing something going on near the house.
We entered, but it wasn’t two seconds inside before things got freaky. We found the lady; her remains. She was just a sack of bones by then, sitting on the same couch I left her. She apparently had been there for quite some time, I could tell that. She was preserved, I don’t know how but she was.
My father freaked out, but nowhere near as much as I did. I know what I saw. I saw her move, and I heard her talk. When I left there she was not a body. She was fully alive.
They took the body to a funeral home and tried to identify her. She was a pretty old lady, somewhere around ninety years old. Her name was Mary Ellington. She had lived out there with her family, who were fishermen. Nothing got strange until they looked a little farther down the line.
She had two kids, but one died at an early age. The other one was named Jerry Ellington, the boy whom she had talked about. They had lost all records from him, actually, ever since he left his job in Chicago as a gravedigger. I figured he had somehow told his mom that he was coming home and just never did.
That was… A week ago? I haven’t actually thought too much of it until today. Today, as I was digging into a nice apple, my mind suddenly came up with a horrid thought.
No matter how you preserve a body it eventually gets decomposed by worms, animals, all of those things. But this woman was in great shape, despite the fact that she was pretty old and dead for at least a month. My family had driven me to think I was just having some sort of daydream, or I saw the house and made everything up. But like I stated before, I saw that woman alive.
I’m pretty interested in the supernatural. I read stories about them, most utterly fake. I look up accounts of people ‘seeing dead relatives’ or ‘getting abducted by aliens’. It was just a fun pastime up until now.
Why would I see her ghost? Was she just trying to tell me about her sad, lonely life? Just trying to have a friend? Recalling my short conversation, one line comes back a lot.
“You should go before Jerry comes.”
Who was this Jerry? Why did I need to leave? My original thought of her just going completely senile became distant… and a new one came in. I’m still trying to find the answer to this one question.
Why was the house so clean?
Category:Nature
Category:Ghosts
Category:Places