Real Ghost Stories

I shared these two ghost stories last October, but I am going to share them again, because I might win a prize from IM Insane Mama: A Big Old Spooky Mess#links if I link back to her page. So here goes...

Right after my paternal grandmother died and we got home from the funeral, I was sitting in a chair right under the wall phone when it rung. I picked it up and it was my grandmother's voice. She kept saying Deborah, Deborah, Deborah. I turned white as a sheet and my mother asked me what was wrong. I told her it was Grandmother and she laughed and took the phone away from me. When she listened it was a dead line, not a dial tone, but like the phone was dead. Mother said that was weird. Several years later I was telling this same story to two of my brothers. They did not believe me. I was adamant that it was my Grandmother on the phone. I heatedly said that I wished there was some way that she could show us a sign that it was actually her the day of her funeral on the phone. About that time the depression china that we inherited from her which was in a china cabinet in the kitchen started rattling and shaking making a large noise. My younger brother screamed like a girl and jumped clean over the couch and one of my older brothers said the hair stood straight out on the back of his neck.

This same grandmother had a house that we kept in the family for several years after she died. At one point one of my older brothers and his wife rented it. There were huge french doors off the main foyer/parlor into a room that my brother and his wife used as a living room. My grandmother had used it as her sewing room/storage and did not like any of us going in there messing with her things when she was living. She always had to have the french doors closed. After my brother and sister-in-law were living there for a while, my sister-in-law noticed that the french doors were always closed in the afternoons when she came home from work when she distinctly remembered opening them in the morning just before she left. At first she thought my brother was doing it. She asked him about it and he said that he had not shut them. Then they thought it must be a problem with the doors not being aligned properly and that they were shutting because of that, so my sister-in-law got some huge, heavy planter's pots with some kind of large plants to put on either side of the doors to hold them open. She liked the sunshine from the foyer/parlor to shine into the living room. I kid you not these pots were heavy and hard to move. Shortly thereafter, my brother and his wife left for a party one afternoon and they came back just after dark and when they came in the front door through the parlor, the first thing they noticed was that the french doors had been shut, but the potted plants were still in the same position that they had left them and no one else had been in the house. Isn't that eerie? I guess my grandmother wanted those doors to be kept shut. My brother and his wife soon moved out of the house saying that my grandmother was still there haunting the place.

What stories do you have to tell?