Real Ghost Story - Tracy's House

Strange days indeed . . .

I remember when I was about 15 years old I lived at my friend Tracy’s house. She lived with her Mom in a sort of beat up house. They were not rolling in the dough but they housed something like 10-13 dogs and 5-6 cats at a time in the house. They really loved animals, in fact Tracy’s Mom - whom all the kids called Ma - worked at a vet’s office. Several strange things happened during my short stay with them. Here are some of the highlights . . .

One thing that was really odd was that you could never get through a full recording of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. I swear, every time you would try to play a tape it would just get eaten somewhere in the middle of the song, if it were a record it would start to skip. At the time they didn’t have a cd player, but I imagine the same sort of thing would probably have happened. I really didn’t believe them at first but I tried it myself and as they say . . . the proof is in the pudding!

Another weird thing was that they had this little onyx dog with diamond eyes (I am sure they were fake diamonds but you get the point) and it used to sit on top of the t.v. The weird thing about this little doggie was that you would leave the room and the dog would be facing the middle of the room and the next time you came in, without fail this dog would be facing the corner of the room. It was so odd. Tracy used to like to say that there was a ghost in the house that she called Gram (short for grandma, I think because she thought it was the ghost of an old woman) who liked to play little tricks.

One day Gram really acted up on me and freaked me out to no end. I stayed in room with my friend Tracy and she had a really deep closet. This closet had one of those accordion style doors that you actually had to lift up and over a latch to lock. Now I know that when I walked into that room to do my homework that day said closet door was open about 2-3 inches. So I sat down on the bed to do my homework and I was petting one of the cats who eventually got down and started roaming the room.

As I sat there pondering my Algebra equations, I listened to a tape of one of my all time favorite eighties hair bands, Great White (I was a teenager in the late 80's give me a break!) on our little stereo. After a few moments, the tape just stopped playing. No big deal, that happens sometimes with tapes so I popped it out and prepared myself to re-roll the portion of the tape that had been eaten by the tape player. Funny thing was, there was no portion eaten by the tape player. So I popped the tape back in and it played for a bit and then it did the same thing. Fully engrossed in what the heck could be wrong with the tape or the player I lost track of where the cat was in the room. All of a sudden I heard noises coming from the closet. Not a big deal, I figure the cat is playing around in there and go to open the door.

Here’s where the story gets a little weird folks . . . the closet door is locked. When I got the door opened, the cat raced out of the room like a shot. She looked thoroughly freaked out. Now, remember how I stated that someone would actually have had to pick up the door and latch it? Well, I didn’t do it, the cat sure didn’t do it and there was no one else in the room to do it. I pretty much ran out of the room, down the stairs hysterical vowing never to be alone in that room again. I moved out soon thereafter but I hung out with Tracy for years after that. I am sure that if we got together to reminisce today, we would bring up the old stories about her Mom’s house and give each other the chills all over again.