My Grandma and Great Grandma rented a house during WWII that they swore was haunted. My Great Grandpa was a spy/translator, so he had access to things that were harder for the average soldier to get… like silk stockings. Anyway, Alice and Grandma Helen noticed that things were going missing (like stockings and grocery money) quite often, so they locked them in a box. Only they had the keys. No luck… they opened the box and it was cleaned out. Then they started hearing hefty footsteps at night up and down the stairs and through the hallway, chilly gusts of wind that they couldn't explain, etc. They did a little investigating and found out that there had been a murder/suicide in the house and moved out immediately. Suddenly they understood why the house was such a good deal and why no one stayed there very long.
Grandma Helen died in January of this year at the age of 101. My mother visited her in the hospital when she was in her final days and caught a moment when she was very lucid (she lived alone until 3 months before she died and was never infirm or otherwise crazy except for the last week or so before she died when she was in and out). Anyway, in a very lucid moment she told my mother how my cousin's father, whom she had only met once or twice, had come to visit her and told her that she could cross over to the “other side”. In typical Grandma Helen logical fashion she said to my mother, “Well, at first I couldn't understand why the “Other Side” didn't send your father, or even Bob (my dad), but then I realized that I probably would have thought he was a hallucination. And Uncle Jack? I barely knew him. By accident.” But that seemed to placid her down, which was nice.
I like the idea of an envoy who's supposed to send you off to the next plane of existence. I think Grandma Helen did too. She was pretty excited to get to the end of this and see what happens next.
