Kentucky Ghosts

The Little Girl Ghost Who Adopted Us

The Little Girl Ghost Who Adopted Us The house that my family lived in looked pretty much the same as a lot of other country houses in Kentucky. When it was painted, which wasn't real often, it was white. There was a big front porch, and, inside, it was a regular farmhouse. Two rooms were downstairs, kitchen on the right and sitting room on the left. There were two bedrooms upstairs. No one lives in that old house now. My folks, the Halleys, bought the house and farm about 1920, just after the First World War. Me and my wife Addie had a new brick house built a few years ago, just down the hill from the old place. We were glad to move into our new house for a lot of reasons. Some of the people in this community think we moved out of the old place because it was haunted. Now I'm not the sort of person who scares easily. Ever since I was a small boy I have seen and heard many strange things in that house. They were strange things I never could explain. I don't have to prove that to anyone. I know what I saw and heard in that house was real. My father bought that house from a family 46 called Pearson. The Pearsons had a little girl who had eaten a whole lot of walnuts that had laid out all winter and sprouted. She took sick and died in the house. A few people in my family have actually seen her ghost. The first time anything happened was back when I was a little boy, in the late 1920s. For a while, every evening and every morning there came a knocking at the door. When someone opened it, no one would be there. I don't really remember that, but my dad used to talk about it. My mother nearly went crazy over it, because the knocking would just keep on until someone went to the door. After that, things were quiet for a while. That little ghost must have gotten into the house one of those times when we answered the door. Before we knew it, we were hearing footsteps upstairs. We all heard them from time to time. Sometimes we heard them while we were at the dinner table, and we knew no one was upstairs. We would stop for a minute and listen. My dad did not want us to pay too much attention to it. I guess he thought we would be afraid, so he would start to talk about something else. Mother tried to join the conversation, but she always sounded tense. Then she would fall silent and look down, and sometimes close her eyes. Even though I was little, I knew she was praying. 47 Next to the door-knocking, the footsteps bothered Mother most. She told Dad that she often heard the steps when she was home alone, but she did not tell us kids. One day she couldn't stand it anymore. Mother had heard that if you asked the ghost what in God's name did it want, it would quit bothering you. That day when she was alone in the kitchen, she heard it walking directly overhead. Gathering her courage, Mother shouted at the top of her lungs: "What in the name of God do you want?!" The footsteps instantly stopped, and she never heard them again when she was alone. But that was not the end of our ghost. Over the years we got kind of used to seeing and hearing strange things. I remember the rocker in the sitting room, especially. Sometimes when you walked by the door to that room, out of the corner of your eye you would notice the rocking chair moving all by itself. It rocked slowly. It happened in the daytime when nobody was in the room, and even sometimes at night, when we were in there listening to the radio. We still heard the footsteps too, from time to time. A cousin of mine, Sally, stayed with us for a few years when I was in my early teens. Once in a while Sally said she heard a sound from upstairs, a kind of humming, like a sewing machine. Every 48 time she went up to find out what was causing the noise, she couldn't find a thing...