Ghost of a Smile by Tammy Lee

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With most of the ghost stories I receive from readers we can only speculate what events led to the lingering of a passed soul. Very rarely do we get the to the truth of a matter and sometimes, such as in the mystery of the house in the following letter, even when the truth is revealed, it cannot be explained.

The following letter was addressed to me by Mr. Harrison Kemper, who works as an electrician in Bumblebrook, Alberta. He wrote the letter on April 27, 2008 in response to my request for ghost stories set in small prairie towns and it was published in 2009 as part of an anthology of ghost stories called, "My Haunted Prairie Home".

At the time I had thought his story was a rather straightforward haunting but shortly after the anthology was published I received a curious letter from a Ms. Leona Pickles, whose mother’s family used to own Mr. Kemper’s house. Her letter, written on October 11, 2010 was in response to Mr. Kemper's ghost story.

I have reproduced Mr. Kemper's letter first, followed by Ms. Pickles' explanation. What I had thought was a straightforward haunting has turned out to be something quite special.

Mr. Kemper wrote:

I think we all know how a ghost story is supposed to go but the ghost that lives with me doesn't seem to know the rules.

House prices dropped with the recession and I thought I’d take advantage and buy a second house. My wife and I had paid off our first house years ago and we were looking for a place I could fix up and rent out as an investment and a bit of monthly income. At the very least we thought it would make a fine wedding gift for one of our sons should they get married.

It’s a fine old three-storey home with a full basement and an undeveloped attic space and we picked it up for a song. I should have been suspicious the owners were so anxious to get rid of it but I had assumed the renovation work the house needed was too much for them to handle.

We bought the place in the spring and the night we closed on it and picked up the keys I started work on the place. My oldest boy, David, helped me rip out all the old shag carpeting on the main floor.

When you rip out wall-to-wall carpet you cut a section out with a carpet knife, roll it up, and set it aside out of your way until it’s time to carry all the neatly rolled up sections of carpet to the dump. David was working in the living room and I was working in the dining room and we were going to meet in the middle. I could see David and he could see me.

As I knelt on the carpet and prepared to make my first cut I suddenly smelled bubblegum, that cheap pink stuff you used to get in with a little comic folded up inside the wrapper, and something gave me a shove. It wasn’t a hard shove but it couldn’t have been David because I could see him on the opposite end of the living room from where I was.

It was unnerving but I’m a practical sort of guy so I ignored it and started cutting the carpet and rolling the sections up. David and I finished the dining and living room that evening and as it was still damp outside we left the sections of carpet rolled up and leaning against one of the walls in the living room for overnight.

When I came back the next day, alone because David had classes during the day, every section of carpet we’d cut up had been laid back down on the floor erasing the work we’d done the night before.

Figuring some kids had broke in to play a practical joke I checked the doors and windows but they were all intact and locked like they were supposed to be. I even checked the storm doors into the basement but they were still chained and padlocked from the outside and, in fact, they were rusted over so I could tell nobody had messed with them.

It wasn’t like it would take me that long to roll the sections up again, or so I thought, but when I went to tug up a corner of the carpet I was amazed to see there wasn’t a single cut made! The carpet was as whole as it had been when we’d started working the night before!

Now, I’m getting on in years but I hadn’t thought I was so old that I’d imagine myself working into the night; I haven’t got enough imagination for that sort of thing. So I called David up on his cell phone and, sure enough, he remembered cutting up the carpet with me.

I was more curious than alarmed so I thought I’d do a little experiment and cut a single section of carpet, roll it up, and take it home with me. As soon as I started cutting the carpet there was that smell of bubblegum again but this time there was no shove. I cut a section of carpet six or seven feet long by two feet wide, rolled it up, and tossed it in the back of my truck.

That night I kept the roll of carpet in the foyer of my house, confident no practical joker would be able to use it to fix the carpet in the other house.

In the morning I left the rolled up carpet at my place -- sure enough it had been there in the morning -- and headed out to my project house. The carpet where I’d cut a section away was completely repaired with no sign of a cut every having been made.

I was completely flummoxed by the mysterious carpet and thought maybe I should get to work on something else; at least get some demolition finished before the weekend when my boys could help me with the heavy lifting a renovation requires. But no matter what I did to the house, no matter what I ripped out or broke, by the next morning everything would be back the way it was and there would be a lingering smell of cheap bubblegum in the air.

Now, at no time at all did I feel like there was something bad or evil in the house with me. In fact, my boys all said they liked coming over to work on the house because they felt so happy there. The house had a ‘good vibe’. Even still, I thought maybe I should talk to our minister and see if he had something to say about the place.

He came over on a weekend and immediately he said he liked the place but he could sense there was something different about it. I don’t hold with mumbo jumbo but it was pretty reassuring to hear a holy man say he could tell something was up. I told him about what had been happening and he suggested he cleanse the house of any lingering negative energy. I said that was fine so he went from room to room reading aloud from the Good Book and praying.

While the minister did his thing I hung back and I could have sworn I saw a young girl, maybe eight years old, straddling a bicycle in the hallway between the living room and the kitchen. She gave me a big smile then vanished.

I saw the girl more and more often after that. Most of the time she’d be straddling that bike of hers, walking it around downstairs, but sometimes I’d see the bicycle leaning up against the wall by the back door and she’d be upstairs running around or the back door would bang like she was running in and out of the house like kids do when they’re excited.

The cleansing the minister performed didn’t do a lick of good and I think it’s because there wasn’t any negative energy to bless away! I had to give up on renovating the house because that young lady would put everything back and if I took something away so she couldn’t get at it a replacement would mysteriously appear. I’ll be danged if I know where she got any of it.

I haven’t sold the house but it sure is hard to rent.

Yours truly,
Harrison Kemper

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Dear Ms. Lee,

I have recently read your anthology of ghost stories, “My Haunted Prairie Home,” and was struck by the story told by a Mr. Harrison Kemper. His haunted house is the house I grew up in so I thought I might share what I know about the house and its peculiar guest.

The house had belonged to my mother’s family and she had not only been born there but had lived there her entire life. My father had been a military man and often spent months away from home so my mother lived with her parents while she raised us children.

We grew up around the ‘birthday girl’, as we called her, so she didn’t seem that strange to us. Sometimes you’d see her bicycle in the hallway leaning against a wall, sometimes out on the front porch, and sometimes she’d have it lying in the back yard. If you didn’t see her with her bicycle you knew she was upstairs in a bedroom; she was very polite and never took her bicycle upstairs.

She wasn’t a scary ghost to have around the house and family tradition said that if you saw her you’d have a good day.

Any time there was a birthday party she’d be in attendance, smiling and happy, mingling with the guests. You wouldn’t see her much if there were strangers around but you’d know she was there because balloons would move by themselves; and if you weren’t quick she’d blow out the candles on the cake before you could.

The one thing that upset the birthday girl was if you tried to change the house in any major way. It got a bit tiresome because we weren’t allowed to upgrade any of the appliances or paint out the rooms. If you tried, she’d put everything back the way it was. We still don’t know how she did it.

My grandparents died when I was young but I remember them glaring at my mother every time the birthday girl would ‘fix’ something they had tried to change. I didn’t understand why they seemed to blame my mother for her antics until years later when my mother had to sell the family home.

We, her children, had all moved away and had families of our own by this time and we were growing more and more concerned about mom living in that old house by herself. True, the birthday girl made sure the house didn’t fall into disrepair, but it was still dangerous for mom to be alone all the time.

Well, one morning on her way to get the mail, mom slipped on the ice and broke her hip.

She was in the hospital for months while she recovered and during that time the family decided it was time to move mom to a full-time care facility. We thought she'd be upset but she seemed calm about the move and asked only that we kids make sure we sold the house and that her special trunk at the foot of her bed be brought to her at the facility.

Now, mom's trunk was strictly off-limits to us kids. She'd always tell us it contained her most treasured possessions. I admit, I had a burning curiosity as to what was in her trunk but I never dared open it because my otherwise, pleasant mother turned mean quick if you touched her trunk. But the new facility had some strict rules about what their guests could keep in their rooms so it fell to me to open her trunk and sift through the contents for contraband items.

Inside the trunk I found a girl's party dress, still like new, with bright yellow rosebuds printed on it folded around a photograph of a young girl with long hair standing beside a bicycle. I immediately recognized the girl in the photograph as being the birthday girl who haunted our house!

Eager to finally get some information about our resident spirit I flipped the photo over and saw my mother's name neatly printed on the back with the words, 'tenth birthday'. I don't know how it was possible but the ghost we'd been seeing was somehow my mother as a little girl. But my mother wasn't dead, so how could it be her ghost?

I didn't dare ask my mother about it because then she'd know I'd been through her stuff so I carefully replaced the dress and photograph the way I'd found it.

We sold mom's house and use the money to pay for her stay in the care facility and I often wondered about the ghost of her younger self who haunts it. Did she leave with mom? Were the new owners seeing her, too? Thanks to your book, “My Haunted Prairie Home”, I know she's still there and has scared off at least one owner before Mr. Kemper.

Thank you,
Leona Pickles

At the time of this book's publishing I received an email to tell me Leona's mother had passed away in her sleep. I emailed Harrison to ask if he still saw the ghost girl in his house and he reported to me that there had been no further trouble with ghosts or mysterious happenings in the house since Feb 17th; the day Leona's mother passed on. He’d finally been able to start his renovations and the changes he made have stayed put.

So what was the apparition seen by the Pickles and Kemper families? Was it possible to be haunted by the spirit of someone who was still alive? Was the happy memory of a glorious tenth birthday so wonderful that it took on a life of its own?

Sometimes, even when we know the truth, there is just no explanation.


Copyright

Tammy Lee

"Ghost of a Smile"

© 2011, Tammy Lee
Self Published
mad.docs.of.lit[at]gmail.com