I didn’t think much of this when it happened, beyond the irritation value it afforded at the time. However, I have done a lot of reading about ghosts since, and I think this does qualify as a Halloween story…

My father died in March of 1993, and in August of that year, my four children and I made the long drive from Wyoming to South Carolina to clean out the house and get my mother packed up to move out to Wyoming with us. It was just the kids and me; my husband couldn’t get off work.

When we got there, it was typical August in coastal South Carolina - like living in a steam bath, especially for those of us used to a dry, cooler climate. But we had approximately 40 years of accumulated junk to clean out of the house and garage, miserable heat or no miserable heat. Mom couldn’t do it from her wheelchair. The house wasn’t too bad; I had taken care of a lot of it when I went back for the funeral in March, and a cousin had been working on it since. The garage outside in the heat was the main focus of our work.

So every day, we spent the morning in the heat of the big two car garage with its full rafters and large workshop, and sorted. After lunch every day, when the heat was the worst, we either went 13 miles to the beach to cool off, or hid in the air conditioning of the house.

Now, you may be wondering where the weird Halloween part of this story is….

While we were all together in the house in the afternoon, we noticed that the phone would ring, both extensions. Someone, usually me, would get up and answer it - and the other extension would continue to ring after you had picked up the first, no matter which phone you started with. There would be no dial tone, and at the other end - well, it sounded like a very distant, very bad connection. You could almost hear something or someone, but not quite, but there wasn’t any static either.

This happened no matter what the weather, and it only happened during the afternoons when we were together in the house.

My cousin told me that it had started a few days before we arrived. It kept on until one day when my ten year old son got frustrated and spoke quite rudely into the phone when he couldn’t hear anyone at the other end and the extension kept ringing. I can’t remember what he said - there were no bad words involved, but he was clearly frustrated. It never happened again after that day.

Oh, and by the way…my father was an electrician who had frequently worked on the phone lines at his job at the paper mill. He had installed both of those phones in the house. Oh- and like any older Southerner, he didn’t tolerate rudeness in a child.

I wonder - was he trying to say good-bye?

- She Wolf ©2007