My Ghost Makes Crank Calls

Many years ago, my husband and I bought an old house. Built around 1840, we didn’t know too much about its history.

We did know about one lady who lived there. Her grandson, now our age, was our neighbor. She must have been a pretty nice Grandma, because Jim didn’t really want us to change a thing about the house. Or the porch. Or the driveway. Or the sidewalk.

“My Grandma always had her refrigerator on THIS wall,” he told me once.

As mildly interfering as he was, when we had trouble with the well, Jim walked over to a spot in the yard and said, “Dig here.” And sure enough, there was the well.

When we first moved in, we noticed something odd about the phone. Once in a while, instead of all the phones in the house ringing, only the extension in the kitchen would ring.

Most of the time, there would be no one there when we answered. But once in a while, there was a garbled voice, as if we were listening in on someone else’s call from a distance.

After a while we learned that if only the kitchen phone was ringing, we shouldn’t bother to pick it up.

But that’s when the phone started to speak.

It would ring and ring, and we’d ignore it.

And then it would start saying, “Hello? Hello?”

But we hadn’t picked it up.

I began to think that Jim’s Grandma was trying to speak to us. The house had a lot of owners in all those years, but most of them wouldn’t have been familiar with telephones. Maybe Grandma wanted us to put the refrigerator back on the south wall.

I’m not into creepy books or movies, so I don’t know that much about ghosts. But I figured it would be wise to be polite.

When the phone would start to say “Hello? Hello?” I’d just say aloud, in the general direction of the ceiling:

“I’m sorry. But I’m really busy, so I just can’t talk right now.”

After about a year, she stopped calling.

We moved away several years ago — into a house we built ourselves. No feng shui ghosts.

But our old neighbors don’t particularly like the family that moved in. They wish those new folks would move out.

Maybe Grandma could make a phone call.