Location: Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada
The following report was sent into our website by Willow on March 6, 2008:
“When I was in my early teens, we moved into a house that would now be over two hundred years old. We really didn’t experience anything too different at first, except for our dog, a Siberian Husky, who would not go down the right hand side of the upper level of the house. He would stand at the level, look down that direction, and whine when you would try to call him down, but wouldn’t set one paw in that direction. Other funny stuff he would do in the house, like wake up and stare at nothing,etc.
After living in the house for a few years, we started to notice things. One night, my sister was there with her boyfriend at the time, and they were sitting in the front parlour watching T.V. Noticing something out of the corner of their eye, they turned to their left to look into the front hall, which also had a good view of the staircase leading upstairs. Both of them saw an old lady walk past the doorway and proceed up the stairs, while no one else was in the house, much less an old lady. They weren’t really afraid of what they saw, just kind of freaked.
My sister says that she also had another similar experience to this a few weeks after that, and from then on refused to be in the house alone. She wasn’t necessarily scared of the apparition, just that she was seeing the unexplained. We were never really scared, just uncomfortable at times.
One night my mother was in her bedroom sleeping at night when she suddenly awoke. She turned over in her bed to look at the alarm clock on her bedside table. There, only a foot away from her, between a narrow stetch between the bed and closet, was an old lady sitting in a rocking chair. She had snow white hair, an old fashioned full length dress on and was sitting in a rocking chair with her face cupped in her hands. My mother thought that she was dreaming, shook her head, squinched her eyes and looked agian. The old lady was gone. She took note of the time as being a few minutes after 1 am. Like I said, she thought that she dreamt it, so she rolled over and went back to sleep. A little while later she was awakened from her sleep again. Once again she says that she rolled over in her bed, and once again she was confronted with the image of the old lady with her head in her hands. Once again she shook it off, thinking that she must of been seeing things and tried to go back to sleep. She did look at the clock again and noticed that it was exactly an hour after the first time that she was awakened, but tried to shake it off and go back to sleep. An hour later, on the dot, she was once again awakened, and looking at the same spot between the bed and closet, saw the old lady with her head in her hands. This time, she says, she got up and went to the bathroom to make sure that she was awake and actually experiencing it. When she returned to the bedroom, there was no lady, no rocking chair. She then went back to bed, a little disconcerted, and slept the rest of the night.
Still curious about her experience, she went to visit the lady that lived next door to us, an old woman we really adored named Aunty Gladious, who was in her nineties and had moved into the house as a young bride. She told Aunty of her experience and Aunty told her that she had described the wife of the original builder of the house, to a tee. She was an old lady when Aunty moved in beside her, she used to wear long old fashioned dresses with a small flower print on them, and the room in the front which my mother used as a bedroom, had been used as a parlour. Aunty also told her that she would sit in the corner in her rocking chair and would do embroidery and other fine work- exactly where my mother saw her. She also told my mother not to worry, the she was a good soul and meant no harm, she was just looking after the house and the people who lived there. She also said that she didn’t particularily care for the old lady’s husband, that she thought that he was a bully, overbearing to his wife and children, not particularily kind, hard to others. When my stepfather came home a few days later and heard my mother’s story, he was amazed, but not particularily suprised. He said that he had felt strange things in the basement long before that, things that made him feel uncomfortable, and once thought that he saw an older man down there, but when he looked around the basement, there was no one there. My brother Paul, now passed, said that he saw something down there once while he was getting wood for the stove, an old man which he said scared him.
I myself did not have a major ghost event in there, except of course for the general spooked feeling that we all had, and not wanting to be alone. The thing that stikes me now about it all is the acceptance that we all had of these events at the time, that they were experienced by different individuals, and eventually shared the stories with one another, but that they were generally taken in stride, and didn’t really make us scared to live there. It was just kind of accepted. Maybe because they happened over a span of several years on a sporadic basis, and it took a long time for the experiences to be shared, so we got used to the idea of having an event happening before something else occured or was shared. To the point that they would almost be forgotten before something else weird happened. Even the behaviour of the dog was dismissed as being just one of his quirks. I was just actually talking to my sis online as I was writing this and she remembers how the place used to spook her..”
Michelle McKay Paranormal 