Post #260976 by Cammo on Sun, Oct 15, 2006 9:28 PM

The Haunted Farmhouse
Part 3

When Sara was just a year old she was all over that farmhouse. It was a fun place for a kid to be. It was fun for all of us, we had an Olympics party there every summer where all our friends came to roast corn, burn burgers, guzzle beer and take part in a bunch of crazy sport events we invented for them, like the Toilet Seat Toss or the Long Jump Carrying an Egg In Your Mouth. We’d judge, running around with clipboards. It was a blast actually. Maybe that’s why we never thought of a ghost being there, it was a happy place despite the oddball stuff that kept happening.

We would find scissors everywhere. They were our own scissors, but they seemed to never be where we left them, next to the postage stamps. They’d be on top of a table, hidden next to some dishes, in the bathroom. Nobody ever remembered putting them there. Knives, too. I found a knife in a planter once, a steak knife. They had been looking for it, it was part of a set. Sara wasn’t doing it, she didn’t like knives and never played with them. It got to the point where if you wanted a pair of scissors, you just started looking all over the place first, not in the scissor drawer. They never thought about it, it was just bothersome, and it was hard enough dealing with bringing up a baby in a big old farmhouse. Who thinks twice about this stuff? Other things happened, too.

Like the stones. It wasn’t scary, just really strange.

One day Mark found his car was making a horrible steel rattling sound every time he came to a stop. It never made the sound when he was driving at fast speeds, just when starting and stopping. He looked everywhere under the car and couldn’t find the problem. It drove him nuts. He took it to a mechanic and the guy listened while he was driving real slow. Then the mechanic took the hubcaps off and bingo, they were filled with stones. All the hubcaps had stones in them. A lot of stones. The mechanic wondered how somebody had done it; replaced the smooth hubcaps without having all the stones fall out as they punched it back in. It was kind of a complicated prank, and real noisy to do.

Some kid having fun, my brother thought at the time. The mechanic didn’t even charge him, they laughed about it and he drove back home.

But all the way home he kept thinking, we live miles from anybody in the country. Who could have done it? They had never seen any kids anywhere. And it had happened when he had come home for lunch one day, the car had been in the driveway for about 10 minutes tops. He had a bite, and had to go back to work right away. The rattling had started then. And the kitchen window looked out on the car. Nobody could have done it without him seeing them. The stones were the exact same ones they had in their driveway, they hadn’t been put in when he was in the city. Rod hadn’t even home that day, neither was Wendy. He had been alone.

It was puzzling, but he never thought it was unexplainable. They laughed it off. He never once thought anything unnatural was happening.

Until later. With that business about his daughter.