The Grandmother I Never Knew

Witness: April Smestad
Location: Minto, North Dakota
Date of Encounter: June of 1982

If I never was a believer before, I was on that day. I was 15 years old and was home from Arizona for the summer. I more or less grew up on our family farm. The house there is an older style two-story farm house.

I play guitar and liked to play in the stairwell because the acoustics sound good there. It was early one afternoon in the month of June, and I was taking some time to play, sitting on the middle landing. It was a warm day out. As I was playing, I had noticed the air leading upstairs had gotten cooler — it was weird. Appearing from the north bedroom was an apparition of an older woman with short dark hair, wearing a older style dress, apron, glasses, and holding a rag. She had no feet, but moved to the south bedroom across the hall then she came back and looked at me and smiled. She then went back into the south bedroom. The air by this time was noticeably colder.

My first re-action was to get out of there, but I really did not feel scared. I talked to my father a few days later about it and that was when I found out my then grandmother was not my real grandmother but my grandfather's second wife. My father told me his real mother died from a fall down those stairs resulting in a blood clot to her brain. My father was 14 years old when she died. Her funeral was also in that house. She was a lover of music, as all her children played one form of instrument or other. I of course had never seen her. My father just stared at me when I described her to him. Then he took me to visit my grandfather and I was shown a picture of her. That was her! For some reason when I go back to the house I still feel a presence there. Since then, I have been more sensitive to such things.