April 25, 2007
The Grandmother I Never Knew
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April Smestad, Minto, North Dakota, 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.
