Gram's Warning

Witness: Courtney
Location: Philidelphia, Pennsylvania
Date of Encounter: September 17, 2005

My family is very close with our cousins, aunts, and uncles. When my grandmother passed, it was a shock for everyone. She died on January 18th and we are finishing cleaning out her house (because my grandfather died some time ago). My Mom and I went to her house to clean the rest of the things out of the attic. We were there for about 20 minutes and she decided to wash some of my grandmother's clothes before we packed them into boxes. She went to do that and I (of course) followed her because I don't like to be alone in her house. So we went into the laundry room and put some clothes into the washer and went upstairs to the attic. While in the attic, we heard a loud beeping sound (the smoke alarm) so we ran downstairs, but couldn't find the source of a fire. My Mom went into the kitchen where the smoke alarm is and checked the batteries, she said my aunt had just changed them a couple of days ago so they couldn't possibly have gone bad already. So she put the batteries back in and we went back to our work. A couple of minutes later the alarm went off again, so this time we called my Uncle Jeff who's an electrician. He came over in about 20 minutes and in that time it went off twice. He checked the circuits and whatever else could be the problem but found nothing.

We decided to leave since the things that were going on were creepy. In the car several miles away my mom said to me, "You know, Grandma was meticulous about keeping the alarms ready just in case." That kind of creeped me out.

The next day we went back to make sure we turned off all of the lights and when we got in, the kitchen floor was soaked with water. The whole family came over and we all cleaned it up, and after we were done my uncle went downstairs and checked the breakers and made sure they were dry. Sure enough they were wet and he dried them off in the nick of time. When everyone was going home he said to me, "Courtney, If we weren't there, the house would have caught fire." I let it all sink in and it clicked, the alarm the day before, Gram was telling us a pipe was broken and it would have caught the house on fire if we hadn't come together again.