Burning Leaves

From: 
Story type: Ghost
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
Source: Form Submission

One of my friend's parent's owns an old Victorian era house. They knew there were strange things going on there before they bought it, but were drawn to that kind of place. This is just one of the stories from the place.

One night in October my friend couldn't sleep. He woke up and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. There was a window just above the kitchen sink that looked out into the wide backyard.

The backyard had a large clearing in the middle, being surrounded by trees, and a small garden. Across from the garden there was a fire pit, not much more than a ring of large stones around five feet in diameter. As he looked out the window, he noticed that in another part of the clearing, near an old flagstone, there was a shaky silhouette of what appeared to be a person. He thought it was odd, but finished what he was doing and went back to his room, although he admits that he didn't look out his bedroom window because it faced the same part of the backyard.

He noticed this figure a few more times, always at night or dusk, always between October and November, and always in the same place in the yard.

One day he brought it up to his mother, and she told him that she had seen the figure too in the same place he described. She then told him that the previous owners of the house were an elderly couple.

In the fall, the old man would rake up the leaves that fell from the maple trees on the property, making a pile in the fire pit. At dusk he would light a fire there, and stand over the fire pit, watching the leaves burn. But on one night, the man had a heart attack while he was watching the leaves burn and fell into the fire, burning to death.

My friend then asked his mother that if this was what he had been seeing, why wouldn't he have seen the silhouette by the fire pit? She told him that after this happened, his wife was so upset that she had the fire pit moved next to the garden, away from the flagstone and out of the view of her kitchen window.