Past Life Story

From: 
Story type: Past life
Location: gainesville, florida
Source: Form Submission

When I was about three years old, my father took me on a bike ride through the historic district of my hometown. I pointed to this one house and said "I used to live there." My father, putting the comment down to sheer childish imagination and creative verbal expression (I was just learning to speak conversationally, after all), simply responded "sure, honey." That's when I added, "when I was an old lady with one leg." (I have no memory of this; this is my father's account of what happened then).

Many years later, in my twenties, I had occasion to research the story: I asked my father to point out the house, and, to be completely fair, he's only reasonably sure that he pointed out the correct house to me (this was decades later, remember!), but in any case, I wrote down the address.

I then went to the county courthouse where I dug for a few hours in the old plat books and tax records, where I discovered that there were three main family names that showed up as holding ownership of the property since the time the house was built in the early 1900s (I think). I then went to the county library to dig through old obituaries within those three families on microfiche.

Sure enough, I found a front page article about a woman who'd actually died in the house I pointed out as a three year old. She'd died in the house after having been confined to her bed due to a serious leg injury.

She died twenty years before I was born, and is even buried in town and has living relatives who still live here, but after being unable to locate the cemetery after much driving around, I decided to take that as a "sign" and let sleeping dogs lie...