My Friend Penelope

From: Tiffini  (laffitupfzbl@yahoo.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: My first home in Washington IL
Source: Form Submission

My family moved around a lot when I was a kid. My parents weren't so great with finances, and every so often we'd just have to pack up and move. The home we lived in when I was about 6 years old is the one I considered my first home, since that's the one we stayed in the longest, and that I remember the most of. This story chronicles my experiences in that house.

I'd like to give background on the house and the layout of it. It started life as a doctor's house. Eventually, he built a larger, grander house next door and began to use our house for his practice. This happened around the 1830's, the house being build in the early 1820's. It was a larger home, sort of federal style with a large, columned porch. When you walked in the front door, immediately in front of you is the one bathroom, to the right of that is the main staircase leading up to two bedrooms, and then the master bedroom with sitting room attached. If you walked to the left, you would go through the living room, turn to the right and find the kitchen, and another set of stairs up to a room which was where the servants would have slept. If you continued around, you'd come to the laundry room/sun porch and the stairs to the basement.

Let me start out with the mundane things. I say mundane because these things have happened to me at several homes throughout my life. I'm not pyschic, but I am sensitive to energies. So are my sisters. I guess that makes us a magnet for this sort of thing.

The basement is the first thing I think of when I went to that house. It was a run of the mill basement for that type of house, brick walls, a labyrinth of rooms and halls, musty odor, pipes and ductwork everywhere. But the feeling you got in the basement was much more than the typical creepy feeling you get in most basements. It was a "REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THIS PLACE NOW" feeling, and you generally did not go down there alone. There were weird grooves in the floor in the main room, and we found out later that this was the surgery and the grooves were for liquid waste from operations. We also found out that a lot of people died in that room, including the former owners wife in childbirth.

The servants quarters, off the stairs in the kitchen, were the next biggie. My brother and I had a toy room up there, and for the most part it was fine. But on occasion, the former servants liked to mess with us. I wasn't too freaked out by it mostly, but it made my brother a nervous wreck. However, there were occasions when we BOTH had to leave. Particularly bad for me was the whispering. Sounded like a man's voice, a woman's voice, and a child's voice, all whispering together, then the level of the whispering would get louder and louder. The child who lived in the room often tried to join in our games with us, by moving our toys, winding them turning them on, etc. The worst, though, was the door. The door to the closet would simply open. From being ALL the way shut with the door knob latched, the knob would slowly turn, the door would inch open, and then leave itself standing wide. At that point, my brother and I would usually head downstairs, where our Mom would tell us we had to go outside. Even in the dead of winter, we'd play outside until our lips were blue before we'd go back into the toy room.

There were various issues in the kitchen and living room, with appliances and lights that liked to control themselves, noises, and these odd bursts of light. Not orbs, just like a flashbulb, then gone.

In my parents bedroom and sitting room (my younger brother used that for a bedroom), there was an odd lack of activity. I suppose it was due to my Dad's complete inability to admit that anything weird could be happening. There were mornings when my parents would wake up to find all five of us kids sleeping in some fashion between their bed, my brothers bed, the chaise lounge, the floor, and a bean bag chair.

Up the other set of stairs is where the house got positively evil. My two sisters and I shared a large room over my parents suite, and we eventually moved our three poster beds all together. My Mom thought it was sweet, the way we all wanted to sleep so close, but for us, it was protection. There was a yellow rose wallpaper on the walls, and every few months, my Mom would have to replace an entire strip near our vanity table due to a large black spot that kept appearing. She kept blaming it on us girls, singing it with a curling iron, or rubbing up against it, but the truth was, that black spot represented something that scared the hell out of us. This was how it usually happened: My oldest sister would feel a tightening in her chest. The first time it happened, she thought she was having a heart attack. Then, a dark mass would appear in the corner above the vanity. The mass would grow and grow until it threatened to envelope the room. The temperature would drop rapidly, even on hot summer nights with no AC. My other sister and I would be paralyzed under our blankets, not able to move, so our oldest sister would come and sit near us, hold our hands, and we'd try to wait it out. Usually, she had the sensation of being touched or rubbed, or her hair pulled. Once she was slapped hard in the face, and there was a red mark. This thing seemed bent on her, and once it was done, everything would go back to normal, except the wallpaper. Fortunately, this only happened once in a while.

My older brother, however, was alone in the room across the hall. He had numerous complaints of issues with noises, voices, things being moved, being pushed, hit, kicked. For the most part, I believed him. I also knew, as well as the rest of our family, that he drank, smoked a lot of pot, and occasionally used some mind benders. I dunno if this made him more susceptible to the entity, or if he simply imagined it or did some of it himself, while incapacitated.

Finally, we get to the weird part. And you've stuck with me so far, so I'll keep it short, because there's not much to tell. I had an imaginary friend named Penelope, right? She was this old fashioned lady, hat, gloves, long dress. She was very proper, and I thought she was the most beautiful and sad person I'd ever seen. We had regular conversations, almost daily. She'd meet me at the large tree in the front yard after school, and we'd sit and talk until dinner. In the summer, I'd sit out there and read all day, and we'd talk and laugh all day. Mostly, she wanted to talk about the house. She told me when it was built, where to find things like this awesome old dutch oven that my mom still uses to this day, when each tree and bush was planted, and even where to dig to find a little tin box with some scraps of cloth. Two odd things about Penelope were that she could not leave the yard, even when I begged her to, and she quit talking to me when I got my period. This devastated me, because there were no children my age in the neighborhood. She was about the only friend I had after school hours.

We moved out on my 13th birthday, Penelope had been gone almost a year. Life went on as normal for another few years, then I decided to drive over to that part of town and see the old house. Well, the street had been preserved by the local historical society, and the first two houses on the street, the doctors first and second houses, had been turned into museums about the city. I was looking over some old documents about the two homes, and there was an old portrait of the doctor and his wife. It was Penelope! All the things she'd told me were true, all the things about the house, the city, the trees, all of it. It mentioned that she died giving birth in our basement, and that the child lived between the two houses for his whole life. I assume she never left because she wanted to always be where he was, but then when he moved along, she stayed put.

I will never forget my years there, and I'll never forget my friend.