Scream

Name:            Tom Urbanik
Email:           turbanik@pewtrusts.com
Location:        Snow Shoe, PA
Type:            Ghost
Date:            Thursday, May 11, 2000
Time:            05:50 PM

When my mother was a young girl she lived with her family in a home that had been repossessed by the bank. My mother has told me that she never liked the house, and I, myself, always felt uncomfortable there. She related to me an instance where she was in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and was shocked by the sound of a blood curdling wail coming from outside the house. My mother told my grandmother, who assured her that it was probably one of the children playing outside. My mother is convinced that it was something "not quite of this world."

In the mid 1970s I was about 10 years old when I dreamt that there was a coffin on my grandmother's dining room table--six months later my grandmother died of cancer (it was a sudden unexpected diagnosis).

My aunt lived in the house her entire life. One night after my grandparents had died, my aunt awoke from a sleep in my grandfather's chair to see a haze floating above her--she referred to it as an angel.

My father was severely mentally ill. In May of 1996 he was in a state of manic dementia, exhibiting irrational behavior that included mismanagement of he and my mother's money. One night, after a day of listening to my father discuss the possibility of entering into a bad business deal, my mother took their account information and went to stay the night with her sister in my grandmother's house. She had never left my father at any time in their 40-year marriage.

She returned home the next day at approximately 10 a.m. to find my father dead of a heart attack.

My mother does not recall what happened when she entered the kitchen that day, but what I know is that I decided at 10 a.m. to call my mother to ask her for some advice. She answered the phone, wailing, "Why did he have to die without me?" "How will I live with this?" and then hung up the phone on me.

My mother does not remember talking to me. To this day, she is tortured for not having been with my father at the time of his death.

I often wonder, was there some connection between that wail heard at my grandmother's house and that morning she found my father dead?