THE DOLL
My cousin was what they used to call a "latch-key kid", meaning that his mother worked while he stayed alone a good part of the day. At this point, however, he would not go into the house when he got home from school. Most evenings he would play outside or would sit on the doorstep until she got home. And he absolutely would not sleep alone.
About a week later, my aunt brought home some memorabilia from her mother's (my grandmother) house. One of the items was a small, dirty Raggedy Andy doll that she had won at a fair when she was a kid.
One night when she got home and went into the kitchen to make dinner, she found the doll sitting upright on the kitchen counter. She thought this was weird, but set it aside and eventually took it back to the hall closet and back into the box. She soon found that the doll had a weird way of getting out of that box. One night on the way to the bathroom, she found the doll lying in the hallway; another time it was in the living room on the sofa, as if it was watching television.
My aunt finally got the message that the place was haunted. After work one evening, she went down to the spiritualist shop and asked them if they knew anything about spirits. Not surprisingly, they were all answers and recommended a séance to help the spirit go into the light.
THE FIRST SÉANCE
My aunt invited them to come up to her apartment a night or so later. Led by the shop owner (a medium, remember), they began by using a Ouija board to contact any spirits. They reportedly contacted a man named Elwin Cobbes, who began to communicate on the board. He said that he lived in the building when it was a roadside tavern in the late 1900s. They asked him why he couldn't move on and he said he didn't want to, so there was no success in making him leave. The medium tried to contact the teenage girl my mother had seen. There was no response at first, but after a few more attempts a weird jangle of spoons and forks came from the kitchen. They asked if she was doing that, but there was no response on the board. So the spiritualists left.
A day or so later, my aunt began to encounter a new presence. One night my aunt was in her room dressing when out of the corner of her eye she saw a woman kneeling down over at a cradle. She quickly turned, but of course there was no one there.
The next morning as she was starting for work, she looked down the hall, and inside her open door was what appeared to be a woman walking around. She was dressed in a long, blue and white dress, like hospital nurses used to wear. My aunt carefully went back to the room. Although there was no one there, she felt eyes on her, as if someone were standing there watching her. She just left the house.
A few days passed and she talked to the spiritualist again. She asked her group to conduct another séance. She even offered to pay them for their help in getting rid of the ghosts. (I guess she couldn't afford to move.)
Next page: The second séance – more trouble
