Ghost Story part 1

I was the first one to see the house; it was on a Realtor home tour. I walked in and gasped, it was exactly what we had been looking for. I came back later that day and spent an hour or two there just looking around, making sure before I told Mr. G. It took a few days of me using my best getting Mr. G to do something he was not to sure about to get him to the house. He walked in, he gasped, he smiled, and we had found our new home!

It was seven years ago on Halloween that we started work on the house. We had heard that the woman who lived here before (it was an estate sale) had died. We later learned she had died here in the house. She had smoked, a lot. The other Realtor who had represented her estate told us it took 3 months to get the house clean enough for anyone to see it… And so we started to clean more…

Mr. G could not get here everyday so it fell to me to rip up the old carpets and start the painting before we could move in. After we started to paint we realized that we needed to seal the walls, the nicotine bled thru the paint. So I got shellac and got to it. We had an electrician and a drywaller coming in too as we fixed and patched, but for the most part I was here most afternoons alone.

We somewhere got the impression that the old woman (as she was soon called) had died in the living room. I would work until 2-3 each day then head to the house to seal & paint until well after dark. It was on one of those late afternoons (almost fully dark) in mid November that we got the first hint that there was something different about the new house. I was almost done with the sealing and painting the hall & the inside of the linen closet, all the interior doors were off the hinges and stacked in the garage. I was alone in the house. Just across the hall from the linen closet is the guest bath, I was sealing the walls of the linen closet. Shellac smells… it is overpowering. I was facing into the closet using the roller when I heard someone exhale a deep breath behind me in the bathroom doorway and I was enveloped in the smell of a cloud of smoke… I took a very deep gulp, counted to ten, put down the roller and turned around, there was no one there… I left, fast…

When I told Mr. G that night what had happened he chalked it up to fumes in a small area, he did not believe me. I kept going back and kept up the schedule, but left each day before dark. The new carpets were put down, the new front door & garage doors were installed. We moved in Thanksgiving weekend 2000, it was snowing and very cold.
We were very happy. The doggies were not, we only had 3 doggies back then. They would stand at the end of the hall looking down the dark length and growl… Mr. G still did not believe, he said they were just adjusting to a new place. I knew better.

Winter went on; spring was a hint in the wind when we learned where she had died. The neighbors told us one afternoon. They had noticed the mail piling up in her box. She was not a great neighbor so everyone left her alone. They figured when the police broke into the house with the paramedics she had been dead around two weeks. She had died sitting on the head in the guest bathroom… across the hall from the linen closet, in June 2000...