My children are young and asked
me the other day if they could go visit Grandma, Grampy and their friend Peggy.
It made me think of the night I met Peggy and all of her practical jokes, and I
thought I would share that story here.
My brother is a couple of years
younger than me. When I was eighteen, I went away to college and my brother and
my parents moved into an old Queen Anne style Victorian house. It was on
a busy downtown street in our midsize southern city. Most of the surrounding
buildings and houses were used by businesses. My family moved in September and
I wasn't able to come home until October. My first morning back, my brother,
Patrick, asked me,
"Has Mom told you about
Peggy, yet?"
"No. Who's Peggy?"
Peggy was the house ghost.
Patrick had been showering one night shortly after they had moved in. He was
leaning forward rinsing the shampoo out of his long hair and when he
straightened up, he saw a young girl. He said that she looked maybe nine years
old. She was standing outside of the clear shower door, staring at him. He
rinsed his face and she was gone. He said that she had blonde hair and light
skin and she had just looked at him.
Since then, she had taken to
playing tricks on him. She would set his alarm clock to go off at 3:33am, or
she would move the clock across the room. She would switch the clothes that he
had set out for school. Peggy liked to play her practical jokes mostly on my
brother, but she had played some on other people as well. She would sit in a
window in the attic. Patrick said that he and my parents were doing yard work
in the front yard one afternoon, when a lady who was walking down the sidewalk
stopped to talk to them. After the introductions, she had told them that she
thought they were doing a good job restoring the house. She also asked them
where their little girl was. When my parents said that I was away at college,
she had clarified that she meant the little girl, the one who sat in the
window. The lady had pointed to the attic window. (The reason that my brother
was doing yard work with my parents that day was as punishment for going into
the attic and leaving that window open.) Patrick stopped telling me the story
at this point to yell "I told you I didn't open that window!" to Mom
in the kitchen.
As my mom came into the room, I
asked
"So, why did you name her
Peggy?"
"We didn't," my mom
looked at me perplexed.
"Peggy is her name." My
brother said. He left the "duh" unsaid.
"Yeah, but how do you know
it's her name?"
Mom and Patrick just looked at
each other. I think I was the first person who had asked this question.
That Thanksgiving my Aunt
Jan and Uncle Randall came to visit along with their young daughter, Audrey.
Audrey was tall for a seven year old and had long, blonde hair. My mom put them
in my brother's room, which had a bed, but also had a futon for his friends
that often slept over. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving and all ate too
much while Mom and Patrick told Peggy stories. After supper, Patrick had to leave. He had
auditioned for a part in the Christmas play at church, and had gotten a role.
They were having a small planning meeting that night, and Patrick had promised
a woman, who was new to the church, and also in the play, a ride. Jan put
Audrey to bed soon after. We ate some turkey sandwiches and played a rowdy game
of Balderdash, and Patrick came home. He said that the meeting had gone well,
and that the new woman, Lisa, seemed lonely. Then we went to bed. The next
morning over breakfast, my aunt and uncle looked tired. Audrey said,
"Mama saw your ghost last
night!"
"Peggy?!" My mom and
brother asked in unison. We all laughed at that.
Scooping eggs on her breakfast
plate, my aunt said,
"Last night I woke up
because I heard a noise. I looked over at the window and thought that I saw Audrey
standing at it looking out. I called to her 'Audrey, Audrey honey, come here,'
but she wouldn't move. Randall woke up and I told him that I thought Audrey was
sleepwalking."
My uncle had looked over to the
futon and saw that Audrey was still sleeping there.
"Jan, Audrey is sleeping
over here on the futon."
"Well, she's also standing
over there!"
When they looked back at the
window, Peggy was gone. Randall got Audrey off of the futon and they all
cuddled up in the bed for the rest of the night.
We all laughed and then the
doorbell rang. The room was instantly silent. We looked at each other and the
doorbell rang again. We started laughing again, and my dad went to answer the
door. He came back with a young woman who had a huge basket of muffins in her arms.
This was Lisa. Lisa was around 26 and had recently relocated to Alabama. Patrick
was right, she was lonely, and apparently already smitten with my 16 year old
brother. I didn't like her.
A couple of weeks later, I
finished up the semester and came home for the winter break. I noticed that my
family would often talk to Peggy, attributing odd noises to her. She had become a part of the family. Old
houses are often drafty and our house had cold pockets. Whenever I would walk
through one of these spots, I would look down at my feet and hold my hands in
front of my face while saying,
"I’m not ready to see you.
You'll scare the shit out of me. I don't want to see you."
I woke up a couple of times to my brother's alarm clock going off at 3:33 in the morning and muttering, "Damn
it, Peggy, give it a rest."
It never felt weird that we had a
ghost, or that we talked to her. It was comforting to have her as the reason
for the old house’s creaks. Plus, there was always an extra interesting story to
tell people when they saw the house for the first time.
What wasn’t fun was Lisa’s rapid
obsession with my little brother. I grew to hate her. She called my brother all
of the time. She "joked" about them getting married. She often
dropped by unannounced. She left love notes on his car. I think that she may
have done more that Patrick never told us, because he began having a hard time
sleeping. Then, during the Christmas play, she hung on my brother, nuzzling his
neck and even kissed him on the cheek, in the middle of the Angel’s monologue.
My parents had a meeting scheduled with the pastor after the New Year to talk
about Lisa. The kiss moved the meeting up to the day after Christmas. At the
meeting, Lisa was told to stop contacting my brother outside of church. From
what my parents said, she was not happy.
I went back to school and got
caught up in the new semester. I made weekly phone calls home and my mom said
that Peggy seemed to be playing fewer pranks on Patrick, but that Lisa was
still bothering him. He had stopped going out with his friends, and they would
all stay in and play video games or watch movies. He had also begun to have a
harder time concentrating, and he was still not sleeping. They were thinking
about filing a restraining order. Lisa had refused pastoral counseling and
church sponsored counseling and was in danger of being asked to leave. My
mom also said that they had started finding mutilated animals in the yard. They
thought it had been the feral cats in the neighborhood killing the birds and
squirrels until the bodies of the feral cats also showed up mutilated.
I came home for spring break. I
had papers to write, clothes to wash, and no money. Since the Christmas break,
I had been receiving weekly letters from Lisa at school. She wrote about how much she loved Patrick,
how she couldn’t wait to be a permanent part of our family. She wrote about how
she couldn’t understand why we were keeping them apart, and how she was going
to be with Patrick. I had saved every letter and had sent them to my parents. The
week before I came home, a restraining order against Lisa had gone into effect.
I had come home to a changed Patrick. He wasn’t so mellow anymore, and had
developed a quick temper. He had quit his part time job, stopped seeing his
girl, dropped out of track, and was writing some pretty bad poetry. He had lost
weight and had nightmares when he was able to sleep. My parents had put him
into counseling. There was so much that I hadn’t been told. Patrick was now
getting calls from the one or two friends she had managed to make who blamed
him for lying about her. One night, while I was doing the last of my laundry, I
heard a yell and a thump. I walked out of the laundry room to see Patrick on
the floor next to the back stairs, holding his leg. I yelled for my parents,
and tried to help. Patrick puked in my lap. My parents decided to take him to
the emergency room and I decided to take a shower.
I threw my puked-on clothes into
the washer and ran to the bathroom. My shower was short, and while I was
finishing up, I thought that I heard my parents come back into the house. I
wrapped my hair in a towel and me in my robe and walked out of the bathroom. I
shivered as I walked through the house.
"Mom? Dad? Patrick? Did
y'all forget something? I know you didn't get out of the ER that fast."
There was no one. The door was
closed and locked. Peggy, I thought. I got dressed in my pajamas and heard a
weird creak; Peggy was irritating me. The house was colder than ever, in
spite of the warm spring night.
"Peggy, cut it out. I am a
huge chicken. Patrick will be okay, and he will be home soon."
I started watching T.V. and
folding my clothes. The Jamie Lee Curtis classic seemed to freak me out more
than it should have, so I switched the channel to something tame. Every so
often, a board would creak, there would be a weird thump, and then she started
knocking on the door. I checked and no one was at the door. It happened
again, and again, and again. I got pissed. The last time, I got up and
headed to the front door.
"Damn it! Okay, fine,
Peggy, you win. Let’s see you! Scare the shit out of me, but since you can move
stuff, you're cleaning the mess." I expected to once again see nothing.
I turned the corner, and I
walked into a wall of cold air that stole my breath. There was Peggy, standing in front of the
door. She was about eight, and I could see through her. Except she didn't look
like she wanted to play a prank. She glared at me with green, glowing eyes. She
had deep anger lines in her face. Her mouth was open and I could see sharp,
pointed teeth. She held her hands out towards me, claw like, with nails too
long for a little girl. She was growling at me.
"Wha...?" It was
more a breath than a word. I couldn't move. I felt the tears roll down my
cheeks and the pee run down my leg. Then it felt like my head exploded, I was
conscious long enough to feel the worst nausea ever and then nothing.
I came to with paramedics
leaning over me and my mother standing behind them crying, and talking to
a police officer.
"She's not a nice
girl," I muttered.
When it was established that I
could answer questions, the police officer asked me,
"Ma’am, do you know where
she went?"
"She was at the fucking
door. She's really must not like me, and she's not a nice ghost."
The police officer asked the
paramedics if I was really ready to answer questions.
My mom said, "Lisa, where is
Lisa?"
My hair hurt and I was getting
very grumpy. "How the fuck should I know?"
"Ma’am, can you just tell me
what happened?"
"Peggy, Peggy happened. She
was making noises, and she was trying to scare me, and then I saw her, with the
eyes, and the claws, and the teeth, and then she did something mean to my
head."
They took me to the hospital for
monitoring.
Later, I was told that my mom had
found me in front of the door in a puddle of urine with a pretty nasty bump on
the back of my head. There was also a note on the floor next to me, along with
a gun.
The note was from Lisa. She had
written that her life was meaningless without Patrick, and she was going to
unite them forever in Heaven, and send anyone who got in her way to Hell.
I guess me being the only alive one at home was getting in Lisa's way, so she
whacked me on the back of the head.
The police were never able to
find her. The case has long since gone cold. Some think she was horrified by
what she did to me and left town, others think she went off and killed herself.
As for me, I think Lisa had
finally met Peggy, and I think whatever happened, it wasn't a joke.
heidi
completed:11/12/13
This is my first submission to reddit No Sleep. No Sleep is a subreddit for "real" campfire stories. I haven't written a short story this long in a while! When I first envisioned a blog, I thought that it would be full of stories like these. I hope that you like it, and please be sure to check out the other stories on reddit. As always, my posts on the lasagna are always in progress, so I welcome comments and critiques.
