Nan & Pop still keeping an eye on "their" house?

by joanne
(Reading, pa)

My tale is actually sort of funny now, but it wasn't when things started happening. Now they're mainly annoying. Nothing big, just little things to let us know my husband's grandparents might still be here.

We moved in with my husband's grandmother ten years ago, after his grandfather died. She was bedridden and no one wanted to see her go into a home, so we moved in to take care of her.
First night we slept here, my son (about twelve)woke up in the morning, jumping out of bed. Very unusual. Nothing ever wakes him that fast. Nothing. Ever. He's laughing, sort of shaky, muttering something like "okay, Pop, knock it off." I asked him what was going on; he told me something just kicked him in the butt. He was wide awake when it happened, not dreaming, felt it very firmly. Exactly the kind of thing his grandfather would do.

Things were quiet for a while. Odd things happened - stuff disappearing from one spot, turning up in a totally ridiculous spot later. One night my husband & I were taking down curtains in the living room. We have old radiators in the house, one at each window in the living room. My husband dropped his screwdriver. Reaching behind the radiator, he laughs & says "Oh, come on, it can't have fallen through a hole in the floor!" There wasn't a hole. And it didn't fall down to the basement. He looked. I looked. Downstairs... under, around, and in the radiator itself. No screwdriver. The screwdriver was black. The rug was light green. We couldn't both just not see it. We looked for fifteen minutes. Finally gave up, thinking we were both losing it. Walked into the kitchen, came back a few minutes later, there was no one else in the house, no one could have been near it. And there was the screwdriver, right behind the radiator where we'd already looked for fifteen minutes.

One day I was making meatloaf. Didn't want to get my rings messed up so I put them in a ring holder on my dresser. Just a small thing, looks like a little glass sombrero. Made the meatloaf, came back upstairs later - no rings. I picked up the ring holder, turned it upside down, looked on the floor, behind the dresser, even in my wallet thinking maybe I really was losing it. No rings. I looked for those rings for weeks. They were gone. One morning a month or so later, I rolled over in bed to see something gleaming on my dresser. Heard a voice in my ear whisper "Look again". There were my rings, in the ring holder where I'd put them in the first place.