» Messing with the Dark Side

My parents house had something odd about it
From the day they moved in, my mum could smeel pipe smoke in the main room, despite both my parents being non-smokers and my grandad, the only smoker in the family at the time, having switched to ciggies a while before they moved in. My dad sometimes caught a whiff too, but it was mainly my mum.
The really freaky stuff happened when my mum started looking after the neighbour's kids while their mum was at work. The oldest was still a year or two from school age, and a pretty truthful and nice kid. He came into the kitchen one day and asked my mum (pointing back into the living room) 'Whos dat man?'. My mum asked who he meant, and he went back towards the door and pointed furiously, saying 'In dere'. She checked, panicking that some lunatic had wandered in silently, but no man was there. She watched him for a minute, and he acted really oddly, looking round the room and eventually just kind of staring at the door that led to the cellar. She led him into the living room and asked 'Is he still in here then William?' and was told that he had left. When quizzed further, he said that he'd walked past my mum and into the cellar. But that he'd been smiling.
When his mum came to pick him up (I was there for this bit) she was chatting to my mum about something else altogether (my mum hadn't mentioned the experience to the neighbour at this point) and she was holding the kid so that he was facing over her shoulder towards the top of the piano. On top of the piano, in a display case, was one of my grandad's prized pipes (he collected them) which he had left us when he died. William pointed straight at it, and declared that 'that funny man' had had one of those.
We had a dog who used to run out of the room from time to time and sit patiently by the cellar door in the exact manner he did when my dad was going to come home too...
Never worked it out yet.

First post... be nice!
(Tue 25th Apr 2006, 9:29, More)