Ghosts...In Three Acts – III

All three of our houses had ghosts.
The first one held ghosts we unknowingly brought there ourselves.
The second house had several...One charming and poetic, one tragic, and one very real but borderline hilarious specter.
Our third house has the best ghost of all.

These are their stories. And ours.
(Please scroll down and read the first two before this finale...)

III.

Our third house is here in Utah. A place we thought we’d never live. In a city and county we thought we were even LESS likely to inhabit. When Jeff accepted the offer to teach at BYU we had to eat a lot of crow. Not just a pie, mind you, but a full-on crow buffet!

And house-hunting was, well...interesting, to say the least. Remember, we were leaving a beautiful Craftsman home built in 1908. So when we told the realtor we were interested in older houses we figured we’d see something along those lines. But instead, "older" to him meant circa 1990. Hilarious. We said okay...just don’t show us anything from the 60s and 70s. So we looked at roughly 30 homes in four days and couldn’t find anything acceptable. (I’m sure he wanted to strangle us!)

At that point we started dropping our requirements...and our pride. “Okay, this area’s no longer off limits.” “I guess we can adjust the price range to include a broader selection.” “Give us any decade. We can’t be that picky.”

And then he showed us this house. I had seen it on the internet at least half a dozen times, and never mentioned it to the realtor. But I recognized it as soon as we pulled up in front. We walked in the door and happily noted the entry way. Jeff’s first requirement: Check. We looked around the main floor, and then they ushered us upstairs. Just as I started climbing the second set of stairs (above the landing, I had the most amazing experience. I had this tingly all over feeling that I can only describe as a spiritual hug. It honestly felt like something warm and sweet had wrapped itself around my soul, as if to say, “This is the place. This is where you belong.”

Jeff was down in the kitchen talking to the owners. We finally met up again in the basement, and after I mockingly gave a thumbs-up to the hilarious 1970s yellow and brown bathroom (!) I pulled him aside and said, “I think we can stop looking, Honey. This is the house.” Amazingly, he’d felt it too. “I think so too,” he said, and told the realtor we didn’t need to see any more, we were ready to make an offer. We hadn’t even seen the whole house yet. But we were that sure.

We found out the next morning, in talking with the owner, that she had gone to high school with my mother (who had passed away 12 years earlier). She even pulled out an old yearbook to show us. On top of that, my dad had been her parents’ bishop. This woman had grown up on the same street I grew up on. There was no doubt that what I felt, the “ghost” in our new house was my mom, trying to tell us this was “Home.”

I hope she never leaves....

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This series of posts was written as an entry in Scribbit's October Writeaway: Ghosts.