Childhood Memory With A Twist

I was kind of a weird kid, growing up. I guess we (my siblings and I) were all kind of weird, in that we weren't allowed to watch much TV, and were whizzes at coming up with themes for role playing. My sister usually came up with the best group themes; Undersea Mermaids (this would be priceless to see on film; 5 or 6 kids pretending to swim across the yard!), Pioneers (the poor dog had to be our cow, and we planted sprays of pine needles as carrots), or Train (a great deal of dressing up and packing of suitcases), all involved some pretty complex storylines, which she was only too happy to give. But occasionally I would play my own story-game.

One of my favorite internal games was about a little girl named Alice, who went for a walk in the woods with her family and disappeared. Even though her family searched for her exhaustively, they never found her. Alice died, alone, in the woods, and her ghost haunted the forest ever after.

I TOLD you- I was a weird kid.

I'm sure the neighbors thought I was odd, wearing an old, white choir robe with a red woolen vest tightly buttoned over it. Sort of the folk costume of Czechoslovakia. I would flit around the neighborhood in this get-up, talking to myself under my breath, as I went through the story.

What strikes me as odd about this story is the name of the little girl I was being. Alice. Sure Alice is a common enough name; especially when your older sister is obsessed with singing along to the old Jane Powell record of Alice in Wonderland. So maybe its just coincidence. But this past fall I posted a story about my great grand-aunt, Alice Snyder, entitled "The Ghost Who Haunts Me". I didn't know about her as a child - my grandmother never really knew anything about her father's family. When I was given a family bible full of tintypes and cartes de visites, her picture was the only one that had any name marked on it, and it was simply "A S" scratched roughly into the back of the tintype, but there was no information in that bible that told me anything more about her. It wasn't until I was trawling the Venango County Genealogical Society's library, in Oil City that I came across an obituary about her and her tragic end. At first I didn't even think it was someone relevant, so I didn't copy it, but after getting back home I realized she did fit in and in due course I slapped my head, a la V-8 style.

Jennifer, over at Thursday Drive, wrote a post today about ghosts and was asking if anyone believed in them, or had had experiences with them. Talk about your synchronicity - I've been feeling like Alice is hanging over my shoulder since the summer before last, trying to show me what happened to her/where she is now. Realizing that her name was the same name as the imaginary girl I role-played as a child kind of seemed more than coincidental to me now.

The other night, after I had gone to bed, and was lying there, drifting into sleep, I heard someone speaking to me - telling me their name and other things, which were garbled and didn't make sense to me. Random thoughts fluttering through? Maybe. But it was so strange and quite unusual. Things in the room moved and made noise during this as well. The floor creaked though everyone was in bed. some stuff fell off of my dresser, though no cats were about. Do i think it was a ghost? I don't know. I only know what I heard and felt wasn't the usual energy in that room. Take it as a manifestation or just as a ghost story, but I have been successfully led too many times in my family research by a hunch or a feeling to completely disbelieve in ghosts.

Do you have any ghost stories? Let's creep each other out!!