GRANDMA

    Let me start by telling you that the story you are about to read is 100% bullshit free. My parents, my brother and sister and I lived in my grandmother’s house when I was growing up in Spartanburg,South Carolina. I don’t remember if my two siblings were still living there when all this happened, but that doesn’t matter. It happened to me, not to them.

    To say that my grandmother was an eccentric woman is pretty much hitting the ten-penny nail on the head. When I was growing up she was already well into her 90′s. She used to yell at the TV if her beloved wrestling show was interrupted. When they cut into the show to announce that we had landed on the moon I could her shouting “I wish they’d land on the sun. Interrupt my rasslin’ for this garbage, dadblast’em!!” Yes, indeed, grandma was quite a sweetheart.

    As the years passed she began to get a little bit crazier and a whole lot sneakier. You don’t know what it’s like to be all alone in the house with her late at night. My mother and father would be out and my brother and sister would be with friends. I’d be at home stretched out on the couch watching “World Wide Wrestling“. I was reveling in the joy of watching Wahoo McDaniel tomahawk chop the living snot out of the hated ‘Nature Boy‘ Ric Flair. Suddenly I would catch something out of the corner of my eye that made me jump clean out of my skin. It was my grandma, peering around the corner, her white hair standing up like a cross between Don King and Albert Einstein and with a wash cloth dangling out of her mouth. Now just sit back and get a good mental picture of that and tell me you wouldn’t jump too. Anyways, after the initial scare wore off I would do what I would always do and that would be to calmly tell her ‘Grandma, go to bed.’ She would let out a low moan and then I would hear her shuffling her house slippers across the carpet as she headed back toward her room. I would continue watching the wrestling and all would be well.

    When my grandma was 97 she fell and broke her hip. As is the case many a time with an injury of that magnitude she did not recover. Soon after her death I moved into her bedroom. It was about a year after that the main part of this story, which I have taken all the way around the world, took place.

    It was late one night, probably around 2 a.m. I was lying in bed facing the wall with my back to the room. I heard the sound of my grandmother’s slippers shuffling on the carpet behind me. Without thinking I did what I always did when I heard her moving about through the house at night. ‘Grandma, go to bed.’ I heard that low familiar moan and I knew that she had heard me and was on her way to bed. Now, there are just two things wrong with that whole situation I just told you about. One, my grandmother had been deceased for a little over a year and two…

…I was in her bed.

    I froze with that little piece of information running through my brain. Then, and like the rest of the tale this part is 100% bullshit free, I felt the bed shift behind me as if there were someone crawling into it. I could feel their back against mine as they settled in to sleep. I know you may think that it was my brother or sister but neither of them were the type to play a practical joke. It certainly wasn’t my mother and father. They had very little sense of humor and were well into their eighth hour of sleep.

    I didn’t turn over the entire night. I finally feel asleep around 5 a.m. When I did I could still feel my grandmother’s back pressed against my own. I still to this day don’t know why she paid me that little visit. Maybe it was to say goodbye and to let me know she was okay. Maybe she wanted to feel the warmth and comfort of her old bed again.

    Then again maybe she just wanted to scare the shit out of me one last time.