My earliest encounter was when I was about four years old. I was staying with my paternal grandparents at their home in Monroe City, MO. The home had been in our family since 1886, which put the home turning 100 the year I was born. The family always had an old-fashioned streak in it that favored the first-born males prior to my generation and this story proves that many of our personality traits and values seem to make it to the other side with us.
When I was younger my sister still had severe issues with asthma. Her coughing fits would get so bad that she’d stop breathing and the doctors we went to at the time told us that she “forgot to breathe” and that we should beat on her back until she started breathing again. Sometimes this smacking was so violent that you wondered if it should continue, but it’s always what brought her back to breathing and kept her with us. When her breathing treatments didn’t seem to be improving her health she’d have to visit the hospital. Sometimes these visits were multiple days long and since we were a family on a tight budget, the cheap thing to do was send me to a grandparent’s house. One of my parents would check on me each day, or sometimes have me for the day before having me stay with my grandparents yet again at night so they could stay at my sister’s side while she was in the hospital or because my father was working overnights on the police force.
This story involves one of those nights. I was at my grandparent’s house and had been tucked into sleep in the bedroom. The house had an odd layout because it had originally been only two rooms and had been added onto twice. Once to add the parlor, which became my father’s room when he was born, and once to add the kitchen, turn the old back porch into the bathroom, and subsequently add a new back porch and coat closet. The flow of the house pretty much required you to walk through the main bedroom to get anywhere, as that room was situated between the path between the kitchen and the living room.
A very quickly drawn diagram of my grandparent’s house is to the left, with furniture shown in the bedroom and living room for reference points.
I was laid down to sleep on the bed facing the living room by my grandmother, who then joined my grandfather watching television in the living room. Since this is the next room over, it was easy for them to keep an eye on me and for me to know where they were.
I finally got to sleep and the next thing I remember is somehow being awakened gently. When I opened my eyes and peered upward towards the ceiling, I saw someone standing there. Standing over me watching me sleep was a tall, slender man. While the man’s figure was mostly dark like a shadow, I could make out his outline, facial features, and intent. I did not feel fear, but instead I felt what I will call “understanding”. The mental impression I got from the man is that he was curious as to who I was and that he now understood who I was. The secondary feeling I got was that he was there to protect and was not upset that I was there.
Just about this time, my grandmother walks through the treshold from the living room into the bedroom and the figure vanishes. I don’t mention him and mostly forget about the incident for the next 10 years or so.
Around the age of 14 we were going through a box of old family photos that had been in my grandmother’s house when she passed that my family had never sorted through.
As we peruse the photos, I came across one with a man posing with a small group of people, “that’s the man” I exclaimed in a sort of shocked tone. Until this point I had forgotten about the incident, but this photo reminded me of what I’d seen. My father who was sitting at the table at the time, asked me what I was talking about and I explained the story I am telling now. By the time I finished my story, my father’s jaw was on the floor, as the man that I had identified had died in 1934, and neither he nor I had ever met him. It turned out that my great-grandfather had checked-in on me and the man that I had picked out in the photo was him.
To this day this remains one of my earliest memories and is just one more story in my Haunted Lineage.