Kiddies, this is the final installment. Next week, there will be a 3-parter about my summer home when I was a kid, which also had some haunting features...
We sold the estate when I was 15 and my siblings were 20, 21, 22 and 28. We moved to Arizona because father's heart was bad and the cold weather and the work on the estate was just too much. He only made it a little over a year before he passed on.
I was 16 and arrived home from a sleepover to find an ambulance outside. I rushed in and saw the paramedics working on my father on the kitchen floor. They announced he passed on and my mother ushered us outside to weep when about 4 minutes later, the paramedics rushed back to say the paddles worked and they brought him back. As they wheeled my father past me, he smiled. "It was beautiful. I was at a fiord" (father was from Norway) "all my family was there, mother, father, aunt, uncles, and there were flowers that don't exist and colors that don't exist." He died a few days later in the hospital.
We had just gotten home from the hospital and had celebrated because his vital signs were good and he was alert. I went to bed in my room and during the night woke up to someone pulling on my big toe. I looked up and at the end of my bed I saw my father's outline. My father always traveled in his work and I wasn't allowed to stay up to see him when he got home. He had a close call in a plane one time and I always worried. He would come in and pull on my toe to let me know he made it home without fully awakening me for a conversation. I smiled, thinking they must have let him home from the hospital early. The telephone rang and I turned to pick it up, but someone else picked it up in another room. I turned back and he was gone. The phone call was the hospital informing us we needed to hurry. We rushed there to find him deceased, lying quietly in his bed.
The people living at Aspen Grove reported seeing my father, in the suit and tie he was buried in (his favorite traveling suit). They were having an outdoor party. They went to attend to visitors, went back and he was gone. They didn't know at the time, he had passed on. He was standing just where I would imagine my father would stand, near the croquet set. He loved to play when he was in town.
My parents had a pact to haunt Aspen Grove. They never wanted to leave, but they did what they had to at the time. My mother died 20 years later having vowed to meet him there.
Seven years later, my brother died suddenly. Before he died, he took a nap, woke up and said he was flying around Aspen Grove and he saw our deceased cousin. He mentioned the tennis courts were gone (something owners added after we moved out and he was right, they were gone).
My sister died 4 years later suddenly and we had talked a great deal about my ghost hunting and she promised to be there, as well.
Then, a couple years later, a family friend contacted me. He was a professor at the university and lived at the end of our driveway in a cottage. He was a dear friend and had done my mother's eulogy. He promised to haunt the place. What he hadn't told me is that he was dying of pancreatic cancer.
It's hard to believe, but at one time a contractor bought the house, hoping to tear down the entire property and put up condos. Yes, the DC suburbs really grew up and the housing was very expensive. The neighbors and the historical society fought to protect this historic place.
A compromise was made; he had to leave the mansion and front boxwood maze gardens intact, but could build on the rest of the property. The greedy evil bastard tore up the cottages, the barn, the orchards, the rolling hills, covered over the creek, and sold his units. With a little curse applied his way, he did go bankrupt in the end, so there is some justice in life (or perhaps a bit of karmic mirroring his way in the form of ritual, hee hee). There wasn't even an archaeologist on site when the plowed up the former slave cottage/carriage house, the back boxwood maze or other parts of the property. Other owners had stripped the three huge Waterford crystal chandeliers and almost every artifact when they left.
The nice couple who live there now take excellent care of and love the home very much. They even had the show on an episode of HGTV's "If Walls Could Talk" medical mysteries episode. It feels good to know the place is in good hands.
So, Aspen Grove could potentially hold the soldiers that haunted it, as well as four family members and a family friend. My ultimate dream, of course, is to go there for a hunt with my team, the right equipment and a film crew to document a hunt like no other; a predetermined hunt with spirits waiting and willing to make contact. I don't know if such a situation has ever occurred, but it is rare and unique.
Hope you enjoyed this 3-part series. Next week, my summer home's story will be on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday.
