Sunday scriblings. Ghost Stories.

G'Day,
Sunday Scribblings prompt for this week is ghost stories.
Over the years I have had many things happen that I guess could have been ghost stories and also some funny ones that were most probably my imagination running away with me.
Do I believe in ghosts? Well, I don't know in which sense "Believe" is meant but I think there is such a thing as ghosts.
I think these sort of things are something you have to be tuned in to to experience, so lots of people have never had anything like that happen to them. But, here are some of mine.
When Pete and I were first married we lived in an old house in Wagga that had a strange light in the centre of the hallway in the darkness that could not be explained by another light source. It was around the door to the bathroom and 2nd bedroom. I used to often wake up during the night after dreaming about something there and tell, whatever, that we lived here now. The presence was never threatening but was more like it was questioning. When my first son was born I am sure that the presence was an old lady or man because I felt it watching out for him. I don't know if it was some weird connection with my son or with this presence but I would often know when my son was about to get up to something that might hurt him , just before he actually got up to it. Like when he learnt how to push a chair across to the back door to open it and was in danger of falling down the back steps, or when he was about to eat the dirt out of my potted plants, (again!) I would get an idea, and there he was with a handful of dirt about to go in his mouth. Or I would get a message like "You left that knife on the table" and would go to check just as my son was reaching up for it. Also if I was away from him and someone was looking after him I could tell them exactly what time he woke up and cried because my let down reflex would go and milk would start running. Weird. I never had that with my other kids. When he was big enough to sit up and be fed in his high chair he used to stare at the place in the hallway each morning at breakfast time, that was lit up at night, and babble away in his baby talk to something or someone there. Unseen by me, but for all the world like someone was there talking and playing with him.
My niece also must have been tuned in to stuff like that too when she was a baby, because my sister lived in a house that was reputed to be haunted and every time she was taken into a certain room she would panic and scream until she was taken back out again. Also when she was a toddler I used to take her with me to visit an old lady I was working with at the time and she didn't like that house either. The old lady suffered dementia. When I was there cleaning, I used to have a sense of someone following me around saying "Don't touch that, it is mine" maybe it was the old lady's husband, so it was a very strange there also.
When my boys were little we lived in a town called Urana and there was something strange in the corner of my front yard. I would often hear a baby crying out there and when I went out to check there was nobody or nothing around.
Also around the same time we used to go out for short day trips to the surrounding district, one day we visited a town called Rutherglen. There were old shops along the main street that had long since closed down but were re-opened with museum and local history type displays set up in them. I went into one of them and there was an old photo at the end of the room that showed an early pioneer from that area and I couldn't walk past it. It was such an unfriendly threatening feeling that I felt in there, I had to get outside, but nobody else with us felt anything like that . I later asked my pottery teacher at the time , who lived there, about it and she said there were lots of ghostly type things happened in Rutherglen.
At our Junee house there was a light spot outside our front verandah that was only there just before dawn and a strange feeling at the end of the hand rail . It was especially noticeable on foggy mornings when we left early for work. One morning when Peter was leaving for work there was a young teenage boy standing there. Peter got a shock and said out loud "What the F are you doing there" and it disappeared. We had known about a car accident that happened across the gully where a young boy was killed and maybe that was him coming looking for help. I sensed that he was about 14 or 15 and he had mid length blond hair that curled at the bottom and had on a blue and white striped tee shirt, but of course I didn't have anything to go by to prove that. Peter doesn't believe in such things but he saw that one.
Junee is also famous for having a haunted house called Monte Cristo. It was an early mansion in the town. It has been on T.V. often and is reputedly the most haunted house in Australia. We went there often, mostly because it was full of antiques to sticky beak at. One day we went on the tour and my eldest son sat on one of the chairs upstairs. Olive the tour leader and owners wife said to him don't sit there that is the ghost chair. When he stood up he had three red scratches down his thigh. They looked like finger nail marks. There was no nails or anything on the chair to explain it.
And, where we are living now, in this house since moving here we have had some strange unexplained noise. When Michael and I have been alone in the house there has been a really loud sound of smashing glass, like something big has fallen and broken on the tiled floor. We have gone to check what it was and there is nothing there. Over in the park there is a sign saying that in this area there used to be a motorcycle track before the houses were here. It might have somehow been related to an accident that happened then.
When I was working at Junee hospital there were lots of stories going around of things that happened late at night when people were working night shift. Things like muffled voices outside the emergency department and wheel chairs running away down the ramp outside there, without any help. Also someone talking in the day care area. At Christmas time they used to try to close the acute care ward for a couple of days and we used to go in there and do special cleaning jobs that were unable to be done when it was open. I was over there one day cleaning, when it was empty and I got this really strong smell of after shave in the kitchen. Well ! I had myself spooked. It was there all day whenever I went into the kitchen. I swept the floor and when I bent down to pick up the sweepings it was really strong. On checking I worked out that some one must have either spilled or broken a bottle of after shave lotion and used the hand broom to sweep it up. We all had a good laugh about it. So that one was truly my imagination running away with me.
Also while working there in the kitchen, we used to see a shadow of someone walking down the hallway outside when no one was there. They used to reckon that it was the old doctor.
That's all folks. More of my silly memory stories.
Bye Love Linda.