Happy Halloween!

On this occasion, I thought I’d tell a couple true stories!

When I was a teenager, we had 2 neighbors (yes, only 2…we lived out in the boonies…we all had roughly 15+ acres). Neighbor Jones was a great family; I used to babysit their 2 kids. They had lots of animals like we did and we all got along well. Neighbor Smith wasn’t quite so pleasant. She had the only house around for miles that had a big chain-link fence at her driveway. She didn’t socialize with anyone and even when we’d wave, she’d glare. One day Mrs. Jones called us, asking if we’d seen her black-bellied pig, Elvis. Yes, Elvis. We hadn’t, unfortunantly, and figured the coyotes got him.

A couple weeks later, she called crying and upset. She said she had had to go over to the Smith house to talk to her about something and decided to peek into the garage, still looking for her pig. That’s when she saw him. Elvis’ skin was hanging on Mrs. Smith’s garage wall! “Mrs. Smith killed Elvis!”

My second story happened to relatives of ours, many years back. This family lived during the early 1900’s and just bought a house near an orchard. The husband, Harry, worked on the other side of the orchard and the wife would go through it to take food to her husband while he was working.

One day, after many days of very rainy weather, she was walking through and felt something tug at her skirt. She looked down, and there was a forearm and a reaching hand, sticking out of the ground. She ran screaming to her husband, “Harry, there’s a body in the orchard!” He then followed her and sure enough, there was a body just below the surface of the ground.

It turned out that a poor local family had lost a member. They were too poor to have a service/burial, so they buried the body in the orchard. Unfortunately, they didn’t bury him deep enough and the rain had settled the ground, making it possible for the hand to stick up through the mud. So be careful when walking through a field after a rainstorm!