When I was growing up, my two younger sisters, one younger
brother and myself spent every summer at our cottage by the
lake. My parents encouraged us to invite our friends all
summer long so at least one of us always had a guest or two
continuously. However, the cottage was small, only two
bedrooms, one bathroom and a main room that was both a
living room and a kitchen, so my father built a large wooden
platform and erected a large tent on top of it very close to
the main cottage so that my parents could keep an eye on us.
He installed bunk bed cots with sleeping bags on them so
that the tent could sleep eight at once. He ran an extension
cord and put in a television, rugs, a couple of chairs
including one rocking chair and a big basket of comic books.
Needless to say, we were in heaven.
Since the tent only served as a place to sleep and hang
out, every morning we would all pile in and have breakfast
in the main cottage. It was on one of these mornings that I
remember noticing my youngest sister, Mary, was looking pale
and not well rested as she had dark circles under her eyes.
The first couple of successive mornings I never said
anything, but finally my mother did, asking Mary if she was
sick because she had become so quiet and pale.
That’s when Mary began telling everyone that she thought
someone was coming into the tent in the middle of the night.
My mother insisted that this was not possible since the door
to the tent faced her bedroom window and it had a large
zipper that made a loud and distinct sound every time anyone
zipped it up or down. My mother also insisted that being a
mother, she was very attuned to the sound and knew every
time it was unzipped when any child went to the bathroom in
the night. She told Mary that she was quite certain that no
one had come into the tent but wanted to know why Mary
thought someone had.
That’s when my sister said she had
awoken a few nights prior to the sound of someone rocking in
the one rocking chair we had in the tent, close to the door.
Mary said she could hear the sound of the chair as it
creaked against the wooden platform the tent was erected on.
Where Mary slept, she could peek out of her sleeping bag and
see the rest of us snoozing on our cots and could see we
were all there sleeping soundly so knew it had to be a
stranger. She said she was too frightened to look at the
chair, and anyway she told us, to see the chair, she would
have to stick her head out of the bag to look down towards
the door and she couldn’t bring herself to do it. My mother
insisted that it was a bad dream but Mary insisted that if
it was then she was having it night after night for the past
week.
Then Mary said, “The worst part of it is whoever is in that
chair must be wearing a ring or something because I can hear
it as they tap it against the arm of the chair.”
That’s when my mother went pale and we all noticed it at
once. She grabbed a chair and sat down, clearly visibly
shaken. We asked her what was wrong and she told us that she
hadn’t thought about this for years, but when she was a
small child, around five years old or so, she began waking
up to the sound of the rocking chair in her room. When she
looked at the rocking chair she said she saw an old
transparent woman, dressed in very old fashioned looking
clothing, rocking back and forth and staring at my mother
with vacant eyes. The weird part, my mother told us, was
that she would tap her hand against the arm of the chair and
the ring on her finger made a loud tapping sound. My mother
said this went on all night long and when she told her
parents they didn’t believe her and thought she was bad
dreams. Finally, my mother said that after awhile she had
become so hysterical that her parents took the rocking chair
out of the room to appease her. After that, my mother said
she never saw the old woman again and as my mother finished
her story, we all looked at my sister Mary. Yikes!
After
that morning, my mother made my father take the rocking
chair out of the tent and Mary said she never heard it again.
Since Mary never did look we never did know who was sitting
in that chair rocking and tapping away all night. Was it the
same old woman coming back again and now haunting my sister?
Was it some old relative who was trying to look after us? We
never knew for sure, but no one in my family has rocking
chairs in their bedrooms, even to this day!
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