Ghosts on the Farm

Name:            William Adams
Email:           wladams@comp.uark.edu
Location:        Bigspring, Missouri
Anonymous:       
Type:            Ghost
Date:            Tuesday, January 18, 2000
Time:            12:30 PM

The Farm in Bigspring, Missouri

These events occurred on a small farm in the town of Bigspring, Missouri. My grandparents had bought the farm in the mid 1960s to serve as a family retreat and to get away from the "rat race" of St. Louis. Grandma saw most of the events, though Grandpa saw a few of them and saw the results of others.

The first thing anyone noticed about the house was that the curtain rod in the bathroom would NOT stay on its brackets. Grandpa eventually had some very heavy-duty nails and even lag bolts installed, but the brackets and curtain rod were almost always in the floor come morning. They finally just gave up and hung a set of brackets where the rod was not fastened, and accepted that they would have to set the curtain rod back in its brackets first thing most mornings. No damage was done, just lots of inconvenience.

Later on, Grandma and Grandpa noticed that the electric stove in the kitchen would be turned on when it should not have been. At first, Grandpa assumed that Grandma had simply forgotten to turn it off, and several lectures on fire safety were delivered. Finally, one evening, Grandma called Grandpa to the kitchen, and he observed and helped with turning off the electric stove. He checked that the switches were positively "off" and were not sitting on the edge, waiting for a vibration to knock them back "on." Three hours later, Grandpa walked through the kitchen and found the old electric stove running wide open - all four burners on "high," both ovens going full blast, and the kitchen feeling like a sauna. He turned it off again, and it then stayed off for the rest of the night, but he gave Grandma a long and frank apology. The stove problems went on for a time, then seemed to trail off to nothing.

There were also forms seen in the house a few times, and some voices heard. Both Grandma and Grandpa were outside on one occasion and saw what appeared to be a tall person wearing a stove pipe style top hat. They had no one staying with them at the moment, and no one at all should have been in the house. They both dashed into the house and made a search, but found no one. This happened several times. The voices heard in the house usually took the form of Grandma's voice calling to Grandpa. Grandpa would then come to see what Grandma wanted, only to find out that she had not called him at all. Grandma also heard a voice that she described as a "querulous, old lady's voice" calling her name in the house when no one was there.

The farm passed out of the family during the early 1970s, when Grandpa's health began to give out, and nothing further was heard of it.