the same nickname, Libby.
Perhaps the ghost had looked for a little recognition from her family and, having gotten none from the grandmother, had seized upon the opportunity to manifest herself to a more amenable relative?
Miss Hamilton is happy that she was able to see the sad smile on the unfortunate girl’s face, for to her it is proof that communication, though silent, had taken place between them across the years.
* * *
Mrs. Jane Eidson is a housewife in suburban Minneapolis. She is middle-aged and her five children range in age from nine to twenty. Her husband Bill travels four days each week. They live in a cottage-type brick house that is twenty-eight years old, and they’ve lived there for the past eight years.
The first time the Eidsons noticed that there was something odd about their otherwise ordinary-looking home was after they had been in the house for a short time. Mrs. Eidson was in the basement sewing, when all of a sudden she felt that she was not alone and wanted to run upstairs. She suppressed this strong urge but felt very uncomfortable. Another evening, her husband was down there practicing a speech when he also felt the presence of another. His self-control was not as strong as hers, and he came upstairs. In discussing their strange feelings with their next-door neighbor, they discovered that the previous tenant had also complained about the basement. Their daughter, Rita, had never wanted to go to the basement by herself and, when pressed for a reason, finally admitted that there was a man down there. She described him as dark-haired and wearing a plaid shirt.
Sometimes he would stand by her bed at night and she would become frightened, but the moment she thought of calling her mother, the image disappeared. Another spot where she felt his presence was the little playhouse at the other end of their yard.
The following spring, Mrs. Eidson noticed a bouncing light at the top of the stairs as she was about to go to bed in an upstairs room, which she was occupying while convalescing from surgery.
The light followed her to her room as if it had a mind of its own!
When she entered her room the light left, but the room felt icy. She was disturbed by this, but nevertheless went to bed and soon had forgotten all about it as sleep came to her. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, she woke and sat up in bed.
Something had awakened her. At the foot of her bed she saw a man who was “beige-colored,” as she put it. As she stared at the apparition it went away, again leaving the room very chilly.
About that same time, the Eidsons noticed that their electric appliances were playing tricks on them. There was the time at 5 A.M. when their washing machine went on by itself, as did the television set in the basement, which could only be turned on by plugging it into the wall socket. When they had gone to bed, the set was off and there was no one around to plug it in.
Who was so fond of electrical gadgets that they were turning them on in the small hours of the morning?
Finally Mrs. Eidson found out. In May of 1949, a young man who was just out of the service had occupied the house. His hobby had been electrical wiring, it seems, for he had installed a strand of heavy wires from the basement underground through the yard to the other end of the property. When he attempted to hook them up to the utility pole belonging to the electric company, he was killed instantly. It happened near the place where Mrs. Eidson’s girl had seen the apparition. Since the wires are still in her garden, Mrs. Eidson is not at all surprised that the dead man likes to hang around.
And what better way for an electronics buff to manifest himself as a ghost than by appearing as a bright, bouncy light? As of this writing, the dead electrician is still playing tricks in the Eidson home, and Mrs. Eidson is looking for a new home—one a little less unusual than their present one.
* * *
Eileen Courtis is forty-seven years old, a native of London, and a well-balanced individual who now resides on the West coast but who lived previously in New York City. Although she has never gone to college, she has a good grasp of things, an analytical mind, and is not given