IS THAT A GRAVESTONE?

This week I thought I’d share an interesting story that happened to me around Halloween a year or so back. You all know it was Halloween 2015 when I began writing the book “The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler.” This week’s story, also centered around a Halloween when something weird happened to me. Which, I guess, appears to show a trend in my life. Not sure how I feel about that, you know, Halloween as a defining moment in my life. I can’t say that I’ve ever been a real fan of Halloween, you know as a holiday or otherwise.

As a child Halloween was something I looked forward to for the candy aspect. I never really liked dressing up. I never put a lot of thought into my Halloween costumes. Mostly I dressed up with what I could find around the house. My mom’s makeup would be used to make my face look somewhat like a clown or the always popular scarecrow. That was good enough and out the door I went to get as much candy as humanly possible in a matter of hours.

As the mother of five children I began to actually loathe Halloween. Never one to worry about a costume, I now had to come up with FIVE of them annually. The pressure was to much, I’m not really creative. Inevidentably I had five clowns or scarecrows going out the door. Some years we got a little more creative. I remember one year I wrapped toilet paper all around my oldest son and called it a Mummy! Worked great until it the light rain started falling. Then he molted.

The other problem with Halloween was the candy. Five children, bringing back into the house, as much collected candy as humanly possible was a little overwhelming. At first, while they were away at school, I would break into their bags and eat as much as I could. You know, with the goal to get it out of the house sooner rather then later. A few years of that and I just couldn’t stomach it anymore and neither could my waistline! So I resorted to actually just throwing it away one little handful at a time.

No I’ve never been much into Halloween. Which is why it seems really strange to me that one of he most defining moments of my life happened on Halloween 2015 and followed a few years later by this experience.

It was Halloween 2021. By now I don’t even participate in Halloween traditions at all. The children are all grown. The grandkids all live far away. I stopped handing out candy in 2015 but even if I wanted to now, there are never any little children walking around our neighborhood. It’s a quiet night. A non event. Just another passing day on the calendar.

So it was that around this time, on one of those passing days around Halloween, my husband and I went to look at a piece of property to purchase. My husband renovates older buildings and creates modern, more spacious apartments. So this building had been brought to our attention as a potential candidate. It was a very large old house. Built in 1879 as a single family home but at some point broken up into a duplex with a separate apartment upstairs. The original front door was still intact. Two separate doors that opened in a big, sweeping grandeur! Both doors had full length frosted windows, etched with flowers and vines. The windows filled nearly the entire top half of the doors and were rounded on the top with the most beautiful decorative moulding. In each room hung the original lighting fixtures. Fixtures that, at one point had been gas, but later converted to electricity, they still hung from the original tin ceilings. They were heavy, made of cast iron with beautifully etched glass shades over each light bulb. There were built in bookshelves and a grand staircase that led no where once the house was chopped up into two apartments. But so much of the original charm of this Victorian house was still there. Although run down, and in need of serious repairs, you could still see the grandeur that this house had been when it was built.

We look at a lot of old houses like this and I always like to imagine the people who had the house built. What were their hopes and dreams for this home? Often when we buy one I will research and try to learn about the people who have lived in these homes over the years. Once I found that my husband’s great, great grandfather had lived, for a brief time, in one of the buildings we bought! In another I found a woman who had resided in it that was from my own family tree, although not directly related, but still, always a little weird to find. Makes one stop and think. Are we somehow always connected to the energies that existed? How do this things that happen, things we often refer to as coincidences, is there another explanation?

That line of thinking, what is a coincidence and what isn’t, played out pretty seriously as we finished looking the house over and stepped outside. As my husband began talking to the Realtor about the price, how soon we could close, etc. I happened to notice what looked like a gravestone leaning up against the garage. Now mind you this property was pretty overgrown and I couldn't really tell what it was as I looked at it from the driveway. But hey, I love cemeteries and I’m always a sucker for a good gravestone so my interest was peaked.

I walked over and kicked away an accumulation of leaf litter and pulled at some overgrown weeds and sure enough there was, what appeared to be a gravestone. Excited by this I hollered to my husband “Hey look there’s a gravestone over here!” He did what my husband always does in these situations, and rolled his eyes. The Realtor on the other hand had a completely different reaction. “Oh my word Michelle get away from there!”

Now I’ve never been bothered by death, cemeteries, gravestones or even ghosts for that matter! So I wasn’t about to heed her advice. These things don’t even register for my husband so he went right back to his conversation with her, not the least bit concerned that his wife had just stumbled upon a gravestone. I turned back to the stone to try and get a better look at it.

I bent down and pulled away more of the overgrowth around it. It was small and I quickly realized it wasn’t a gravestone at all but what would have been used as a foot stone in marking graves during the Victorian era. Seemed reasonable given the age of the house. Foot stones were generally engraved with just the initials of the deceased person rather then their entire name and birth/death dates. So it was with this stone, there were three initials carved into it. But when my mind registered the initials carved in to it, my heart jumped in that really cool way it does when something really otherworldly happens to me! You know a coincidence.

You see the initials carved into the stone were, M. E. S. They were mine!!

When I pointed that out to my husband and the Realtor she literally jumped into her car and started to back out of the driveway. I remember she rolled down the window and hollered back at my husband. “I’m getting out of here! I’ll meet you at my office to finish this conversation.” And she was gone, in a flash of squealing tires. My husband shrugged, accepting that his wife has some kind of weird vibe and walked toward our car. I followed, with only one backward glance at my own gravestone. “Honey we have got to buy this house!” I remember saying.

In the end we did buy it and it is now a beautifully renovated duplex that is home to two families. There is a really sweet young couple and the other tenants are a retired woman and her mother. They love the place and enjoy decorating the big sweeping porch with flowers and bird feeders. It’s good to see the house happy again.

I brought my gravestone home. I’ve set it up in my yard, under an apple tree. I like it. It doesn’t bother me in a creepy or spooky way at all. I mean it doesn’t have any dates on it! If it did that would be to much even for me!