​On a random Tuesday morning in October 2013, I received a text from my oldest daughter, Brittany, from the base of a mountain in Colorado . . . that I was to understand was actually a follow up text. She may have told me before that morning . . . I'm sure she did.  But I must not have understood the full impact. 

"I'm going up Mount Elbert next Tuesday,"  she had said. A family picnic?  "It will take about four hours to get up the mountain," she had said. That long a drive?  They were always doing Colorado things. Swimming in a mountain lake.  Running into a moose. Stealing away to a Vail chalet in the off season for the weekend. Dodging forest fires. 

I confess I might not have been paying attention.  But when the text came through that early Tuesday morning with a photo attachment of my oldest daughter, four months postpartum, decked out in heavy duty cold weather attire and standing in front of a monument sign with a map that read Mt. Elbert Trailhead, I began to suspect that I had might have missed something BIG.

It did not, however, surprise me. This was my Britty. The girl who once threw up for three hours straight before a highschool basketball game and then performed a flawless set of complicated cheerleading stunts without even bothering to look pale. The girl who thought she'd just go ahead and slip in a Chicago Marathon before getting pregnant two weeks later. . . in case she didn't get another chance. The girl who practiced for the DC Marathon by running the Denver Marathon a week before. . . the whole thing . . . and called to chat me up . . .  while she was doing it. 

This was the girl who once talked a naked old man out of an old woman's closet and back into his own bed (in his own room down the hall) without even flinching (or gagging) . . . and stoically and compassionately sat with another as he took his last breath.  The girl who once cleaned a whole apartment from top to bottom, and then pushed a stroller down Michigan Avenue two weeks after a C-section because she was bored . . . and the girl who battled and beat post-partum depression and then had the courage to speak about her experiences from an internationally syndicated talk show out of Chicago to encourage other new mothers because she didn't want them to hurt like she had. 

That's my girl. This was my Brittany Leigh, and it seemed perfectly fitting and even symbolic that she would be climbing the highest peak in Colorado (I did some quick research as she was on her way up) two months after the birth of her second child. Even so, as I sat at my desk working that morning, with the knowledge that my beautiful daughter was actually climbing a mountain, I felt a sense of pride and awe at her strength and resilient spirit. 

I had worried about another bout of post-partum depression.  She was worrying that she hadn't packed enough granola and that maybe her cell phone service wouldn't hold out. And though there was never a doubt that she would reach the summit, when the final text came through with a picture of her sitting atop the snow-capped peak smiling broadly, tattered American flag fluttering in the background, and all of the Rockies behind her, I caught my breath. There was my girl at the top of the world. Right where she belonged.

I am not a wedding person. I'm way more pragmatic than romantic -- I'm the person cynically eyeing the rose centerpieces at the reception, thinking the cost probably amounts to six months worth of mortgage payments on that starter home. Also, crying is a rare event for me normally reserved for the first sight of a newborn baby or after three consecutive nights of poor sleep.

But I will tell you that I cried at my daughter's wedding two years ago this month on October fourth. 

This wasn't just a wedding, though. The tears had less to do with a union of souls than with eternal gratitude and the wonder of life's circumstances in general. That October, Kelsey Brooke, my beautiful second daughter married her beautiful boy. By anybody's standards, they looked like a living fairy tale, or, as I like to quip, the perfectly preserved vampires of the Twilight variety. But even this wasn't what made me cry when I saw them together at the altar lost in each other's eyes. ​

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania has the distinction of being considered one of the most haunted places on Earth. 

In July, 1863, one of the fiercest, most violent battles of the American Civil War raged for three full days in the rolling fields and forests surrounding the town. When the cannons and gunfire finally stopped on July 3, 8,000 soldiers would lie dead in those fields among the 60,000 bloody casualties. The carnage included 3,000 horses and one civilian casualty in the heart of the town; a woman who had been baking bread in her kitchen was shot in the head by a stray bullet that pierced her door.

Paranormal experts will tell you that this is the exact kind of trauma that is a catalyst for hauntings -- when people die so suddenly and tragically that they don't realize they're dead, or they don't want to accept it and just continue hanging around. 

I don't know about any of that, and I wasn't giving much consideration to it when I just happened to be in Gettysburg with my husband and our oldest daughter on Halloween weekend in 2010. 

At the end of that October, Brittany flew in from Denver to run the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, DC. Stephen and I would drive from Michigan to Pittsburgh to pick her up from the airport and drive her the rest of the way to the capitol city. We had never driven through Pennsylvania before and references to coal mines and steel mills had left us with the impression that outside of bucolic Amish country, that the rest of the state would be gray and dirty. Instead, we drove the whole way in a perpetual state of wonder. The peak fall foliage winding alternately through small towns and rolling woodlands rivaled Michigan for its rustic beauty.

By the time we rolled into Gettysburg, it was dusk and the quintessential Halloween eve for dinner in an old tavern and a slightly macabre tour through the historically preserved home of Jennie Wade (the woman who had died baking bread). Old leaves rustled appropriately under our feet, the half moon shone through overhanging tree branches over lanterned city streets, and even a mild wind gusted fresh leaves at an exhilarating rate. Jack o' lanterns glowed from random store windows and residential porches across the town.

A few days and a few adventures later, Stephen and I dropped Brittany back at the airport and headed home to Michigan. It was at a Cracker Barrel near Pittsburgh that I first noticed it. We were talking across the table, sifting over the memories of the last few days, filing them away . . . and I lamented the fact that I wasn't able to get more pictures. I clicked the photo icon on my phone to take inventory and swiped over the few that I had taken, ending with the one of the headstone facing the road. I glanced quickly at it again and was about to put my phone away when something caught the edge of my eye. I looked closer. Directly to the left of the headstone, and about halfway down, the faces of two men, one just beyond the other, are staring directly at me. 

In a recent blog post, I noted how a spooky incident experienced by my daughter and me in our church may have lent some credibility to strange occurrences in my own early life.
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On a frigidly cold winter night in 1976, my entire family had taken refuge at the lovely home of an aunt and uncle where my brother and I played often with our two cousins. Everyone had a place that evening. Our parents were all firmly ensconced in a marathon game of cards at the dining room table. My brother and our younger cousin were absorbed in the set up of an elaborate Hotwheels track in his main floor bedroom. And I tagged along with our oldest cousin in the rambling expanse of her attic floor bedroom.  

I had just turned nine that winter, and she was a teenager, four years older than me. I was enamored of her antiqued blue four poster bed and its matching dresser where she sat and tried on make-up in the mirror . . . her walk-in closet full of bell-bottomed jeans . . . and her music. It was the era of Elton John and Sweet Emotion and a hit song by the Bay City Rollers called Saturday Night, and I had fallen asleep to her stereo light enough times to have memorized every word, every note of its upbeat tempo.

That night we were lying in the dark on my cousin's shag carpeted floor wrapped in blankets. Only the stereo light illuminated the darkness, creating dim shadows. Even my cousin right next to me was a dim, formless shape. It was getting late and we were tired, but we could still hear the raucous laughter of the card game and the muted conversation of our brothers going on below us. She was always kind to me, but her patient indulgence must have reached its limit because I remember her saying, "Aren't you tired?" . . . and she rolled away from me across the room. I wasn't offended.  I just giggled and continued to pepper her with questions from across the dark expanse. And she asked again, "Don't you want to go to sleep yet?" I had answered, "I'm waiting for Saturday Night to come on." Eventually, she did fall asleep. I could hear her even breathing and see her still outline from the far side of the room.

But I still fought sleep, waiting for Saturday Night in the dark. And that's when it happened. 

Just as I recognized the first notes of Saturday Night, the song I had been waiting for, someone . . . or something . . .from behind me . . . tapped me on the shoulder.

It was exactly the way someone would tap you on the shoulder to say, "Hey! Isn't this the song you've been waiting for?! Two quick taps. In the dark. Behind me. Where nobody was.

Even in that certain knowledge, I had instantly and reflexively sat up and turned around, scanning the darkness behind me. But there was nothing, nobody. I was paralyzed in terror for one second . . . two . . . three . . . until my flight instinct kicked in like a runaway freight train. I scrambled to my feet and launched myself in the direction where I knew the door was, bouncing off a wall or two before I found what seemed like a very long hallway that led to the staircase. My feet barely touched the steps as I half skittered half flew down them and I could hear my cousin calling behind me, asking me what was the matter. My momentum carried me straight down the main floor hallway into the bedroom where my brother and my younger cousin played. They only laughed at me in my terrified incoherence as I tried to tell them what happened. I switched directions and stumbled back to the kitchen, my heart still thumping in my ears. By that time my cousin had caught up with me from the attic and we were both talking at once to the adults . . . she was trying to explain from her perspective how she had suddenly awoken to me losing my mind upstairs, and I was fixated on the idea that there was someone ELSE up there STILL. 

And they said and did what you would expect grown-ups to do. They were patient. They were reassuring and comforting. And they flipped on all the lights and showed me that there was nobody there. It was my imagination, they said.  I must have been dreaming, they said.

But I remember that my dear aunt had looked askance even as she had smiled affectionately at me and pulled me close in an attempt to dismiss my fears. 

And years later, she would quietly recall the family's earliest years in that house . . . when her first child was a newborn and her husband worked late. She remembered how, as she sat rocking the baby to sleep in the still of the night sometimes, that she could hear footsteps traversing the length of the attic. . . that was uncarpeted back then . . . back and forth . . . back and forth. . . and tried hard to ignore it.



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​It was a dark and stormy night . . . really. This was the backdrop of an early autumn evening in 1998 when at least one of my family members became inclined to take my ghost stories a little more seriously. A chilling steady wind had been chasing leaves and slicing through sheets of rain that had been coming in deluges on and off all day long. I was tucked away safely at home with my two daughters, 10 and 13, when the phone rang. It was someone from our church looking for my husband.

We lived in a house just across the parking lot from our church, and my husband was, in fact, the maintenance and groundskeeper for the property. But he was out when the call came in, from someone just leaving choir practice, that there was a leak in the ceiling above the stage behind the pulpit in the sanctuary. No problem, I said. I worked at the church, too, as a part time cleaner. I had access to keys, and I knew where the light panels were located, and where a bucket was kept for a temporary fix. My youngest daughter, Brooke, volunteered to go over with me.

I wonder today, still, if she regrets that decision.

We bee-lined from our house to the closest entrance and entered through a door that locked behind us as it closed and we made our way towards the sanctuary down a long hallway by combination of familiarity and light shadows cast by streetlamps outside the building. We walked past half a dozen darkened offices and Sunday school rooms on either side of us before the hallway opened up into a large foyer. The night, lit by the moon and a mist of rain and streetlights, illuminated through large plate glass windows and a set of locked double doors that opened to a crisscross of sidewalks and tree dotted fields connecting to the road beyond. There was just enough light to guide us through the shadows across the foyer to more doors. One was a swinging door that led to a small, windowless room behind the main sanctuary where the light panels were located. This was also the "cry room" where mothers could sit with babies and small children behind a glass partition and still participate in the church service. A row of chairs and rocking chairs lined the room, positioned toward the pulpit. A door from this room opened into a long center aisle leading to the pulpit and leaky-ceilinged stage behind it. 

The stage was set for creepy, but we were still unsuspecting.

Not one for idle chatter, Brooke stood patiently nearby as I felt for the light panel against a far wall. I located the switches for the "cry room" that we stood in, the center aisle sanctuary light, and the stage light. There was a runway effect as I flipped each switch, our eyes adjusting to the light, and we walked down the long aisle hand in hand. We quickly located the leak, and found yet another door to a room behind the stage where a bucket was kept. With the drip-drip pinging a rhythm into the bucket behind us, we reversed our direction, heading back to the cry room, and turned the lights back off. The stage darkened. The sanctuary darkened. And finally, we stood in total darkness again, and I led the way back out through the swinging door. 

And that's when we heard it.

We had taken just a few steps into the foyer. In fact, the door was still swinging shut when the pleasant and melodious voice of a woman seemed to float just over our heads from directly behind us in the inky blackness where we had just stood. Hello. It was drawn out in two distinct syllables. Hel-looo. 

I had heard a woman say Hello. I was sure I heard it. I think I heard it. Was I losing my mind? In the brief half second that I was second guessing myself, I also thought to reach for my daughter's hand again and hurry her along just a bit . . . not enough to frighten her - maybe she hadn't heard it, and I certainly wasn't going to put ideas into her head. But her hand gripped mine like a vise and she whispered, "Mom . . . did you hear that?"

I had heard it. She had heard it. All bets were off. I took off like a rocket, dragging her behind me, and instead of heading back down the long hallway, we detoured out the double doors of the foyer, and ran like we were on fire across the field, dodging trees and sliding through the wet grass. We were half-way across the field when it occurred to me that I was an adult . . . and a mother. Still holding Brooke's hand, I brought us to a screeching halt. We were both breathing hard and probably bug-eyed, but I stilled my beating heart, leaned over and said, "Honey, what did you hear?"

​ "I heard a lady say hello." 

We glanced back toward the church considering together, glanced back at each other in certainty for an infinitesimal second . . . and were off again. She may have outrun me in the race for our front door.