A Beloved Home

Over the years as people have discovered I have an interest in ghosts they have opened up and shared their ghost stories with me. They have shared stories that happened to them, a relative or even a friend.

A co-worker told one of the best stories I have ever heard.

This woman had grown up back east and later moved with her husband to New Mexico.

When she was a young child her father and mother had moved the family, which included three daughters to a rural suburb outside the city. The girls were ecstatic for they now had several acres to explore.

They moved into a small house on the property. This house became a life-long obsession for her father. She told me she couldn’t remember a time while growing up where their new home was not under construction or being renovated. 

The kitchen alone was changed so often that her mother often stated that her children grew up with a helping of sawdust in their food.

She laughed and told me that sometimes she wondered whom her father loved more, his family or their home. He would sometimes leave special events in his daughters’ lives early, such as graduations, just so he could finish laying floor tiles etc.

Years after his daughters married and his wife had passed her father still lived in his beloved home. He died—no surprise—doing what he loved, fixing something in his home.

Several years later when this co-worker and her husband were visiting friends and family in their home state, the sister they were staying with received an odd phone call.

The woman that now lived in the home where they grew up requested to meet them. They arranged to have lunch together the next day.

The woman told them she loved their old home. Even though the suburb was not as rural as it once had been the house was still surrounded by untouched acreage.

She told them that the summer before her daughter had held her wedding reception at the home. My co-worker and her sister thought this was nice but they noticed the lady was becoming nervous.

She finally bent down and pulled out a photograph from her purse. She told them it was a photo taken at the reception. She mentioned that when the photographer had her daughter view the wedding pictures so she could choose which ones she wanted he had gone out of his way to point out this one.

Uncomfortable now, she told the sisters that this photo, which was of the wedding party lined up, had a strange transparent man at the end of the bride’s side.

He was unusual because he was not dressed for a wedding instead he wore paint overalls and a work hat. None of her family or herself remembered seeing this man during the reception.

At this point, the sisters requested to see the photo. It was their father at the end of the line. His ghost was still hanging out at his beloved home.

Years later, while visiting this co-worker at her home she took me over to a photo that hung on her living room wall. It was the wedding reception photo with her father.