Little Hands

First-person account from the Reader’s Digest:

When my mother was a teenager, she lived in a haunted house. What is unusual about this is she never talked about it. She did tell me a story about an encounter with a ghost, but it didn’t occur in her home.

A few houses down from her home lived a family with two daughters. The younger of the two girls went to bed complaining of a terrible headache.

The family discovered this little girl had died during the night. It was determined she had an aneurysm.

Overwhelmed with grief, this family left town for a while after the funeral. They asked my uncle to take care of their pets.

My mother and father were dating at the time, and they asked to go along. My mother really wanted to play the family’s grand piano.

As the trio entered the house, the two men went to the basement to feed the pets, my mother headed straight for the piano. As she played, she felt something brush her ankles. She continued to play thinking one of the cats must have escaped.

A few moments later, she felt the soft brushes again. She looked under the piano but saw nothing. As she started to play again, she felt two small hands grab each leg tightly.

She got up and ran to the basement door. The two men responded quickly to her panicked call. When they arrived at the top of the stairs, she described what had happened.

Her uncle turned white. He told her a story the neighbor had told him at the funeral. The deceased daughter always played a game with her father as he played the piano.

She would crawl under the piano and grab his ankles and then push his feet up and down on the pedals.