This story a part of the True Ghost Stories page on Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page. Please do not copy or distribute without permission from Obiwan and/or the original author!
To: obiwan@ghosts.org
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1998 15:31:14 EDT
Subject: Fwd: Ghost Story for the Day
From: eaglesnest@kwic.com
Well, this is my first post to this list. I have only been subscribed for = a couple of weeks and I am enjoying it. Some of these stories are pretty dar= n scary, I must admit....definitely to be read in the daytime or with the lights fully on! I thought I would tell you a story told to me by my dad when I was a kid.
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In the small town that I grew up in there was this old abandoned house at the far end of Main St., near the train tracks. We kids used to play aroun= d the tracks and the house, but we never went into the house. It had been boarded up and empty for as long as I could remember. This house had a peculiar nickname. However, I had never heard the nickname until one night at supper I mentioned that we had been playing by this house. It was then that my dad mentioned its nickname, matter-of-factly. Curious, I asked my dad how the house had gotten that name. He was surprised I had never heard the house called by its nickname, it had been called this name for a very long time. But I was only about 10, so he supposed I hadn't heard the stor= y yet. Now, I don't want to tell you right at the start what the nickname fo= r the house was.....I'll leave that for the end of the story, it would spoil it to know it now.
This is what my dad told me, as it was told to him by his grandfather who was a neighbour and friend of the original owners of the house in the earl= y 1900's:
The original owners, a man and his wife, had built the house in the late 1800's. They had lived there and raised their family there for many years. One spring night the now aging woman was awakened from a sound sleep. She sat upright in the bed and was shocked to see her son standing at the foot of the bed calling and beckoning to her. Over and over he cried to her, "Mother, help me...... Please, Mother, help me." while motioning for her t= o come to him. When she put a light on in the room, her son disappeared. The woman glanced at the clock, the time was around 12:20 a.m. Eastern Time. She was very upset and woke her husband. He reassured her that it had just been a bad dream. After all, their son was far away. He'd just gotten a good job and was fine. But she wasn't comforted by her husband's words, sh= e was very upset and didn't sleep at all the rest of the night. The feeling that something was terribly wrong would not leave her. She kept telling herself that he was alright, it was silly to worry. After all, he had just started work on a ship.....a most wonderful ship.....
an unsinkable ship.......
The date that the woman was awakened from her sound sleep was the early morning of April 14, 1912. The next day, this couple got word that their son had perished with 1500 other souls the night before in the north Atlantic when the unimaginable had happened and the ship their son was working on met her fateful end at approximately 1:20 a.m. Atlantic time.....12:20 a.m. Eastern time.
And the nickname that the house had....?
The house had always been called the "Titanic", right up until its demolition in the late 1970's.