Grunkle John

My parents were divorced when I was three months old. My dad was utterly insane and was a raging alcoholic with psych problems on top of that already.

My father lived in Kentucky while my mother lived in Pennsylvania where nearly all of her family was. Dad, on the other hand, only had a few people in his family that were present.

Dad had his mom, aunt and uncle, and me. He had lost custody of his older son when he was three years old. I was visiting my dad due to court order when my dad's uncle (great uncle, in my case) had passed. I found it ironic that he had passed on September 16th because my grandfather had passed on the same day a few years prior.

Now, my paternal grandmother was absolutely heartbroken over it. She loved her brother and he was one of the only people she had left, albeit she could be a nasty old lady.

I loved him too. I remember when I was little, I would go to his and his wife's house up near Dayton, Ohio and play with his custom train model he had built in his basement. It was simply amazing and I had always held an uncanny interest in trains and planes and cars.

I remember him rather vaguely now, since he passed when I was not even ten. What I do remember was that he was sort of quiet and extremely tall to me. He must have been more than six feet tall.

Anyways, I was staying with my grandmother at her apartment one night and she had three cats. I was terribly allergic so I was sitting on the futon in her living room. She had a sliding porch that was on the ground floor so her cats could go outside.

The blinds to the porch were half open and slid so you could open the only half of the door that could open. My grandma was in her room reading from her prayer books like she did every night.

The living room was dimly lit and I don't even remember what I was doing at the time besides sitting. The porch was to my right and you couldn't see anything outside at all.

All of a sudden, a shimmering black shadow emerged from the glass door and glided in front of me. I was paralyzed and terrified as I watched it drift and go towards my grandma's room.

The shadow towered over me and almost touched the ceiling. All I could think of was my uncle though. The next thing I knew, my grandma was screaming and I could move again, so I darted to her room and asked if she saw it too.

I was somewhat relieved that she saw it, so I knew I wasn't crazy or losing it to my nine-year-old imagination. After a few minutes of consoling, we calmed down enough to assume that it was her brother and my great uncle visiting her as a less than subtle farewell. She had seen things like that in the ghost shows she liked to watch.

We still discuss it now and then, our thoughts never wavering to anything else besides that being her brother, but we could be wrong.