I grew up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. I lived in a number of "coal camps", towns built for the families of the miners that worked in the mines. One town in particular, Greenough, in Pike County was the site of my story.
My twin sister and I were in the first grade. We walked to and from school with two of our older sisters and our brother. Normally there was a whole group of us walking to and from school. On this particular day, about seven or eight of us in a group stopped in front of our house and was laughing and talking before went in. My dad worked on the coke ovens in a little town called Alleghany about 3 miles away. My mom and a friend ran a restaurant just up the road near the coke ovens. We were early "latchkey" kids, I suppose. Anyway we were standing in front of our house when one of the kids asked, "Who's that standing in the window?"
We all looked and sure enough there was a man standing looking out the front window at us. Now this was not cause for undue concern. We had a fairly large extended family and occasionally a family member came visiting and my mom would give him/her a key to get in the house until she or my dad would get home. This fellow we did not recognize, though.
Anyway, we left the group and went in the house. We were surprised to find the front door was still locked. We yelled and hollered trying to find our guest but try as we might no one was to be found.
Later, an hour or so, we were out in the back yard playing ball with several of our friends, some of whom we had walked from school with. One of the kids pointed to an upstairs window and shouted, "There he is again."
Sure enough, there he was watching us again. I want to stop here and describe this elusive chap for you. He was fairly tall, had black hair, dark horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a dark brown suit, which we didn't see a lot of being in a small Eastern Ky coal camp. We split into two groups. One group went in the back door while the other went in the front door, locking the doors behind us. Same story, after searching the house from top to bottom, he was not found. The doors were still locked from the inside so he couldn't have slipped out. Our friends decided it was about time to go on home so most left immediately, the rest sort of wandered off until only my sisters and brother were left and if we had somewhere to go we would probably have wandered off, too!
Several incidents happened when we saw this fellow but the most intimate one, for me anyway, I'll relate now. I had been pestering one of my older sisters, just fulfilling a younger sibling's obligation, don't you know. Anyway she had reached the breaking point and I knew that retreat was the wisest choice so I ran through the house and down the basement stairs. Someone in the past had enclosed the space under the basement stairs to make a small storage space. I had claimed this space as my hide-out. I hit the floor of the basement, ran around and into the hide out. There was a light hanging down on a length of wire, so I reached up and pulled the chain flooding the space with light. There, not two feet away stood the tall man with the horn-rimmed glasses. I quickly turned and ran smack into my sister who had anticipated where I was headed. I quickly, but with considerable stuttering, told her what I had seen. We both turned around and looked but the fellow, once again, had vanished.
We got to telling folks in the neighborhood that we thought the house was haunted. One old lady, I think she was Noah's bookkeeper or navigator, said that the fellow that had lived in the house was, years before, the superintendent of the mining operation and, though no surprise to us, matched exactly the fellow we had been seeing. He had been killed in the mines several years before we moved into the house. We also found out that this house had been the company "clubhouse", the house where the superintendent lived and where visiting company officials stayed when in town.
All this happened back in 1953-'54ish but I remember it as if it happened yesterday. We moved out not long after that. One of my dad's friends rented the house and about a month later came visiting us asking if we had seen any strange things there. They went on to describe a man they had seen there. A tall man with black hair wearing dark horn-rimmed glasses in a dark brown suit!
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