Grandma’s Ghost Chamber

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

Grandma’s farmhouse.

Both photos were taken by my brother, Leon Unruh.

GRANDMA’S GHOST CHAMBER

Last week, on a cold winter’s night when the wind was scaring up noise outside, I pulled the blankets to my chin. At that moment, Grandma Unruh came to mind.

When my brother and cousins and I spent nights with her during the winter, Grandma came upstairs to check on us. At breakfast she’d report, “You looked cold, so I put another quilt on you girls in the middle of the night.”

With six quilts fastening us to the bed, we couldn’t roll over, but at least we were warm.

Grandma’s place, a few miles outside of Pawnee Rock, was like any old, two-story Kansas farmhouse, sheltered from the north by cedars, with a handful of outbuildings and a watchdog named Shep.

The upstairs was unheated in the winter, without air-conditioning in the summer, and a little bit creepy all year round. As we climbed the enclosed staircase, drafty air swirled about us, as if we were being hugged by ghosts.

Haunted? Probably not. I’m pretty sure the creepiness we felt was something we brought upon ourselves.

I’ll bet you had childhood sleepovers at which you did your best to frighten yourselves, succeeded, and then spent the night deciphering the sounds of monsters.

We grandkids spent many nights at Grandma’s house. And I considered my cousin, Mary, to be worldly and wise because she was six years older than me, and was from the big city of Great Bend.

During her junior high and high school years, Mary brought along a friend. Mary, her friend, and I would sleep in the bedroom that had belonged to Mary’s mom. My brother, Leon, slept down the hall in Uncle Laramie’s room. And Brenda, Mary’s little sister, a few years younger than me, got stuck sleeping with Grandma.

In those years before “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974), Mary and her friend regaled us with urban legends of the day which seemed to always be about a young couple parked out in the country and that couple encountered a human who, unfortunately, had met with some form of evil in the woods and had a missing arm, leg, or head.

Since I didn’t have access to fresh horror stories myself, when it came time for my turn at storytelling, I often relied on the classic “Golden Arm” tale.

We were in the perfect theatre for ghost stories, the upstairs of that old farmhouse. On winter nights, the window panes, loose in their frames, would rattle in the wind. During spring and summer, violent thunderstorms shook both the house and our nerves.

As a town kid, growing up surrounded by occupied homes, I felt vulnerable on the farm at night. A lone house seemed like a lightning rod for storms and for trouble.

We were about ten miles from Larned State Hospital – where the criminally insane were housed. Once, during a high school basketball game, the principal announced over the loudspeaker that a patient had just escaped from Larned State Hospital. He warned everyone, “Before you get in your cars tonight, be sure to check the backseat.”

At Grandma’s house, the city lights of Larned were a visual backdrop to the southwest, and the threat of an escapee looking for food, shelter, or victims seemed very real.

Inevitably, as we told our ghost stories, Shep would start barking at the edge of the dark field. When Shep’s barking suddenly quit, we stopped breathing. Was she silenced? Our imaginations would fly with the wind.

I reasoned, as any 9-year-old might, that if Shep were disabled, all we had standing between us kids and the bad guy was my pacifist Mennonite grandmother and Grandpa’s shotgun that she kept behind the dining room door.

But, on a previous occasion, I had seen Grandma wring the neck of one of her chickens – to make us lunch from scratch. So during those wide-eyed moments in the night, I felt oddly comforted by Grandma’s seeming enjoyment of killing chickens.

Between the two of them, Shep and Grandma managed to keep us safe from storms and intruders.

Like any other set of kids who tell stories in the dark, we would scare ourselves silly, realizing too late that we’d gone too far. But then, the next time, we’d tell those stories all over again.

Copyright 2010 ~ Cheryl Unruh