It’s so annoying!
When I’m watching a scary movie...
And one of the characters hears something down the basement...
Don’t go down the basement!
Of course, they go down and something bad happens.
And I hate to admit it...
But I did something stupid...
I WENT Down the basement!
I was a junior in high school when I went down...
My uncle was a collector of antique books...
And my father would often go over to his shop...
And buy books such as:
Milton’s Paradise Lost Dante's Inferno
Because, being an artist, he liked the illustrations in them.
One day he brought home a book dated 1858 entitled: Incantations and Spells...
My mother turned her nose up it and called it a witch book.
Me? I was fascinated...
I recruited my two friends to go through the book with me.
During the course of that summer, we read every page...
Down in the basement.
Once, we tried a spell to make one boy fall in love with one of my friends. (didn’t work)
All was okay for a while until...
One evening my mother called me for dinner. I was in the basement when I happened to look down and saw my grandmother’s feet. She was barefoot and wearing a long gown. Why wasn’t she wearing shoes? And I’d never seen her in a long dress. Weird, I thought, then ran up the stairs and into the kitchen stopping abruptly because there at the kitchen table was my grandmother. I didn't say anything about seeing the apparition.
A few days later, my mother was heading downstairs to the basement to start a load of wash...
Don’t go down the basement!
She told my father later at dinner that the basement had a cold draft that hadn’t been there before. She felt it again when she hung the clothes on the clothesline to dry.
Later, she asked me to get the clothes and bring them upstairs.
Don’t go down the basement!
I also felt the cold air plus a heaviness—or presence—in the air. It creeped me out. But still I said nothing.
A few days later...
My mother was doing another load of laundry...
Don’t go down the basement!
And she saw the same apparition of an old woman in a long gown walk past her and told my father, but he just laughed saying her blood sugar was probably low and there are no such things as ghosts.
I knew better...
It was only when my father actually saw the old woman standing right in front of him
that he took action. He burned the witches’ book.
There are more stories about that book and what came up from below,
But not from the basement—from another realm...
Those stories, though are for another time.
So?
What's your favorite classic ghostly tale?
Have you ever seen a ghost?
And are you afraid of going down basements?
Always,
Em-Musing
P.S. Interestingly that book also had an illustration of Pythagoras’ Wheel, that, if asked a question needing a yes or no answer it would give you the answer.
The book also explained in detail how to tell the future using Geomancy but I didn’t want to figure it out. It was too much like doing math which I hated.
