Shuffles the Ghost

It's the day before Halloween so I thought this would be a good time to share a family ghost story...

Once upon a time, my parents and grandmother lived on the second floor of an old apartment building in Vancouver. It was a nice little place, despite eccentric plumbling and rumbling radiators, and being the sixties, it probably had its share of shag carpeting.

But what made the place a little dodgy was that it was haunted.

At first only my Gran knew it, and she kept that little nugget of information to herself. She resided down the hall in the second bedroom and later she'd swear that every night at about two in the morning, the closet door would swing open all by itself and she would hear shuffling foot-steps head out into the hall-way. It gave her the willies.

Well, Gran moved out,and although my mother claims there were other factors besides the supernatural at work here, I have to say that the creepy-closet-door reason would have been enough for me.

After Gran left, my parents began to realize things were amiss too. The second bedroom was just no fun to be in. And the shuffling foot-steps now made their way all the way down the hall to the kitchen at night. It sounded like an old person in bedroom slippers.

My parents did a little sleuth work on the apartment's history and found out that an old man had died in Gran's old bedroom. Hmmm, now what?

Their upstairs neighbour, Tom, was a friend of Dad's and had some ideas on the subject of spirits. Tom figured that Shuffles was simply confused and didn't realize he was dead. He recommended that they simply tell the old fellow the truth.

So one night soon after, my parents waited in the kitchen for Shuffles, and when the noises started my dad spoke aloud to the thin air: he told whoever was there that he was now dead and had to move on, and that he was frightening the people who now lived here and to please leave.

They never heard Shuffles again after that night.