Moving Day

During their time with us, the ghosts have not been happy to entertain themselves simply by making noises and playing with matches, they also steal things. In 1972 my parents sold the Mill Creek house they bought in 1955, and we moved to a larger home in a different section of Levittown called Twin Oaks. The move was not far enough away to justify hiring a moving company, so we rented a moving truck and all of us pitched in to help with the move, all except for Terry who had married earlier that year and was living in California.

Anyone who has ever moved is well aware of the chaos that exists when all of your belongings are sitting in boxes and scattered around waiting to be put in their proper place. Prior to our move my parents purchased a coat of arms, a rather large and heavy object that hung on the wall. When we moved into the new house the coat of arms was put in the living room on the floor with several other things. All of us saw it there – it was too big to miss! After my parents had painted the dining room, they went to get the coat of arms to hang it, but it was nowhere to be found. Certainly someone didn’t just walk in off the street and take it. If that had been the case other things would have been missing as well. And, they would have had to get past Namu, our rather large Siberian Husky who was quite protective of his family.  Even though it was a heavy object and not easily moved, each of us searched the house from top to bottom looking for it, but to no avail. The coat of arms was gone and never seen again. While my parents were not happy with the fact that the thing went missing, my sisters and brother and I joked that the ghosts probably needed it to decorate their own walls.

While we were living in the Twin Oaks house my sister Terry and her husband came out from California to visit with us. During their stay Terry came across her baby album that my mother had kept and after spending some time looking through it, she put it back where she had found it. When Terry returned to California, she called our mother and asked if she could have the album and our mother said she would send it out to her. Our mother went to get the album but it wasn’t in the place Terry had left it. She checked with Terry to make sure she was looking in the right place, which she was, but the album wasn’t there. Our mother searched high and low for it and eventually admitted that she wasn’t going to find it. And then, about a year later, she happened to be looking for something in the closet where the album was supposed to be and was surprised to see it there, as plain as day. We thought for sure the baby album would be gone for good, like the coat of arms, but in this case whoever took it decided to return it to its proper place.